“It Feels Heavy”, It Probably Should: A Comprehensive Guide on How You Should Feel During a Training Cycle
How did it feel?
“It moved fine but felt really heavy.”
Read that exchange again.
It moved fine, but it FELT heavy.
What’s the problem? Well, as it turns out, most likely there isn’t one. However, there are some cases where that statement can tell you everything about where someone is at in training and in turn, can certainly be a problem.
If you have lifted for performance for an extended period of time, you probably are aware that this dilemma is quite profound and maybe you have experienced it yourself.
As I have began to work with more and more lifters of various backgrounds, I have noticed the themes of fatigue patterns of how I typically program and, of course with exception, feel confident in pin-pointing when they will feel good and when things will come a bit harder to them.
That doesn’t make it any easier for the lifter, who is actually lifting the weights.
In this article, I will try to seek out a solution to this dilemma and help you identify if this is something you should pay no mind to, or if it is indicative of a greater problem.
First and foremost, we need to diagnose your habits outside of the gym. Yes, that is what I personally like to look at first.
The reason I say this, this can unlock a ton of info without any extra intervention.
The issue is as humans, we are not always truthful and sometimes we can be prideful and choose to offload our decisions, making what could be a productive conversation, null and void. I have also noticed, a small percentage of lifters always default to the programming/technique and any time there is a minor inconvenience or setback, want to change things.
As most of you who read my articles know, I like to compare to traditional sports where I can. This particular scenario in another sport would look something like:
Basketball: You are a good shooter, you have a single practice session where you miss more shots than usual. Would you change your entire shooting form? Change your entire routine?
Football: You are a prolific receiver, you have a single practice session where you drop a few balls. Would you change your entire fundamentals on how you catch the ball?
Baseball: You are a good pitcher, you have a single practice session in which you cannot control your fastball. Would you switch your entire mechanics because of it?
Sprinting: You are a good 100m sprinter, you have a single practice session in which you feel clunky coming out of the starting blocks. Do you change your entire technique of block clearance?
As we are probably subconsciously aware, sport as a whole is dynamic and does not occur in a vacuum. These problems I presented here can sometimes be attributed to things outside of the domain of the event, or sometimes, even nothing.
Back to business here, let’s say you have an established report with the client/athlete and they are honest with you, no matter what, you need to first figure out what is going on.
X person could be amidst the heaviest coursework load of their academic career and their mind is not firing on all cylinders when getting under a heavy bar.
Y person could be completely burning the candle at both ends with lack of nutritional intervention and staying up late each night.
Z person could be doing a bit extra work that you are unaware of, creating higher levels of fatigue than anticipated.
All of these problems are unique to the individual, but to go to the programming and technique first could be patching up a small hole on one side of the boat while the other side is capsizing.
Fix this issue, weights will feel better… maybe. More on that to come.
Second, everyone’s favorite, we certainly do need to check the programming and make a decision on whether this is intended or it is a consequence of something that maybe we failed to account for.
I will lay out a couple practical examples for you all in which this could be intended, or at the very least, expected. One will be a chronic example, the other an acute example.
Example 1 - Chronic, for this example we will use an ascending set scheme for the squat.
Week 1: 1x7 @ RPE 4, 1x7 @ RPE 5
Week 2: 1x7 @ RPE 5, 1x7 @ RPE 6, 1x7 @ RPE 7
Week 3: 1x7 @ RPE 6, 1x7 @ RPE 7, 1x7 @ RPE 8, 1x7 @ 87.5% of heaviest set load
Week 4: 1x7 @9, 1x7 @ 80% of top set load
In this example, we can be pretty certain that week 3, weights will feel the heaviest, in a chronic sense. Let’s examine why this is probably the case.
Week 1: Both volume and intensity are super low and more than likely this is a glorified deload, or reload, as I like to call it.
Week 2: Volume AND intensity are up, but probably in manageable dose.
Week 3: Not only is volume the peak of the cycle, but you are being asked to go to RPE 8 on a third ascending set, carrying over the fatigue from the previous 2 weeks AND not to mention, we have other lifts we perform in this sport. This is when things will, “catch up to you”, so to speak and our RPE, which is usually a subjective measure, won’t be quite accurate. It is incredibly common to take a set, have it feel awful, watch the video back and what do you know, it was pretty sub-max, during these periods of training, doubly so if this falls in line with the the typical overreach most coaches will use 1-2 weeks out from a meet.
Week 4: Ideally, if you cleared fatigued, this should actually feel quite good, at least in terms of execution. If the weights feel heavy, most likely, they objectively are for you. People forget all the time, and it maybe doesn’t apply to this specific scenario, but when you are approaching weights that are 90% and above, they should feel heavy, again, because they are. Now, take this for a grain of salt, as there are several caveats, but it is not as simple as, “The more times I lift 400lbs, the easier it will get".” Anecdotally, and from my own experience, this is rarely the case. That is a topic for a different post altogether.
Example 2: Acute, for this example we will use the deadlift in a top beltless set scheme and be under the assumption it is the day after volume squats.
We will assume the squat session 24hrs prior, mirrors something like the prior example, with lots of leg assistance and accessory work.
We will also assume, the coach is programming this for a reason. Meaning, the athlete always performs well fresh for deads, but in meets interference from the squat tanks their deadlift. And maybe they do not have the time with their schedule to perform volume squats and heavy deads in the same session, or perform an SBD session, which are notorious for taking over 3hrs.
We are also assuming the reason the lifters is performing the top set beltless is to either limit the absolute load or establish more spinal erector strength, possibly both.
In this example, we can almost always assume the load will “feel” heavy, no matter what we do. You are intentionally taking fatigued deadlifts AND adding a variation to the mix.
I have experience with this myself and to be honest, my week 1 feels pretty much the same as week 4 despite weight being added each week and usually with a 60-70lbs gap between week 1 and week 4. I do this because I have a tendency to go too heavy, too soon on deadlifts, and I found with my schedule, I no longer have the time to do SBD sessions and 3.5hr plus sessions multiple times a week, so this addresses all my inherent weaknesses.
This sounds pretty simply, but you’d be surprised at how many people are unable to contextualize their training. Again, as it seems to always come back to, social media has a lot to do with this as we see the highlight reel of people’s training and we develop a false sense of expectation because of it. Human nature of course, but in my own experience, it is hard to break this mindset when “X famous social media lifter PRs every week, sometimes twice”.
Now, that is intended and in my opinion, as long as you can explain to the person why this is, there is no problem. You can go through periods where you dissipate this fatigue in order to display strength, and then your methods will also be “validated”, but as long as you have a reason, it should not be an issue.
But what happens when you run into an issue where the intended training is NOT intended to be so fatigue-inducing that weights are usually RPE 5 become RPE 9 or god forbid, a failed set. What if you are tapering down and the athelte is feeling WORSE going into a meet?
This, in short, is a problem.
A good proxy that you are training hard enough but not too hard is you have an established flow of peaks and valleys. You have days where you feel good, so-so, and awful. If the pendulum swings towards one extreme or the other, this is when we can run into 2 issues.
You are training TOO hard and every day you feel awful. You may feel secure in your technique in this case but usually the culprit is too much training volume, too much average intensity, or both. This could be coupled with lack of nutrition and recovery as well. Unless you are trying to induce an overreach of the ages, this is not a good thing. Being so fatigued that training is miserable is not good and we cannot pretend like it is necessary to progress. This should be a signal to you as the coach or athlete that something is off, assuming you are doing everything in your power outside the gym.
You are not training hard enough and every day you feel awesome. Although in a vacuum this might seem ideal, chances are you are not making much progress and are not doing enough damage and disruption to the system in order to elicit an adaptation. This is hard to do, I have found, but is most pronounced when people do HUGE tapers without needing to and in turn, the week of their meet, they feel good but they also feel clunky and weights feel heavier because of it. This is the concept of detraining and we should all be aware that tapers are dependent on your training demands. If you have been doing 3 sets of 5 at an easy RPE for weeks and never feel fatigued, chances are doing a taper where you take the week off of lifting (don’t do this) will flatline and tank your performance because you did not have a recovery deficit to dig yourself out out.
So, if this happens, what do we do?
The answer is a bit complicated in that if it’s the former, we can take a deload, if permitted the time, and that should solve most of our issues, but in cases like the latter, especially if you are in the week of the meet, you can’t just add a bunch of work and expect it to solve itself.
The good news, you can prevent this rather easily by testing and evaluating methods well ahead of time.
Here is an actual example for one of my clients, Michael Beaupre, who going into his first meet back in quite sometime, had severe elbow pain going into the meet that effected his ability to lock his elbows on bench. We were able to solve this for the second meet where he not only had no pain, but benched a meet PR for the first time in 4 years.
We found that the amount of volume he was doing, coupled with the amount of squatting he was doing, was just too much to recover from, regardless of what benefit it yielded.
We took that data and did 2 things:
Reduced actual comp bench press volume and added in work such as multi-grip pressing.
Reduced frequency of barbell squatting and replaced it with SSB work to give the elbows a break.
We performed pretty much the same style of taper, but this alone allowed him to actually express this strength in the meet.
And to solidify this with actual experience, he benched 292lbs that meet and I believe 5 weeks out, he made a comment that 245lbs felt very heavy despite moving well. That was intended!
So, to tie up any loose ends here, if you have concerns with how weights are feeling, I am not here to tell you that is it not valid and you should suck it up. However, I am challenging you to be a bit more critical and realistic in where you are in your training, in your preparation, or in your extracurriculars, and then make your decisions based off real, tangible date and not ego or emotion.
At Team Hogan, this is something we deal with, and me as head coach, still deal with, but what I always fall back on is this:
“If every session were easy and progress was linear, we’d all be squatting, benching, and deadlifting 600+lbs after a year of training. The frequency in which that happens is minimal at best and flat-out does not happen at worst.”
Just remember the next time you go under a heavy bar, it should feel heavy, but that means very little in terms of how it will move if you have your data set and trends established.
To Utopia,
Erik