Auto Regulation Training

Getting back to the in season training theme from a few weeks ago, the best way to keep your training from exceeding your recovery abilities is to use the auto regulation training method.

What is it?

It refers to self regulating your performance, each and every workout, to allow you to only train quality and not quantity. When you focus on quantity then you run the risk of every easily doing too much volume, some of which is less then desirable from fatigue build up. An example of this is drop sets where you decrease the weight to continue to pump out the set.

Confusion reigns supreme here as most trainee's think that they are increasing the intensity of the exercise but I must ask how is this happening?

Is it because your arms are on fire when you're on your 4th drop set of 8 reps, even though you're now lifting 20% of your starting weight?

No it isn't. All that is happening then is that you are building more and more fatigue and dipping into your recovery stores deeper and deeper where you'll more then likely, exceed your recovery abilities to point where you don't recover between workouts, locally or systemically and you go backwards quickly.

To increase the intensity of an exercise you must increase the load your lifting. Whether it's by 1kg or 5kgs, an increase in weight is in increase in intensity, not the addition of volume.

When using auto reg, you simply choose a rep number and you ramp up to that weight and / or continue using the same weight and rep number each set until there is a change in the delivery of 1 set to the other.

This change could be:

• a missed lift
• a change of technique
• a grinding rep
• a rep that has a sticking point
• the change in tempo of a rep in that one rep is noticeably slower then the last

So as an example you may be shoulder presses with your aim to stay at 3 reps of which there are 2 main options.

The first option is to work up in weight while performing sets of 3 until you feel you've come to a 3 rep max then the exercise stops. This is basically the max effort method.

The second option is work up to your working weight and do as many sets of 3 as you can and once you can't do 3, then stop that exercise.

The beauty of this is that it allows you to take advantage of the days that you are "on", so if you've programmed to do 5 x 3, then you what you may do is get to 4 and the 5th set is a grind and thus less effective and would have been best left out except it said 5 sets in your training diary so that's what you do. It's that 5th grinding set that will dip into your recovery stores.

On the flip side, you might do the prescribed 5 sets but you still might feel good so why finish there? Yes, your training diary says to only do 5 sets but you're feeling primed so don't waste this opportunity. These are the days you want to take advantage of to set personal bests.

Try it at your next workout.