Lesson 3 of 5
In Progress

Fatigue Management

Bryce March 7, 2024

The previous (and upcoming) principles described in this article center around ways to improve the quantity and quality of output. For fatigue management, we want to focus more on maintaining the systems that allow those improvements in output to come to fruition. Effective use of this principle incorporates both planned and auto-regulated strategies into the programming in order to manage the unavoidable repercussions of overloading training.

Even though hard training is the impetus for muscle growth, we know that it also causes fatigue as a byproduct. And this isn’t just the muscle soreness or acute weakness you experience after a hard set — there are several other types of fatigue associated with hypertrophy training that must be accounted for…

CNS Fatigue:

Central nervous system (CNS) fatigue (sometimes called “systemic fatigue”) impacts the whole body. This occurs when the chronic effects of hard training (or any activity that constantly pushes the body beyond it’s present capabilities) begin to negatively influence the feedback loops used by the brain to maintain an internal equilibrium. The result can be as innocuous as a suppressed appetite or as detrimental as down-regulated hormone production. Some types of peripheral (or local) fatigue can also be lumped in this category, such as when excessive delayed-onset-muscle-soreness (DOMS) feeds back to inhibit motor-unit activation and force output.

Some level of CNS fatigue is normal and indicative that the training you’re doing is sufficiently overloading to promote adaptations; however, this must be carefully managed to avoid overreaching (or overtraining) down the road.

Metabolic Fatigue:

Metabolic fatigue refers to what you’d expect: an accumulation of metabolites associated with hard training, as well as the depletion of crucial intracellular molecules like ATP, phosphocreatine, and glycogen. On the surface, this is not inherently a bad thing; we want some degree of molecular turnover as new nutrients come in to flush out the metabolic byproducts of the old. However, these reserves of energy are depleted at different rates by different activities. And their rates of replenishment can differ vastly as well. So what we need is a program that takes these dependencies into account at various levels in order to prevent any metabolic issue from becoming the rate limiting step of the entire progression.

Psychological Fatigue:

Psychological fatigue (aka burnout) can result from consistent hard training without the requisite checks and balances. Successful athletes often have a mindset hardened by grit and perseverance, which is an asset the majority of the time. Yet, this way of thinking can cloud objective judgement when it comes to addressing the realities of burnout. 

It’s easy to notice the acute feeling of mental exhaustion during (or right after) a hard workout, but the chronic burdens can be much less obvious. Do you find it harder now than in the past to get yourself hyped/focused for a big set? Are you losing excitement to go to the gym? Do previously important goals no longer seem worth pursuing?

Note that these are subjective indicators and thus incredibly hard to measure with much accuracy, but escalating psychological fatigue can take a heavy toll on your training regardless of your ability to precisely track that escalation. And this is why it’s so important to preemptively build your training in a way that reduces the risk of burnout becoming problematic in the first place.

Lifestyle:

Our ability to keep fatigue in check can also be massively impacted by our lifestyles. Getting a sufficient quantity of quality sleep (strong emphasis on quality) is always going to be the biggest lever for suppressing fatigue, despite the narratives we spin in our heads that we can “function just fine on 5 hours” — newsflash: no you can’t. Parallel to sleep comes intaking a sufficient quantity of quality food (strong emphasis on quantity) to provide our bodies with the nutrients it needs for energy production and repair.

More insidiously, non-fitness-related stressors from professional and personal life are always creeping into the picture. An athlete may be following perfectly managed programming yet not realize that their life outside of the gym is causing additional fatigue and inhibiting progress. Recognizing how these seemingly unrelated elements can impact your fatigue levels is incredibly important to being able to maximize training and recovery at any given time. 

Checking the Ego:

At first, this might seem out-of-place, but using the safest, most specific technique on each exercise is a high-impact and simple way to avoid generating non-stimulative fatigue. Getting the most out of training with proper technique and well-considered exercise selection will allow you to get the greatest ratio of hypertrophy stimulus to fatigue, and this becomes crucial as margins for error compress.

Training within your capabilities should also be something that is explicitly programmed. Comparison can be deadly — An athlete may see someone else lifting twice the weight they are and get their feelings hurt. Suddenly, they feel the compulsion to crank up the load, double the volume, and triple the intensity in order to catch up…I’m sure you can see how this ends. The best strategy, therefore, is to focus on yourself and trust the program. 

Deload:

Inevitably, any sufficiently excited trainee will be reluctant to take deloads. They will feel as though deloading is unnecessary and a waste of precious time that could be better utilized to make more gains. Hell, most will feel like a deload is an active step backwards — losing those hard-fought gains that have already been made.

The reality is that we’re all awful at gauging our own fatigue levels and tend to be overly optimistic, which means that full recovery will often take longer than expected and require more drastic measures. Given an exceptionally difficult mesocycle or macrocycle (i.e. anything sufficiently hard to force the body to adapt), a period of lower volume and intensity will often be needed to fully recover. Although deloads of this kind are more effective when integrated into an auto-regulated strategy, programming should still aim to sync the culmination of a progression model with a plan for the inevitable plateau in capabilities. In practice, this looks like ~4-8 weeks of escalating volume-load and intensity capped with a week of scaled back training to wipe the slate clean of fatigue, before pivoting into a new training block. Adhering to this conservative “2 steps forward, 1 step back” approach (overly simplistic caricature of deloads but bear with me) allows training to be arbitrarily aggressive in the short-term, while avoiding many of the pitfalls associated with unrestrained specificity and overloading.


Fatigue is simple to understand. Ultimately, it boils down to this heuristic: For every unit of stress placed on our body, we need an equal and opposite unit of recovery.

Don’t neglect it. Be honest with yourself. Learn how much you can tolerate before you burn out. Always stay a step ahead of stagnation rather than waiting until it sets in to act.

The rate at which fatigue is accumulated — as well as the rate in which it’s dissipated — is variable from person to person. How much training — and of which type — a person can tolerate without fatigue spiraling out of control is largely based on individual factors. This is true of sensitivity to volume and speed of recovery, but also of many other far-reaching and disparate aspects of training. Looking more closely at the ways in which we’re all unique snowflakes and how training should be adjusted to account for this snowflakyness leads us into our next principle: individualization.

Fatigue Management-

A post shared by @progressiveperformancep2

Fatigue Management Discussion- https://www.instagram.com/tv/CRbx4CBHid1/ 

Review Your Cart
0
Add Coupon Code
Subtotal