Some people will certainly recover quicker. Some people will be able to do workouts much closer.

They’re going to see quite a bit of progress if they allow the stimulus to happen and that recovery to happen. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, We will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well -being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co -hosts are Brian Sagan, co -founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence -based strength training.

And now for today’s episode. Hey, thanks for joining us today on the Strength Changes Everything podcast. We are in a series on principles of exercise design. And within this series, we’re breaking down concepts that your trainer is going to implement in designing an exercise program that’s going to be the most safe, effective, and efficient exercise program you could potentially engage in. Today’s topic we’re going to discuss is inroading. What is inroading?

Why is this important for our strength gains and to see that continuous progress over time, which is really our goal at the end of the day, building up that strength to reach the genetic potential we have as we get older. So Dr. Fisher is with me today. And Dr. Fisher, I’m super excited for you to break down this concept and teach us all about what inroading is.

Yeah, this is an interesting concept and I think this really helps people to understand maybe how their workout formulates an adaptive response, especially over the longer term. And as previous, I’ve put together a few slides, so if you’re listening to this, this on the podcast, I’ll do everything I can to describe it. But if you can go, go watch this on YouTube, the images, obviously the old adage is a picture speaks a thousand words. And I definitely think the image sort of helps with, uh, with this, uh, theory. So on the screen right now.

We have an x -axis, which is time, and time is generic. It’s not marked with days, hours, or weeks, or months. We can think of it in terms of all of those things, really. And then our y -axis is fatigue or adaptation. So obviously, time is set midway up that y -axis. If we think of anything above the zero line, above the line that marks time, that would be an adaptation.

So that’s positive. Anything that’s below that line is fatigue. So that’s a degree of inroading. And that’s what we mean when we talk about inroading. It’s a fatigue or a negative, an acute negative response to a workout or to a stimulus. When we do a workout, we are weaker at the end of the workout than we were at the start of it.

The workout itself is not we don’t get stronger during the workout, the workout is a stimulus for adaptation. So I’ve shown on the screen a sine wave and it drops down to signal that we are weaker at the end of a workout and then it goes back up and it recovers back to basically a baseline level and then it moves above the baseline level to show super compensation. So every single workout we do can have a positive response. It can increase strength, it can increase muscle growth, and we’ve talked about numerous health benefits of course. So we know that every single workout has a negative and immediate negative response in our energy levels, but of course it can have a positive response over time. What we need to do is think about how we apply our next workout based on time.

So if we have insufficient recovery, then we effectively are training too quickly after our previous workout. So let’s say I train on Monday and now I come back and I train on maybe Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning. And it’s, you know, barely 36 hours. So I’ve maybe recovered from the first workout. I’m back to my baseline but there’s certainly no degree of supercompensation. So I get the same strength index that I got previously or I lift the same weight for the same number of repetitions.

It’s effectively a mirror image of the previous workouts where I’ve recovered from that initial fatigue but I’ve not allowed any degree of supercompensation. And of course, many people experience this and often we think about this in terms of a plateau. Now we’ve talked about a plateau on previous podcasts. So this is not to say that every plateau is a product of trading too, too close to our previous workout. Uh, we know that adaptations are not infinite. So we know a plateau is eventual to some extent, but we’ve talked about that a bit previously.

So I’m not going to get too far into that. But ultimately, if we keep training just that bit too early, where we’ve allowed recovery, but we haven’t allowed any adaptive response, it looks exactly as it does on the screen. And this is for sine waves that curve down, curve up, and then effectively curve down and up again and down and up again and down and up again. So we’re, we’re always recovering back to our baseline, but we’re never allowing time to adapt to the workout with a degree of speed. compensation.

Okay, so this is if we keep strength training too frequently, we’re basically only getting barely back to baseline and then digging back in and fatiguing ourself again and then getting, instead of stronger, we’re just getting back to baseline over and over and over. So we’re doing more work for less benefit, is that fair?

Yeah, that’s that’s completely fair. That’s completely fair. And of course, this is only maybe looking at our strength or our muscle size increases. We probably would still get many of the health benefits that we would expect from strength training. We would certainly get things like myokine release and we might see reductions in blood cholesterol or blood glucose or blood pressure or things like that. But of course, we’re not seeing our increase in strength because we’re simply not allowing time for recovery, for adaptation.

So we can then think of it as one end of the spectrum is what if we have that perfect stimulus recovery. So now I look back at the same curve and we have our sine wave which shows it, it decreases down during or at the end of a workout. So we’re in a state of fatigue, but then it increases above baseline to show super compensation. So what if we train at that very, very peak of the curve now? So if we train there, then now our fatigue after a workout might return us to our baseline, but then we can curve back up again to show an adaptive response. So now we have effectively two degrees of adaptation or two degrees of supercompensation.

And of course we can carry that on and say, well, if I then train again at the perfect time, then I have a third degree of adaptation of super compensation and we can continue that on infinitely for all intents and purposes and say, if we always trade at the perfect we’ll just continually get stronger and stronger and get bigger and bigger up to our genetic potential and up to our kind of natural limits.

So Dr. Fisher, really quick question for you. So what is the perfect recovery time?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So we know that for most people, fatigue is typically 24 to 48 hours. So I would never advocate somebody training in back -to -back days. I would say that there should always be a day’s recovery between workouts. I typically would think most people should take two days recovery between workouts. And I think Three days recovery between workouts is probably better still.

So, hence two workouts per week. And certainly there’s a huge body of research, most of the research that’s looked at training frequency has said two workouts per week is optimal. Training more frequently is certainly not beneficial and training less frequently might not produce the same adaptive response. but can do this, some evidence to say you can train once per week. Uh, so, you know, we can, we can certainly afford to take more rest than we typically think. Um, most people, uh, who engage in strength training probably train too frequently rather than too infrequently.

Um, now it’s worth clarifying, and I will get into this at the end, that we can think of strength training and resistance exercise session as a stimulus, as a stressor. So we look at the fatigue response on the curve. Well, if we don’t get much sleep, that will delay recovery. If we don’t have good nutrition, that will delay recovery. If we have other stresses that cause an increase in cortisol, which can prevent an anabolic response, then we might be worried about money, we might be worried about family, we might be worried about our job, we might get stressed out by traffic.

or by kids or by school or whatever it might be. So anything that causes an additional amount of stress, an additional spike in cortisol is also going to inhibit recovery. So it’s fair to say that some people might actually be okay training every other day and some people might need four or five days between workouts. Um, typically two workouts per week for the most part is, uh, is, is optimal for a training response. I think it would be fair to say if we know we have a period of high stress, then we might add in training days. Um, we might add in recovery days, excuse me.

Or if we know that we’re doing particularly well with nutrition and rest and so forth, then we, we know that we could afford to, um, to add in training days. But I think the best thing to the best way to think about this is the more consistent we are. So training twice per week through the course of a year will probably manage when we have periods of high and low stress or good or poor sleep or good or poor nutrition and so forth. But it helps us to stay consistent with our workouts. So there’s kind of other factors that come into play with that.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

One thing I’ll just chime in to, you know, when somebody is new to the exercise coach and they’re getting introduced to the workout for the first time and they do their first set, you know, they have a performance. They have a piece of data now in, in the cloud that is now their baseline, right? We can see, we can see what they can do. They test their initial strength that provides their strength. curve that’s customized to them to work at every second of that exercise. And then they perform their first set, and that becomes their baseline.

And so one thing I like to explain, which relates to the graph that you have here on the screen, is today you gave your muscles a stimulus. That stimulus was challenging for you. Now what’s going to happen is when you go home and rest and recover, your muscles are going to go through this repair period where they’re going to grow, they’re going to change, they’re going to adapt, and they’re going to get stronger. And because they’ve done that, the next time you come back in, again, assuming that there’s adequate recovery, they should be able to do a little bit more than they did today, and so on and so forth. So today’s baseline becomes your kind of your lowest one that you’re going to try to beat next time. And all of that is contingent on adequate recovery.

But that’s the most encouraging thing, especially for a new client to see, or especially for somebody who maybe hasn’t strength trained in a whole decade. They’re going to see quite a bit of progress quickly if they allow the stimulus to happen and that recovery to happen. So just wanted to kind of paint that picture as well based on what you just taught us.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay, so the next slides are going to be the opposite end of the spectrum. We’ve just talked about what if our stimulus is perfectly timed for adaptation? Well, now what if our stimulus is the perfectly the wrong time? So now imagine that we do a workout. Imagine if I do a workout this morning, And then I go and train again in the afternoon. So I’ve had all of that fatigue from the workout this morning.

But now I’m going to add more fatigue to it this afternoon. So again, we’ve shown on the screen the typical sine curve that we’ve shown with the end of a workout as the as the base of our curve and our supercompensation is the peak of our curve. But now we imagine that we reapply that training stimulus. at our lowest point where we’re at our most fatigued. Well, it takes twice as long now or more than to just to recover back to baseline.

And imagine if I now do this again, well, pretty quickly over maybe the series of a week or a couple of weeks, this might become overreaching where our body is in quite a severe state of fatigue, of muscular and even central fatigue. And if we carry this on for too much, it might quickly become overtraining. And overtraining is very much associated with a decrease in our immune system, susceptibility to things like, you know, the common cold or flu virus or things like that. So our immune system is really inhibited in its capacity to fight off infection. We’re probably also very fatigued. We might have disrupted sleep and so forth.

Cognitive function can be severely impaired and lots of poor things happen when we’re at that stage and it can take a bit of time to recover from. Now this is of course the other end of the spectrum, nobody will probably hit that point because not many people will try and do multiple workouts in a day or multiple workouts in fewer days. But we can certainly give this example and say, this is the extreme of inroading, but we’re simply not allowing our body to recover from the stimulus that we’ve provided.

Yeah, that more is better mentality really doesn’t apply here.

Yeah.

And that, of course, is more workouts. We can also think about it in terms of what if we do more in a workout. So the next curve I’ve called excess stimulus. So again, I’ve gone back to our baseline, we’ve showed our single sine wave curve, which shows our workout fatigue and then super compensation but now we’ve showed another single curve over the top and this time the curve drops down twice as low at the end of the workout so imagine now instead of instead of doing eight or ten exercises for a single set, we do three sets of each exercise. Or if we do 20 different exercises or 30 exercises or more, instead of our workout being completed within 30 minutes, we stay in the gym or we carry on going for two hours.

Well, at this point, we’ve increased the inroading into our muscles, we’ve increased the amount of fatigue, and we’ve inhibited or delayed our recovery capacity from that single workout. Now, arguably, we haven’t increased our capacity to adapt because Once you’ve recruited all muscle fibers, you’ve recruited all muscle fibers. There’s no benefits to re -recruit them. We know recruitment of muscle fibers is the stimulus. We’ve talked about on the previous podcast, when we talked about the size principle and recruitment of muscle fibers. Um, so there’s no greater benefits be had.

We just know now that we’ve eaten further into our recovery capacity, uh, by doing that, uh, by doing that extra work during the workout.

Dr. Fisher, would this be still advisable? Like, let’s say somebody can only strength train once in a week because they they’re traveling. You know, does that mean they should work double as hard during their session and then take off the second day and then go back to the in hopes to go back to the exact same place they would be with two workouts?

Well, so in your question, you said they work double as hard. So they’re working double as hard, the effort level, then that’s great because effort level is equal to recruitment. But if they’re working double as hard as in doing twice as much work during their workout, I think that’s something we should be really careful to do because more exercise doesn’t equal more adaptation. I think that Exercise is a measured dose. It’s a stimulus.

And even if somebody is training, is only able to train once per week, I think this is absolutely fine. This is the right stimulus to do. I wouldn’t want people to fatigue their body any more than is absolutely necessary because there are, of course, debilitating effects. We know that there’s muscle soreness. We know that there’s a peripheral muscular and a central neurological fatigue from a workout. So, If I go and train after this podcast, but I think, well, I can’t train for another week.

So I’m going to do twice as much work in the gym. All that I’m really going to do is feel pretty terrible for the next couple of days. I might feel worse muscularly. I might disrupt my sleep. I might feel more fatigued in my muscles. I’m not necessarily, uh, promoting greater adaptations in the longterm just cause I can’t train, uh, just cause I can’t train again.

Absolutely. Okay.

Thank you for answering that one. Yeah, no problem at all. So our takeaways from this is we can easily train with too much volume or too frequently. And we’ve talked about this before, and I said this in the podcast, that exercise is a dosage. We can definitely think of it in terms of medication. We really only need a handful of exercises taken to a sufficiently high effort.

And that’s it. As soon as we’ve done it, we want to get back out of the gym or back out of the studio and allow our muscles to recover to adapt and then when we’re recovered we can go back in or when they’ve adapted we can go back in and repeat. A good way to think about this is if we’re not seeing an adaptive response We might be doing too much or we might be training too frequently. Now, as we said earlier, if you’ve trained for a number of years and you’ve reached a plateau, a plateau is to some extent inevitable. And while there’s that constant strive for improvement, we’re down to diminishing returns.

So it’s percentage points, not big chunks of improvement. So training hard is the right stimulus, not training for a long time. And as I said, we can also consider all other lifestyle factors or life stresses, which might cause fatigue and or slow recovery. So I mentioned work, school, money, family, friends, sleep, nutrition, and so forth.

So all of those things might inhibit our recovery. Yes. Thank you. And I think that’s important if you’re a client, you know, just to understand that there are a lot of other factors besides just strength and your muscle physiology that will impact a workout on a given day. And so it’s important to protect yourself sometimes from that artificial discouragement that may come if you didn’t beat your previous workout strength index score on a given day. There’s a lot of other factors and these are important to keep in mind to give yourself a little bit of grace.

So I hope, you know, you learned today and my takeaway today from this podcast is that inroading is important to get into the muscle fiber recruitment that we have to do in order to achieve the positive adaptations that we’re looking for. But we also have to, the other side of the coin is to allow that adequate recovery so that we can continue to capitalize on the strength gains that are possible because of the inroading. And I really think that that’s a helpful way to look at this. Dr. Fisher, is that fair?

And do you have any kind of closing remarks or thoughts that you’d like to leave people with in terms of how they should look at the level of effort they give in their next workout? Yeah, I do have one final comment if that’s okay. And that’s that we should be cautious to only think of things in the short term. So some people might be listening to this podcast and they might be thinking, oh, like I train, you know, I’ve just started strength training and I train four days per week and I’m doing great. I get stronger every workout and I feel good for it. And I think the key thing that you have to think about is over the course of a few weeks, that might be fine.

But as you extend that to months or even years, then your capacity to adapt with that training frequency is certainly limited. So when we talk about this, one of the reasons we didn’t have a scale on the time axis is because some people will certainly recover quicker. Other people will recover slower. Some people will be able to do workouts much closer within a month, within a week. other people will need to space them out a little bit more. And hence, we kind of end up with that good average of two workouts per week.

So we should just be a bit cautious to think about things in a small scale.

We should really think about the bigger picture.

Wonderful.

Well, I hope that this episode taught you a little bit of something about how you can maximize your exercise results and by giving your body the stimulus and recovery that it needs to get to know your own body in terms of, you know, what factors play for you when you are recovering so that you can continue to see that progression and also give yourself grace when you need to with your workouts, but continue that journey and

up strength. We will see you next time on the podcast. Until then, I hope you remember strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything .

com. Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.