Programming Online Course

Class 2: SRA Curves

Stimulus, Recover, Adapt. For every movement, energy system, and volume and intensity combination, there exists a theoretical SRA curve. The MovementLink program optimizes the interactions of the SRA curves generated from WODs within the scope of the bigger picture. This way, over-time, fatigue is managed in a way that delivers supercompensation.

Fatigue - In this context, fatigue is more of a long-term thing. Fatigue is how you feel, how you perform, your motivation levels, and your propensity to get sick. The more fatigued, the less you can squat, the slower your mile time, etc. Fatigue is interesting as it accumulates. This is why when intermediate/advanced athletes follow an elite-level workout program, they can hang with it for a few weeks, but eventually, get burned out, injured, sick, become unable to lift the weight prescribed in the program, and/or don’t make good progress. Because they are not at the elite level and are not following elite-level recover protocols, over time they cannot recover adequately, even if just by a little each day. When accumulated fatigue is not managed properly, it is a detriment to progress and is what plagues many trying so hard to get to the next level with the working as hard as you can every single day mantra.

Supercompensation - After a workout, if we think of recovering as moving back towards our original fitness level and adaption as moving higher to a new fitness level, supercompensation is more of a delayed adaptation to training that would produce bigger adaptations than without the delay. After you take a look at the SRA curves, you may want to come back to this definition as it will make more sense once you see it in action.

There are a few potential scenarios to discuss that will help show why more is not always better.

Let’s look at SRA Curve #1 above: 1 workout followed by a rest day. The horizontal black line is your starting level of fitness with the y-axis being your overall fitness. The workout is the stimulus shown by the red line curving downward. Think about it this way: Let’s say you go to the gym and warm-up. You then do one of two things. You either test your fitness or you workout and then test your fitness. If you tested your fitness, it would be at the horizontal black line. But, if you worked out and then tested your fitness afterwards, the fatigue from workout would create a short term decrease in fitness. You would actually be less fit in the short-term because of your workout. This is why the red stimulus curve is downward. But, as we all know, once we recover from the workout, our fitness should, hopefully improve. If our workouts are appropriate, we will recover back to our original level and adapt based on the stimulus to become more fit. Our goal in our scientific approach to programming is to maximize the adaptation curves.

Let’s look at two more scenarios with one workout and one rest day. There is an optimal amount of work from which we can recover and adapt maximally. In SRA Curves #2 and #3 above, the dotted lines represent optimal stimulus. SRA Curve #2 shows that if we don’t work out hard enough (solid red line) that the total adaptation we get is sub-optimal. Now, going back to the more is not always better, in SRA Curve #3 if we workout more than our bodies can effectively recover from (the solid red line) then the adaptation we get from that scenario is also sub-optimal. This is an interesting scenario as each rep you do beyond what you can efficiently recover from actually is working to get you less results. One more rep is not always better. There may simply too much fatigue to maximally recover. In both the too little and the too much scenarios we can still make progress, but it’s not maximal. In MovementLink programming, we are careful to elicit the response we are looking for for that WOD’s place in the cycle to maximize adaptations.

But, it gets more complicated as we do not workout one day on and one day off…so why? Simple answer, to take advantage of the bigger results created by supercompensation.

Linking SRA Curves

Now, let’s look at SRA Curve #4. Supercompensation is an additional boost to adaptation created from an appropriate amount of accumulated fatigue. MovementLink program design includes 2-3 days on followed by 1 day of rest. As you can see in SRA Curve #4, when we workout day after day, we are actually making ourselves less fit. This should make sense because if you worked out hard 3 days in a row and then tested your fitness, you will be less fit after day 3 than if you tested before day 1, after day 1, or after day 2. But, when we back off a bit from training, we can recover and adapt to levels of fitness higher than where we began.

If we try and fully recover and adapt from each individual workout, then we will not be stressing our bodies enough to maximize our results. When we pair WODs together day after day, all of the SRA curves produces from each WOD combine together. If we combine WODs and rest days in a balanced way to accumulate appropriate amounts of fatigue, we can build bigger adaptations. But, we need to back off to realize these adaptations. This doesn’t mean not working out, it simply means working in easier workouts and easier weeks of workouts to allow our body time to realize our potential gains.

Just like SRA Curves #2 and #3, we could do too little or too much, allow for too much or too little recovery time, or not cut back enough once we have accumulated fatigue which would all cause us to miss out on potential adaptations. The way in which we combine WODs together needs to be optimally planned and not just thrown together randomly.

Within MovementLink’s bigger macrocycles, within each mesocycle (Hypertrophy, Strength, Peaking, Benchmark), each week has appropriate and varied volume and intensities to maximize adaptations long-term. If you test yourself randomly in the middle of a cycle, you will likely not see much, if any, gains. But, at the end of the cycles, we are peaked and ready to set new PRs. If there is an event one of our athletes has in the middle of the cycle, we simply taper appropriately leading into the event to bounce their fitness up.

In the SRA Curve #4, the stimulus, or the fatigue of the WODs, was constant. We can further control and manage fatigue to maximize adaptations by purposeful making some workouts easier and some workouts harder. Like we said before, for every movement, energy system, and volume and intensity combination, there exists a theoretical SRA curve. Some are longer than other and some are shorter. Some muscle groups respond best to more training frequency and some respond best to less. This can be easy to imagine because if you do a hard lower body day, your upper body may be fine the next day. It’s the interaction of SRA curves that need to be considered to properly manage fatigue and produce P.A.T.H. Results.

One of the biggest programming mistakes we see is the simple lack of planning and understanding. We typically see gyms do a couple of amateur things. First, they just come up with random workouts with no bigger plan in place. They look at the workouts they did in the last few days and they create a workout that looks different to keep it “constantly varied.” “Constantly varied” should not mean random and without a plan. The next mistake gyms make is they want to do a “strength” cycle. So they grab a strength program off the internet, usually these gyms LOVE to do a Smolov Russian Squat Cycle, Hatch Squat Cycle, or Wendler’s 5-3-1. Please don’t misunderstand me, these programs are great, but they are designed to be stand-alone, complete programs that are highly planned according to the SRA curve concept discussed above. So what do you think happens when a gym simply takes one of these programs and then throws metabolic conditioning on top of it? Of course athletes are over-trained and are not maximizing results. Most of these gyms eventually figure this out and then will take just one or two workouts a week from one of those programs and then add their metabolic conditioning. This will likely produce better results than their first method as the volume is more reasonable, but this must be done with the understanding of proper stimulus to be able to implement it in a way that is maximally effective. Without purposefully controlling for fatigue, you can get better, but there will be a lot of potential for the effort that is being missed out on.

So, how do we know and build optimal workouts? How do we create easier days that are not too easy and how do we create harder days that are not too hard?

Prilepin’s Chart was created by studying the journals of thousands of world-class weightlifters and has become the gold standard in weightlifting and power lifting as a tool to manage daily fatigue levels and once we understand how to piece together easier, medium, and harder weeks and days to manage fatigue, we’ll dive into how to determine the specific reps and weights to use in each workout.