Having a Hard Time Making Progress?

Welcome to the Training Takeaway Newsletter by Data Driven Strength! Josh Pelland here.

If you’re having a hard time making progress, or you want to be ready next time you do hit a plateau, I think there’s a hidden insight in the research.

Even if you’ve “optimized” all of your variables, it’s important to keep in mind that most training elicits gains in the research. In other words, research aims to differentiate better programs from already good programs. I’ve been involved in research for over 6 years now, and I’ve been reading research for 10 years. I’ve always been fascinated by the magnitude of progress we see in the research.

This plot shows percentage changes from a body of research we recently did a literature sweep in. So, this isn’t all training research, but it should be decently representative. I averaged the group-level effects of various strength and hypertrophy measurements in trained subjects only. Around 4,000 data points went into this, and the average study duration was 9.6 weeks.

The average hypertrophy gain was 6.5%, and the average strength gain was 13.7%. These effects could be slightly inflated for some technical reasons, such as measurement error, but that’s unlikely to be driving the majority of the gains here.

If we consistently see these robust gains is the research - again, in trained participants - why can it be hard to see progress in the gym? Well, there’s a lot of details to consider such as how trained the average participant is, whether participants have performed the strength test before, and more. That said, I feel pretty confident saying that the average training study participant is making very good gains.

This doesn’t totally align with what we tend to observe in the gym, so what gives? In my view, there are two main possibilities:

1) Muscle size increases of ~6.5% as measured in the lab are very hard to detect with the naked eye.

We’ve done training studies where I was surprised by the average growth based on seeing the participants regularly to run their training sessions. Sometimes it’s hard to detect the degree of changes that are actually happening under the hood.

2) There’s something about research that enhances the training response.

When a participant is involved in a training study, there’s a lot of focus and the researchers are likely doing all they can to ensure progression in load/reps.

So, even if you have all your ducks in a rock in terms of your optimized variables on paper, keep in mind that this should always be on top of focus and progression intent.

I’m biased, but I think this is one of the main benefits of coaching or following a program. In the absence of coaching, training partners or some sort of community goes a long way.

Here’s your quick takeaway:

I’ll note that I think there can be some downsides to progression intent. Stay tuned for a newsletter in a couple weeks where I’ll discuss how to mitigate these downsides!

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