Coach Ted talks about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of repeating the known.
The Fallacy of the Repetition-Based System
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The Fallacy of the Repetition-Based System
Season 4/Episode 39
April 21, 2022
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
This is the Ted O'Neill Program, where we explore the science and philosophies of performance optimization, and the elevation of the human experience. From the mind of Ted O'Neill, with Jon Leon Guerrero.
0:24 Jon
Welcome to the Ted O'Neill program. We are doing the Season Four In Review week, and this week we're going to review the second concept that we addressed, which was the fallacy of the repetition-based model. That week began on March 7. And if you want to go back and listen to those episodes in full, I encourage you to do that—rate and review, etc. We'd love to get your feedback.
0:51 Ted
Yeah, that was one of my favorite weeks to do, because this concept—this is one of the paradigms shifts that I want to create. Because once you see this, it's something that can't be unseen, to only describe what it is I'm talking about. I see the fallacy of a repetition-based system. So much goes into the idea of training the physical body. And when we think about training the physical body, it's usually, “Well, what is it I'm supposed to do?” And this doesn't just apply to the weight room, where now everyone has—this terminology always gets me—an online program, which is an online coach, which is someone you pay, usually in my mind a ridiculous amount of money, to write you a list of exercises that you could have just written down on the same piece of paper yourself, because they're meaningless. That's not going to do anything for you.
We see it in the sense of weight training: how many sets and reps do you do? How are your loading parameters for this particular thing? But really, we also see it everywhere else, at anything that's exercise- or fitness-based: how far you run, laps you swim at the pool… All this comes back to—what is it we're repeating, and with what frequency and regularity? Now, here's my problem with all this.
When I began to put together the Paraphysical Training model, it was in observance that there was patterned behavior that people would demonstrate that was identical, regardless of their level of experience or their level of qualification. And that’s as follows, whether we're talking about a weight that someone had never lifted before, or we get to the tail end of a set of a really challenging weight.
Now. I'm going to throw this caveat in there—that, at Diablo, we spend a tremendous amount of time teaching and drilling techniques. This is not a shimmy walk in with your list of exercises and just flail away mindlessly why someone in the background with a clipboard who is a, quote, “coach” saying “Good, good great job.” Right, Diablo is not that place. If you're sensitive to constructive criticism, it's not going to happen for you. Because there's a way that we do this, and there's a way that we've decoded each lift where we can break apart each lift into smaller segments, and for each of these smaller segments create a system of best practices.
So, when someone has spent some time at Diablo Barbell, training, they've been trained on a system of specificity. In other words, every single thing that they're doing has place and meaning in every single exercise. So that's the caveat to this concept of how I'm describing the fallacy—the rep-based system, where either we get to the last rep in a set or a weight you’ve never lifted before, and then everything breaks down.
So, when I say it breaks down, I'm not just talking about fatigue or imbalances, because those things are going to happen to a certain degree at some point—you're going to find a weight that you can’t lift no matter how good your technique is, or how strong you are. What I'm talking about is when you completely mentally check out when you reach what we call the access point—in other words, the repetition that actually has the physiological means of changing.
So, said differently—if your max bench is 500 pounds. If you've never worked past 400 pounds, if you do that for a year, you're not going to still be able to bench 500 pounds. You’re going to de-train to that level.
So, in other words, those reps are well within your capability. On the same hand, if you're doing a set of 10 repetitions, and we'll say it this way, if you have a weight you could do 10 reps with and you only ever do five reps with that weight, you’re actually getting weaker, by not pushing them to the reps that challenge you. The reps that challenge you are the repetitions above 95%: that's where you build absolute strength. And then that—and by using the rep model, the last rep of the set with a properly picked weight.
So, when people check out, where—this is observable, if everything falls apart mentally, and it's demonstrated in the body. So, in other words, in the bench-press, everything's going great, right. You're locked in and pulling that bar apart, forcing your chest up, your triceps are right under your hands to push it in a straight line. There's no shoulder rotation, your leg drive is set, everything is on point. And then you get to that one you don't know you do. Drop the bar, bounce it off the chest, your butt raises off the bench, you wiggle and squirm and everyone's yelling, “Yeah, great job!”
Man, what a missed opportunity. (Yeah, you wasted it.)
So. The weight you've never lifted—everything else up until that point is great. And you get to that last one. And you do something similar with the squat: get cut high, or you do a touch-and-go on the box if you're doing a box squat. Or the deadlift gets hitched or ramped, or something that—or yanked or something similar to where you lose all of the technical elements that were previously giving you the success.
This was something I observed for years. And it was a real problem because it was not something anyone's talking about yet. Everyone knew that there were certain reps that essentially had more value than others. That last rep of the set, or the weight that you've never lifted before—there's an agreement on where physiological change happens.
But when you flail about wildly, I've found that optimal progress is not made. In fact, most people will then stay stuck at a very similar weight, or a very small incremental progress, until they get sick or go on vacation, which wipes out that progress until they start the same cycle over and over again.
So there had to be a different, a better way. So, my contention is this. The repetition-based model is fundamentally flawed because we're only looking at the movement path of the bar, or the fact that someone's doing an exercise. And so, “Do so many of this,” as if that's going to somehow cure anything. Now. If you lose your composure, mentally and emotionally, and that translates in the physical, then I would say—what the repetition actually is the thought that precipitates the movement in the body. (Yes.) Does that make sense? (Yes.) All right.
I'm hoping everyone's getting that, because this is, to me, the most fundamental paradigm shift we can currently make in the field of strength and conditioning. If the flailing about of the body is just how we're counting reps, then we're going nowhere. Because what this means is, when I get squeezed maximally, I get tested. I'm going to demonstrate the same thought process from my past. In other words, when we get into that place where we're full of stress hormones and anxiety or fear, or we get oversight, if we revert to a way of thinking—and you can see this. It's a weakness. It's a mental weakness. I don't care how much you puff your chest out and yell, or you know, how much of an ammonia hit you take before the lift, or whatever it is you're doing. If you check out mentally, that's weakness. (Yeah.)
So, this has to be trained. Because when I say weakness, it's not a judgment. This is now something we would have to identify as the greatest opportunity in training. And if we don't, guess what we're going to do. (We're going to sit there in it. We're going to wallow in weakness.) And we're going to do the same thing over and over and over again, and wonder why progress is suboptimal at best.
So, this is why we have so many leads: there's a standard now, we've refined those to a much greater level, where we can train that moment in full understanding that, in every second, every moment, there's an access point—there's a place where you can wring out progress that you never previously had at your disposal. By staying completely composed and locked in to what an optimal state or mastery would look like, as a demonstrable quality.
So, when you get to that place of, “I don't know if I can make it,” instead of bouncing the bar off the chest, you stay locked in through that fatigue. And you are 100% committed to making the last rep look exactly like the first one, where you didn't have to think about it. Or approaching the weight that's a new PR, like you did your second-to-last warmup when you're still weren't questioning, “Can I do this or not?” That's the opportunity.
Because you then have to transcend that repeatable replicable fear and anxiety in the body. Everyone has this. And they will continue to be there until you choose, in that moment of that adverse chemistry, to exercise a level of discipline that is greater than your circumstance is currently presenting. And until you do that, I'm telling you, you don't understand what training really is.
0:24 Jon
Welcome to the Ted O'Neill program. We are doing the Season Four In Review week, and this week we're going to review the second concept that we addressed, which was the fallacy of the repetition-based model. That week began on March 7. And if you want to go back and listen to those episodes in full, I encourage you to do that—rate and review, etc. We'd love to get your feedback.
0:51 Ted
Yeah, that was one of my favorite weeks to do, because this concept—this is one of the paradigms shifts that I want to create. Because once you see this, it's something that can't be unseen, to only describe what it is I'm talking about. I see the fallacy of a repetition-based system. So much goes into the idea of training the physical body. And when we think about training the physical body, it's usually, “Well, what is it I'm supposed to do?” And this doesn't just apply to the weight room, where now everyone has—this terminology always gets me—an online program, which is an online coach, which is someone you pay, usually in my mind a ridiculous amount of money, to write you a list of exercises that you could have just written down on the same piece of paper yourself, because they're meaningless. That's not going to do anything for you.
We see it in the sense of weight training: how many sets and reps do you do? How are your loading parameters for this particular thing? But really, we also see it everywhere else, at anything that's exercise- or fitness-based: how far you run, laps you swim at the pool… All this comes back to—what is it we're repeating, and with what frequency and regularity? Now, here's my problem with all this.
When I began to put together the Paraphysical Training model, it was in observance that there was patterned behavior that people would demonstrate that was identical, regardless of their level of experience or their level of qualification. And that’s as follows, whether we're talking about a weight that someone had never lifted before, or we get to the tail end of a set of a really challenging weight.
Now. I'm going to throw this caveat in there—that, at Diablo, we spend a tremendous amount of time teaching and drilling techniques. This is not a shimmy walk in with your list of exercises and just flail away mindlessly why someone in the background with a clipboard who is a, quote, “coach” saying “Good, good great job.” Right, Diablo is not that place. If you're sensitive to constructive criticism, it's not going to happen for you. Because there's a way that we do this, and there's a way that we've decoded each lift where we can break apart each lift into smaller segments, and for each of these smaller segments create a system of best practices.
So, when someone has spent some time at Diablo Barbell, training, they've been trained on a system of specificity. In other words, every single thing that they're doing has place and meaning in every single exercise. So that's the caveat to this concept of how I'm describing the fallacy—the rep-based system, where either we get to the last rep in a set or a weight you’ve never lifted before, and then everything breaks down.
So, when I say it breaks down, I'm not just talking about fatigue or imbalances, because those things are going to happen to a certain degree at some point—you're going to find a weight that you can’t lift no matter how good your technique is, or how strong you are. What I'm talking about is when you completely mentally check out when you reach what we call the access point—in other words, the repetition that actually has the physiological means of changing.
So, said differently—if your max bench is 500 pounds. If you've never worked past 400 pounds, if you do that for a year, you're not going to still be able to bench 500 pounds. You’re going to de-train to that level.
So, in other words, those reps are well within your capability. On the same hand, if you're doing a set of 10 repetitions, and we'll say it this way, if you have a weight you could do 10 reps with and you only ever do five reps with that weight, you’re actually getting weaker, by not pushing them to the reps that challenge you. The reps that challenge you are the repetitions above 95%: that's where you build absolute strength. And then that—and by using the rep model, the last rep of the set with a properly picked weight.
So, when people check out, where—this is observable, if everything falls apart mentally, and it's demonstrated in the body. So, in other words, in the bench-press, everything's going great, right. You're locked in and pulling that bar apart, forcing your chest up, your triceps are right under your hands to push it in a straight line. There's no shoulder rotation, your leg drive is set, everything is on point. And then you get to that one you don't know you do. Drop the bar, bounce it off the chest, your butt raises off the bench, you wiggle and squirm and everyone's yelling, “Yeah, great job!”
Man, what a missed opportunity. (Yeah, you wasted it.)
So. The weight you've never lifted—everything else up until that point is great. And you get to that last one. And you do something similar with the squat: get cut high, or you do a touch-and-go on the box if you're doing a box squat. Or the deadlift gets hitched or ramped, or something that—or yanked or something similar to where you lose all of the technical elements that were previously giving you the success.
This was something I observed for years. And it was a real problem because it was not something anyone's talking about yet. Everyone knew that there were certain reps that essentially had more value than others. That last rep of the set, or the weight that you've never lifted before—there's an agreement on where physiological change happens.
But when you flail about wildly, I've found that optimal progress is not made. In fact, most people will then stay stuck at a very similar weight, or a very small incremental progress, until they get sick or go on vacation, which wipes out that progress until they start the same cycle over and over again.
So there had to be a different, a better way. So, my contention is this. The repetition-based model is fundamentally flawed because we're only looking at the movement path of the bar, or the fact that someone's doing an exercise. And so, “Do so many of this,” as if that's going to somehow cure anything. Now. If you lose your composure, mentally and emotionally, and that translates in the physical, then I would say—what the repetition actually is the thought that precipitates the movement in the body. (Yes.) Does that make sense? (Yes.) All right.
I'm hoping everyone's getting that, because this is, to me, the most fundamental paradigm shift we can currently make in the field of strength and conditioning. If the flailing about of the body is just how we're counting reps, then we're going nowhere. Because what this means is, when I get squeezed maximally, I get tested. I'm going to demonstrate the same thought process from my past. In other words, when we get into that place where we're full of stress hormones and anxiety or fear, or we get oversight, if we revert to a way of thinking—and you can see this. It's a weakness. It's a mental weakness. I don't care how much you puff your chest out and yell, or you know, how much of an ammonia hit you take before the lift, or whatever it is you're doing. If you check out mentally, that's weakness. (Yeah.)
So, this has to be trained. Because when I say weakness, it's not a judgment. This is now something we would have to identify as the greatest opportunity in training. And if we don't, guess what we're going to do. (We're going to sit there in it. We're going to wallow in weakness.) And we're going to do the same thing over and over and over again, and wonder why progress is suboptimal at best.
So, this is why we have so many leads: there's a standard now, we've refined those to a much greater level, where we can train that moment in full understanding that, in every second, every moment, there's an access point—there's a place where you can wring out progress that you never previously had at your disposal. By staying completely composed and locked in to what an optimal state or mastery would look like, as a demonstrable quality.
So, when you get to that place of, “I don't know if I can make it,” instead of bouncing the bar off the chest, you stay locked in through that fatigue. And you are 100% committed to making the last rep look exactly like the first one, where you didn't have to think about it. Or approaching the weight that's a new PR, like you did your second-to-last warmup when you're still weren't questioning, “Can I do this or not?” That's the opportunity.
Because you then have to transcend that repeatable replicable fear and anxiety in the body. Everyone has this. And they will continue to be there until you choose, in that moment of that adverse chemistry, to exercise a level of discipline that is greater than your circumstance is currently presenting. And until you do that, I'm telling you, you don't understand what training really is.
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