EDM - THE EVERYDAY MAX(WHAT BASE BUILDING IS PROGRAMMED AROUND)
I absolutely hate the mentality of “no limits” because we ALL have limits. When you sit down and decide to create a productive training program, or program a productive training cycle, you have to be very aware of your limits in order to eventually push PAST THEM. This is one of the reasons that an EVERY DAY MAX is what you should be programming around. That day that you managed to bench a PR by 20 pounds is NOT what you should be basing your training cycles around.
No one in any other sport bases the worth of a player around his best day. They do it based around what he’s really capable of on a consistent basis. You don’t judge the worth of a running back based on his 210 yard rushing day when the rest of his career he only averaged about 52 yards a game rushing. It is an anomaly. You don’t give him a contract with the HOPES that he can go out and rush for 210 yards each Sunday. You pay him based on his 52 yards a game.
Many powerlifters or strength athletes do NOT get this. If your best squat EVER is 550, and that was on a +10% day where you felt like King Kong, then why are you basing your training cycle on that or even more than that? This is how people find themselves in the middle of a training cycle missing weights and failing. Then instead of looking in the mirror as the reason why their training is failing, they blame the program. You have to understand the importance of being completely honest with yourself when you sit down and decide to plan out your training cycle, and goals.
Your EDM is what you are good for on an everyday basis. That is your baseline. When you improve your baseline, you will be able to improve the peak associated with that baseline.
Just using numbers as a variable let’s call your EDM, or your baseline, 100%. We’ll call your peak strength of 110%. If a lifter has an EDM of 500 pounds in the squat that means his peak strength might be around 540-550. If he increases his EDM to 525 now his peak strength could be anywhere from 580 to 590.
Pushing your baseline strength level can be done with very few de-loads (time off), lessens the chance of injury, and keeps training cycles consistently moving forward. It also can be increased without venturing into the intensity or loading range that is the most responsible for deep fatigue curves, and injuries. Yes, let’s not kid ourselves, the heavier you go the higher
the percentage to sustain an injury becomes. Injuries also generally occur when you are tired, and still continue to try and push hard through rep PR’s or weights that your body is not ready to move yet. Then...snap....forced rest is upon you. 48 Let me be clear I’m not advocating Nancy boy bullshit here. Training will always be HARD, but you cannot get on the field if you’re always in the trainer’s room. In other words, you cannot make or sustain progress for very long if you’re injured all the time. And being injured tends to be the number one cause of not being able to train consistently.
Programming your training cycles around weights that you can handle with a great amount of speed and explosiveness is always a good idea. Yes, there will be days when even those weights feel heavier than normal; this is to be expected in the ebb and flow of the training life cycle. But even on a down day, you should never miss programmed weights.
This is how intelligent training is programmed.
How to program your EDM “So how do I know my EDM?” This is not hard. Go into the gym, do some warm-ups, and then work up to a single that you have to “prepare” for. Mentally I mean. No yelling should be required, just an internal focus on getting this crisp single done, “CRISP” being the key word here. It should not be a grinder; you should be aware that adding another 10-20 pounds would/could start to turn into one.
DO NOT add more and more weight because you feel like having a higher EDM is going to help you. This will eventually short circuit your training cycle, I PROMISE YOU. You need to understand what your body is capable of even on off days. This might be a 5% or more reduction in your EDM. If you programmed for an EDM that you cannot hit on a down day, then in the latter parts of a training cycle where the intensity increases, you will find yourself grinding to make your prescribed sets and reps, or even missing some reps.
This is because on a -10% day 75% intensity can all of a sudden “feel” more like 90%. In other words, even with proper programming, you will have days where what you are supposed to hit may feel heavier than it did most of the other times you lifted it. Be very aware of what you are using to program your EDM with.
If I had to give a ballpark intensity number, I would say something between 88-90% of your TRUE max is about what your EDM is going to be. That means you will program using your EDM, and the rest of the training will revolve around THAT number, NEVER your true one rep max.
AUTOREGULATION IN BASE BUILDING
The most important reason you’ll need to program with a conservative EDM is that on days where you feel pretty exceptional, you will have the option to work up to your EDM as your last over-warm up.
It is imperative that whatever you program with as an EDM, is a LEGIT EDM. It should still be doable on a bad day, even though on a “bad day” you’d never work up to it.
If you have days where you decide to work up to your EDM and miss it, then it is pretty obvious that your ego got the better of you in programming. That or you went too heavy on testing day to find out what your EDM was.
Let me emphasize that working up to your EDM is an option ONLY for those days where you feel pretty exceptional, in other words, a +10% day. After you work up to it, go back to the working sets that have been programmed for that day. No more, no less.
You will not see the EDM programming in any of the phases because again, working up to your EDM is based around how you feel on that day. If I had to take a guess, you might work up to it once or twice a month at the very most.
GRINDING
In the context of this book, grinding has nothing to do with your weekend in Vegas getting down with some sweet babes/dudes on the dance floor. Grinding weights week after week eventually is the main culprit for a lot of people to stall in progress. The fatigue curve gets too steep and the super-compensation curve is negated. This is backed over and over and over again by what we’ve seen from the Russian training philosophies and other training models that take recovery and super-compensation into the equation. Kirk Karwoski, one of the greatest powerlifters of all time, told me “if you start grinding reps, something went wrong in how you programmed your training.”
If you want to go argue with Kirk, be my guest. He only squatted a grand for a double in training, benched just under 600 pounds, and pulled 777 in competition. The guy he finally listened to about not grinding out every rep was Ed Coan, the greatest powerlifter of all time. Ed reiterated this theme at the seminar I did with him in Chicago. Which was, “set your training cycle up so that you smash weights all the way through it. You should be building confidence every week of the training cycle.”
I myself ended up coming to this realization years ago when I noticed that once I started grinding to hit a certain number of reps in my sets, I would eventually find myself drifting backward in progress. I would stall and plateau out for a while. Of course, I would keep doing what I was doing because after all, it had gotten me to that point so it must work. It did work…for a while. Then eventually you realize that training that hard has a point of diminishing returns. Eventually, you come to an understanding that you can get to that same place, without beating the shit out of yourself week in and week out. That you need to back off and give the body room to move forward instead of trying to push it off the cliff day in and day out.
Does grinding have a place in training? Yes, of course. Generally near the end of a strength peaking cycle, or during mass training phases where you are trying to break rep PRs. I will also say that on some really crappy days, even if you programmed correctly you could end up grinding through a few sets. This doesn’t mean you have to scrap your training cycle. It just means you had a bad day and shit felt heavier than it was supposed to. This is ok.
In peaking cycles, you will almost inevitably grind some reps here and there near the end because even though you should be applying as much force as possible to the bar, as the weight gets heavier and bar speed obviously slows down. Not only that, but you’re going to want to get into a bit of a fatigued state the last week or two so that once you rest up for competition, super-compensation is at a peak. That’s what “peaking” is. And you cannot reach a strength peak if you start getting too deep into the fatigue curve early in the training cycle. This is when you realize you hit your best weights far too early, and now everything starts feeling REALLY heavy.
BASELINE STRENGTH, FATIGUE, AND SUPER COMPENSATION
In the picture below, the horizontal line represents your baseline strength, i.e. Your EDM. The waves represent training stimulus. When you train, you cause fatigue. The amount of that fatigue will vary of course, based on volume, intensity, frequency, etc. When you recover, the body “returns” to that baseline, or just above it IF you allow it to. This is what recovery is. When you grind weights for weeks on end, the waves begin to eventually fall deeper into the fatigue zone, and then flatten out either below the baseline or just back at it.
The line ascending is not a sharp line upwards. It moves moderately upwards. This is what good base building should look like on a curve. There is fatigue, that is not incredibly great, and then there is compensation and super-compensation, after recovery from fatigue. The less sharp the curve is, the more you increase your base, or foundation, level of strength. You do not “peak”, but you improve gradually, and consistently.
Often times, guys train too hard for too long, only to make minimal or zero progress because they do not let the recovery and super-compensation process actually take place, and stay in fatigue debit. You don’t have to beat yourself into S&M bondage style submission every training session in order to create an upwards curve in your baseline strength. This is done by using a smart EDM and programming optimally.
Another way I heard it phrased was, training is like digging a hole, and recovery is like filling it back in. If you dig too deep of a hole, It is going to take you a very long time to fill it back in. The best way to ensure proper recovery is to not dig too deep of a hole. Now the caveat to all of this is, some people are natural grinders, and they “grind” everything. In other words, all of their lifts look slow. Even for those people, they know what “grinding” is for them; then they have to force out those 1-2 extra reps week after week. Even for those people, this will eventually take the same toll that it does for those who are naturally more explosive lifters.
Use “grinding” appropriately, and sparingly. Always save some reps in the tank and most importantly try to remain as explosive as possible during the base building phases in your training cycle.
BASE BUILDING PROGRAMMING - HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? MORE ON YOUR EDM During the “off-season”, or when you are not training to peak for a meet or strength event, the best way to program in my opinion, is to ask yourself how LOW you can program your EDM and still make great strength gains, especially, when you’re planning your off-season cycle around the base building method.
That’s right, how LOW can you program and still get stronger. The reason for this being is because the lower the intensity threshold, the greater your recovery will be. The higher your intensity curve becomes, the deeper the fatigue curve is as well. It is the old “for every action there is an equal or opposite reaction”. The higher you run your programming up the intensity scale or percentage of your 1 rep max, the longer it is going to take you to recover from those sessions.
The reason why programming with a low EDM is effective is that you are basing it off of what your body is capable of doing at any moment. Your true one rep max is really a fleeting number, something that you cannot hit every time you walk into the gym. It is really impossible to base your training cycle around hitting that when it is not always going to be there. Neither are the intensities associated with it.
The question you should really be asking yourself is, how low can you go on the intensity (% of 1RM) scale in your programming, and still get strong?
What I have found through my own research and training, is that you can unequivocally program as low as 70% of your EDM, and get strong. Sometimes, even lower (which I do for squat phases).
For example, the incredibly successful Russian based volume program created by Boris Sheiko, has the trainee spend most of their time in their relative 68-72% intensity range. Yes, that low. It is all about technique, volume, and repeating movement patterns. It is also about moving those weights with as much explosive force as possible.
Volume and intensity go hand in hand. They need to complement each other depending on the goals and training cycle length. If you program too low then there will not be enough carryover to move the big stuff when you need to. If your program too heavy, then you will end up under-recovering and your lifts will start to stall. As noted before, plateaus tend to come very soon after you start grinding weights or missing prescribed reps.
The key in the base building is to understand how important the EDM is, and how low you can program with it to make steady strength gains and to increase your baseline of strength.
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