Fluid, dynamic, responsive programming (not periodization)

Flare ups, strength losses, and navigating unpredictability

Mesopotamian god (with thunderbolts) battles Gryphon ; often associated with battle of Marduk vs Tiamat - story from Enūma Eliš - public domain.

I sat down to add on this entry I had outlined and, for lack of better or qualified words, I gave it the title of “fluid, dynamic, etc. programming and periodization”. It’s an intuitive, non-technical expression that seemed to describe what I’m doing with myself in terms of programming. I did that weeks ago, and it didn’t sound right. It wasn’t, because there is no periodization in a scenario like the one I am working on.

Periodization? Programming?

Let’s clarify a few concepts, and, if not, at least narrow the specter of what is meant with each term. Programming, for example: a program is an organized plan of things to happen in the future. Exercise programming is planning the distribution of exercises in a training session, in a week, or in a month. Programming is done with a certain goal regarding desired physiological and anatomical adaptations. To achieve that goal, programming manipulates training variables such as sets, repetition, load, velocity, etc. Periodization is the organization of training according to a certain model of progression, in a defined time frame. It usually means an extended time (several weeks), and the period may be broken down into smaller chunks (cycles or blocks), with their own goals and training logic. To design a periodized program, it is necessary to be able to predict enough to conceive reasonable expectations, and, therefore, set concrete goals.

Some examples of periodized programs are: the training program for a firefighter department candidate who has specific minimum standards to meet in a set of exercises, and to achieve their best scores by 136 days; the training program for a fighter who must be in peak performance form in 5 months, at a specific date, to fight a certain other fighter; the exercise system of an athletic pregnant woman; or my own, so familiar examples of a powerlifting competition where my goal was to lift the heaviest weight for each lift, in a specific body weight class. All these things have a date, which lets you (the programmer, or coach) design a periodized system, chop it into little blocks as you see fit, and create a training program, because you know what to expect, at least in general terms, and you think you know how to get there. The girl is going to have a baby in no later than 9 months and change, the firefighter candidate will either pass or fail depending on what he does on test day, and whatever I lift on meet day is what I get, and I wouldn’t be competing if I didn’t have an idea where I could be in 3, 6 or 8 months if I followed my program.

Enter chaos

It’s an entirely different universe now. I have no idea, whatsoever, what to expect if I intervene in any way with any training stimuli. I know what will happen if I don’t intervene at all, and that’s not an option. I’m treading uncharted territory as there has ever been one.

My background is in the traditional training methods based on the writings of Zatsiorsky, Stone, Plisk, Kraemer, Fleck, Bompa, and their disciples, and, specifically for powerlifting, the conjugate method and a few other protocols mostly adapted from Olympic weightlifting. My approach was always to combine the elements that I learned from each one of these authors and apply them in a personalized manner. I enjoyed programming athletes’ competitive preparations, and people’s recoveries, and I taught periodization to students who were athletic coaches in sports clubs, a few personal trainers, and a few physicians. Programming athletes the way I did was fascinating and pretty rewarding. My athletes did very well in competitions. Programming this way was also financially unsustainable for me. I don’t seem to be good at this, I have difficulty getting out of the mindset “client=new research project”, that can create such amazing and colorful rabbit holes. Not good for paying bills, though.

Now, I am my most important research project because, well, survival. My very unprofitable approach to programming came in handy. I have the training to use the scientific literature to my advantage, time to analyze the data I collect from my performance, and the nothing-to-lose attitude to try untested protocols. Of course, I’ve never been so motivated. When I said “survival”, I meant that I live with a chronic condition that includes constant, as well as extreme levels of pain, in the place that has the most expensive emergency¹ health care in the world, with unaffordable management options for chronic conditions, with the least qualified cohort of practicing physicians, with ruthless and gangster-like health insurance companies, and pain treatment options that are either completely unaffordable to me, or legally and medically dangerous. I ran out of options. Either I acted as my physician, pharmacist, and principal investigator of the research project on my health, or I would not be alive now, as has been so frequently pointed out to me. Survival means that diet and exercise became the most important resources I have now. It just makes sense, because I, we, many people, can’t afford to be unhealthy: it’s beyond our means. So I need to train effectively, and to do so, I must figure out how to make training decisions or to program in the context of uncertainty.

Programming under uncertainty and keeping the eye on the prize

In this scenario, I am programming training under massive fluctuation of stimuli response and resulting unpredictability. A flare-up can cause a sudden, usually temporary, loss of strength and power output, as well as volume tolerance. I am not talking about a small drop: one week I performed within a calculated 1RM bench press of 155.3lbs (70.4 kg), the next it was 124.2lbs (56.33). Whatever error there may be in this estimate, even half of its magnitude is huge. Such a drop in strength came with a decreased tolerance for volume and early fatigue onset. When the discomfort with the training setup (changing the plates, in the winter, during a flare-up, can be pretty uncomfortable) grew too much, I created a sequence of bodyweight exercises, which I did daily. I created a whole new block of training consisting of this set of exercises and how I built on them. I went from a twice-a-week, low volume, strength stimulus in the range of 75-90%, to a daily frequency of high volume, very low-intensity strength stimulus. I’d love to keep both, if I have the time, but right now I can only handle the bodyweight training I created, at home. Within this new “indoors block”, there was a tiny performance gain in the first days, I added one or another new exercise, and then there was another abrupt strength and endurance loss, from which I am recovering while still doing the bodyweight routine.

It is impossible to design a periodized program in this context. In similar, less chaotic scenarios, for example in the physical therapy of injury rehabilitation, the available protocols for periodization of strength training have been frustrating, and it has been proposed that autoregulated periodization would be appropriate. I can buy autoregulation, but not periodization: if it is impossible to predict results with any accuracy, then we are not designing training towards a concrete goal, but rather as an immediate response to real-time performance and response to stimuli. Of course, there is a general goal that combines strength gain and pain reduction, but they are far from concrete. They are almost abstract desires. Autoregulated periodization has been introduced, and still today claimed as a valid protocol, for healthy adults, not aging chronically ill practitioners in permanent rehab. It’s a nice approach, though, from which I learn and apply when applicable.

Designing my own strategy and programming each training session changed my approach to training, and exposed my own deficiencies in knowledge. It also challenged several of my favorite “known truths”, or comfortable assumptions (those we go to content and distracted). I’m finally up to the neck in one of the things I have always avoided, which is designing training to handle a pathology, or a highly dysfunctional musculoskeletal system (me, in this case). I have always referred people to physical therapists and to physicians for that, and I thought it was irresponsible for me to touch them. For that reason, I never really paid much attention to the literature or practice of movement around chronic injury. And there is no literature on training and handling movement impediments under chronic pain, there just isn’t. My deficiency isn’t on exercise protocols for particular lower back or shoulder conditions. My deficiency is how to approach training as a whole, or, in my case, how to approach strategy design in this chaotic assembly of weirdly interconnected maladaptive physiological responses (me again).

I had very few clients that did not have temporal landmarks to guide my programming. Most had competitions, some had tests to pass, I had pre and post-surgical cases, and for everyone, we had temporal goals or limitations. I don’t have those anymore, or not obvious ones. Perhaps I will need them later, but certainly not now. My decisions in training are guided by a general understanding of the previously mentioned mess (my chronic condition), what little there is to be expected in such circumstances, and my understanding of human and exercise physiology, as a background to a constant assessment of myself in training.

Constant assessment: crucial, annoying, and exhausting

The constant assessment is crucial and also annoying. I’d love to have a coach, I really would. And also a physical therapist. I was always my own coach for programming purposes, but I was a healthy athlete, I could periodize my training, which meant peace of mind, because once you program, the number of decisions you have to make is infinitely smaller, and you can focus all your attention on the execution of the lifts. Oh, I miss that so much. Just opening a file, finding “today” in the program spreadsheet, and following the prescribed tasks, at the prescribed number of sets and repetitions, at the prescribed intensity, and even weight on the bar. Not having any of that means that my conscious deliberative and surveilling attention is divided between: a. intensely observing my own responses (does this feel heavy? How heavy? How many repetitions would I do to failure? How tired am I? Am I dizzy?), b. deciding what’s next (is it better to stop at this weight and go for volume? Can I even handle more weight? Will I respond according to what I expect from this past set? What if I cut the bench press here and just go to the deadlift section, will I recover better? Should I abort this training session?), and c. the exercise itself, its execution and skill quality. This is so far from ideal in lifting, but here we are.

I document my training without fail, every session, every lift. I keep myself updated in the research literature on anything that can affect my decisions in my programming, and that’s a lot of primary source reading per week. Each reading challenges my knowledge base and assumptions. For example, last week, I realized I had serious gaps in my knowledge of the physiology of fatigue. Until recently, fatigue interested me from a perspective of athletic recovery. Now I need to understand other forms of fatigue, not even related, physiologically, to the ones I knew enough about when I was a competitive athlete. These other forms of fatigue affect performance. Ironically, to handle those other mysterious-to-me forms of fatigue, I fatigue my conscious awareness with the three decision-making tasks I handle every training session.

My current training program is recent. I had completely stopped lifting for about two years, which, to my body, felt more like ten years into decrepitude. During these two years, I infrequently used Planet Fitness for random, unstructured machine exercises. I also infrequently, and more recently walked on the streets. I started lifting again in May 2024, not really knowing what I was doing, and I soon had to stop because of the heat, restarting in July. My new approach (included in the whole “reinvention thing”), which I believe is pretty successful, started in September 2024. My last entry in my training journal is from December 30. Since then, I’ve been doing daily bodyweight exercises, and I will check what happened to my strength and power output in two weeks, after the cold wave. Four months into a training program that took the “subject” from a virtually inactive (other than walking) state, where 10 reps with the empty bar felt heavy, to lifting a calculated 1RM bench press of 155.3 lbs (70.4 kg), and then “losing” 20% of this during a long pain flare up, or rather, cycle. That’s my statistical universe, and based on which all my decisions are made.

This is a bad data collection for training decisions because there are no defined patterns. It is difficult, and very tricky to decide, and that’s where the balance of nothingtoloseness and caution comes in: I cannot afford to make certain types of mistakes that weren’t a big deal for me when I was healthy. Or healthier. Whatever. If I erred on the side of the intensity back then, it might cause a little discomfort, and it would affect my performance. If I err on the side of intensity now, I can make myself sick for a very long time. It’s been a while since I had any adverse reaction to exertion, and it was not to a strength stimulus when I had them. It was more to cardio-respiratory exertion. The point is that my health parameters, the same that I used to trust “back then”, do not function linearly now.

Responsive programming? Learning to tune in to myself

What approach is this, that I repeatedly say I started in September? Does it have a name, or follow a school? I looked up “dynamic” periodization, “fluid” periodization, and “agile” periodization, found the related “daily undulating periodization” (even for people living with HIV and for powerlifters) “autoregulated periodization” and realized that I converged with a lot of what was proposed, but the labels still don’t entirely describe how I structure my training and make decisions in real-time. They don’t, because, once again, I don’t fit entirely in any of the subject classes in the literature on sports, and I don’t fit entirely in the subject classes of studies in exercise with individuals with chronic fatigue and pain.

I adopted a minimalist structure, starting with the three powerlifts, with minimum volume. It started with simple, full-range-of-motion lifts, decreasing volume up to three lifts in the last set. From this starting point, weight increments were done according to my subjective perception of intensity and assessment of performance quality in the session. After the first two weeks, the weight of the last set in each lift corresponded to approximately 90% intensity - 90% of 1RM.

I train alone, in my garage gym, and I am still insecure because I feel extremely weak. Feeling “extremely weak” around Olympic weights is very alien to my experience. I’ve always been a strong person. This is all new to me. Several actions other than lifting cause me pain, so I am less stable in general. It is in that context that I decide how much weight to add to the bar, or not to add, to shorten the whole session by cutting sets, or even not training a planned lift in the session. I described my training here. From the point I described in that substack, I introduced rack presses/dead bench presses when I considered the weights I was handling were not that safe for me. I did the same with the squat and kept improving my performance for a while. In October, I dropped the squat, and in the last two sessions in December I only benched. From September to October, I made great progress. When a strong intolerance for volume and general fatigue made me lose the squat, I still had progress in strength, until December. Lots to learn and to implement changes after the cold wave.

Some would call this linear progression (because it’s not periodized), but it isn’t linear at all. “Linearity” was the response I got from 80% of the time with the bench press. The rest was pretty chaotic. I establish intensity, volume, and variation of the lift used in the session for each of the lifts, they do not progress together or linearly. Before I injured the psoas, I reached a weight on the squat that required variations of the straight execution in full-range-of-motion. For two weeks the squat segment included only paused squats and dead squats. The deadlift sets were reduced to single lifts after the first three sets, reducing the volume.

I’d say this is primarily an assessment-dependent progression, with a long-term look at function recovery. I’d call that responsive programming, not more.

Having written so many periodized programs based on particular time landmarks, or some specific goal that could be timed, this is initially strange. It feels strange not to have a weekly structure based on that and on a particular split, with days ascribed to one or another lift or related exercises: I had two lifting sessions per week, and they have the same structure. Weird feelings aside, the result has been strength increase when possible, creativity in responding to sudden losses of strength, power, and endurance, but also a lot of information.

The attitude shift that this recent experience brought might be the greatest contribution to the efficiency of this “method”. First of all, it requires always keeping the desired goal in mind, because the setbacks are proportionally much worse than I ever managed as an athlete, and they are frequent now. It is easy to get lost. Second, never let go of the challenge. Training stimuli are challenges, and even in the midst of intense, constant pain, there have to be challenges. Without challenge, I feel weirdly estranged from life. Finally, I suspect that because I committed to base all my decisions on immediate assessment, I’ve been much more tuned to internal signs. Mindfulness training has already helped with this. I am trusting those signs above all, maybe for the first time. I am trusting my reading of them. Trusting myself is good.

I like that.

1. I say “emergency” because you pay huge insurance premiums and use it successfully for basic health issues, infectious diseases and accidents. Anything chronic and inflammatory, like all the cancers, all the inflammatory chronic illnesses, the Non Transmissible Diseases (NTD), you can forget. As a good friend recently said, unless you are pretty well off (the friend identified as “making good money” themselves, but not wealthy), you probably can’t afford the treatment of an important non-transmissible incurable disease.