Hi coach,
I’m a fairly typical (as far as I can tell) type 1a in that volume in a workout absolutely trashes me. My problem is that as an athlete, our team lifts and lifting program basically require me to do fairly high volume (3x8, for example) for quite a few lifts per session (around 8 lifts), as well as lifting for over an hour and a half. I always end up feeling terrible after if I can even finish and inevitably spend the rest of the week on my back foot recovery-wise. Is there anything I can do to prevent this crash (supplements or strategies etc) or would I just be better off trying to recover the next day with a neural charge workout or something similar. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!
Honestly you can’t really fix the problem completely. Boosting dopamine with a combo of tyrosine and NADH (NADH increases the conversion of tyrosine into dopamine) would help a bit. Taking alpha-GPC might help a bit too by increasing acetylcholine, but it would still not be an ideal situation.
Definitely not ideal for me, because it’s also only a 3 days a week program, although I’ll usually just hit the gym on off days too to fix this. I’ll try picking up some alpha-gpc and tyronsine/NADH to see if that helps. I suppose it’s bound to happen when you have the same program as 50 other people lol. Thanks for the help coach, hopefully this can help me power through till summer.
Edit: One more thing, in your opinion is there any difference in effectiveness between NALT and L-Tyrosine? Or is any difference pretty negligible.
And your coach is not open at all at having you do your own thing?
Generally speaking he lets me adjust weights, but he wants the reps/sets to remain the same. He mostly lets me adjust weights because mine are way higher than everyone else so I have a much different recovery curve.
Can you “pretend” during the team workouts? And then do low reps, heavy weights and low volume on the alternate days? That’s what I did when I was younger.
I hadn’t thought of that…possibly. I could definitely duck some of the accessory work, but on the main lifts (squats, bench, clean etc) we get top sets “checked” by coaches to make sure we hit our weights with good technique. However, I feel like just removing a lot of the accessory “fluff” would really help. I have a team lift this afternoon and it’s “volume day” for squats so I’ll be able to test that, see how I feel tomorrow. I’ll update tomorrow with how I feel.
So yesterday turned out to be a bit more of a de-load day, 5x2e clean & jerk, 5x5 squats at 70%(my lifting partner and I added a 2 sec pause at the bottom because we got bored). I skipped everything else except our sled pull competition and I feel a lot better today than normal. I think from now on I’m gonna try and duck out on all of the ‘fluff’ of the workout. I also ordered some NALT so we’ll see how that goes when it comes in.
Use 60-70% of that rep range, 65% is staggering-ish already.
Or just do 2 sets. How do your other mates match up?
This thread helped.
Besides my partner on my rack I have about 150-200 lbs on everybody in most lifts. This of course means I’m an outlier so the programming doesn’t really take me into account.
That alone should buy you some slack
It kind of does when it comes to rest periods (I don’t get yelled at for taking longer between sets), and I can adjust the weights slightly, but he’s pretty adamant about sticking to the programmed rep schemes. And if I lowered the reps without asking it would likely be seen as lazy, which is a bad look for a captain (even if I know it’s not actual laziness)
Type 1A and 1B are often seen as lazy because when they train according to what feels natural to them they always rest longer instinctively, talk more ,etc. Even myself before I knew about neurotyping I thought that these guys were lazy. My former training partner used to take 5 min betwen sets, he did 1 set when I did 3… BUT he was national champion with a 165kg snatch and 205kg clean & jerk
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This also helps explain why my partner (possibly more 1a dominant than me) and I are always the last ones done. This especially happens on days with more reps, partially because we both just hate it, and also because our top sets always turn almost into mini rest-pause sets after like 5-6 reps. Of course if I was planning to “skip” reps this is detrimental because the others end up waiting on us so they can leave so naturally we end up with like 10 guys watching our last sets