Fundamentals

Most training advice arrives as a set of numbers. Rest this long, stop this far from failure, train this often, use this load, do this many sets. The numbers differ between sources, the arguments between them are loud, and the impression is of a field that cannot agree on anything.

Read the underlying research and a different picture appears. The numbers are mostly proxies for the same small set of quantities, and several of the most-repeated recommendations were derived from mechanisms that were later tested and did not hold.

That is the organizing observation of this category. Not that the standard advice is wrong, but that it is often right for reasons other than the ones given, which changes what happens when you adapt it to your own situation.

What is in this category

Loading fundamentals. (→ Loading fundamentals sub-hub) Rest between sets, where to stop a set, training frequency, load and repetition range, progression, exercise selection, weekly volume, warm-up, movement velocity, time off, estimated maxes, exercise order, and deloads. Thirteen entries that converge on one quantity: how much non-degraded work you accumulate in a week.

Adherence. (→ Adherence 01: The first month) Whether you keep training, which decides whether any other variable here gets the chance to matter, and which the first month predicts best. We put it here rather than treating it as a motivational aside, because the evidence puts it here.

Individual variation. (→ Individual variation 01: Are you a non-responder?) What the group averages everywhere else in this publication mean for one person, and why the famous ranges of individual response measure less than they appear to.

Further branches will be added. Movement quality and periodization each need their own.

How to read anything in this category

Ask what the recommendation was originally for. Several standard prescriptions were built to serve a mechanism that has since been tested directly and failed. The recommendation usually outlives the reason.

Ask what a "set" means in the study. A set taken to failure and a set stopped three repetitions short are counted identically in most research and are not the same thing. This applies to nearly every number in this category.

Ask who was studied. Most of this literature used untrained or recreationally trained participants over eight to twelve weeks. The people most interested in these questions are the least represented in the answers.

Expect the answer to be a range. Where the evidence supports a range rather than a number, we give the range. Precision that the underlying studies cannot support is the most common failure in this area, and it is usually a sign that someone is selling something.