Lee Bell | Demystifying Fatigue Management Strategies in Training

Deloading is widespread, but its application is often inconsistent and undervalued. That gap caught Lee Bell’s attention after discovering there was no consensus definition. Bell is a Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University who focuses on the deloading, overtraining, and overreaching spectrum. He explains how overtraining and overreaching are sometimes used synonymously. That confusion is compounded further by associations with overtraining syndrome (OTS). Instead, Bell frames overreaching as a “window of opportunity” when used intentionally. For example, a planned overreach can be functional or non-functional based on recovery. Bell also examines opportunities and tradeoffs in modern periodization models. He contrasts flexible and fluid approaches with more traditional, rigid programming; each approach has implications for athlete trust and recovery. Looking ahead, Bell envisions a collaborative approach to sport science driven by coaching needs. He reflects on recent coaching survey data and the key themes that emerged for the future. Hear his perspective on next steps in velocity-based training, individualized periodization, and variability.

Reach out to Lee via Instagram: @lee3ell and LinkedIn: @lee-bell| Find Eric on Instagram: @ericmcmahoncscs and LinkedIn: @ericmcmahoncscs  

→ Read the SCJ article co-authored by Lee Bell referenced in this episode: A Practical Approach to Deloading: Recommendations and Considerations for Strength and Physique Sports.

“For me, coming from a coaching background, there will never be a one size fits all. I would love there to be. And I think when I started my PhD, I had quite a reductionist view on this. There will be this perfect, golden microcycle that we can implement with all of our strength athletes, and they will all get stronger, and they will all get bigger. The problem is that […] you have to treat the individual athlete as a human being, so what I mean by that is all of the things that we know as coaches about their training gauge, their likes and dislikes, their individual goals, but also what's happening in the periphery as well.” 16:40

“You've got training stress. You've got exam stress. It's the same way as if someone's got like a big workload, a lot of hours at work, they're doing overtime and things like that. It's all about understanding how the psychology can impact the physiology of training.” 17:45

“If we use our experience as a Coach, […] Your jump scores are down. Your sleep scores are not where they should be. You're reporting muscle soreness, like lots of different things that we can triangulate rather than making that decision of, oh no, you've got another two weeks left or, yes, you're going to have a deload week. Why not just have a lighter session? The deload doesn't have to be-- and we always call it a deload week. But it doesn't have to be a week.” 25:30

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[00:00:02.76] Welcome to the NSCA Coaching Podcast, season 9, episode 18.

[00:00:08.20] For me, coming from a coaching background, there will never be a one size fits all. I would love there to be, and I think when I started my PhD, I had quite a reductionist view on this. There will be this perfect, golden microcycle that we can implement with all of our strength athletes, and they will all get stronger, and they will all get bigger. The problem is is that you have-- well, it's not the problem, actually. It's a blessing in a way. But you have to treat the individual athlete as a human being.

[00:00:37.44] So what I mean by that is all of the things that we know as coaches about their training gauge, their likes and dislikes, their individual goals, but also what's happening in the periphery as well. So the way that we might manage in a long-term capacity, a student athlete program would be completely different to a pro athlete.

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[00:00:59.67] This is the NSCA's Coaching Podcast, where we talk to strength and conditioning coaches about what you really need to know but probably didn't learn in school. There's strength and conditioning, and then there's everything else.

[00:01:10.27] This is the NSCA Coaching Podcast. I'm Eric McMahon, NSCA's coaching and sports science program manager. On this show, we talk coaching, and that includes relevant topics that influence how we train athletes. Big areas for today include overtraining, overreaching, and deloading. And with us is an expert on these topics, Dr. Lee Bell of Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Lee, welcome.

[00:01:35.87] Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:38.95] Yeah, it's awesome connecting with you. You published a paper in the SCG, "A Practical Approach to Deloading-- Recommendations and Considerations for Strength and Physique Sports."

[00:01:51.79] And it really caught my attention because deloading is one of those terms we use pretty regularly in the strength and conditioning field, and it got me thinking maybe we don't always have as much meaning or definition behind that term in how it shapes our methods, how it shapes our training philosophies.

[00:02:11.57] I'm thinking of that traditional three weeks on, and then we got a deload for that one week. And we just do that throughout the year as strength coaches. Well, why do we do that? And we want to get into that. So how did that topic area become your area of interest?

[00:02:26.45] The short answer is by accident. The longer answer is that-- so as you identified in the introduction, my PhD topic explored overreaching and overtraining specifically within strength sports.

[00:02:41.93] And as part of that, I noticed that when you do your typical literature review and you look at studies that have explored overtraining and particularly the interventions that are applied either to induce overtraining or to observe it, that they always had either this tapering period or this deloading period, this period in time where we would reduce the training demand or the training burden then in order to perform some element of testing, to see whether the intervention had worked or not.

[00:03:13.20] And the accidental aspect of it was that it got me thinking that we've got all of these different interventions that have been designed to either improve performance, which as a coach is what obviously what we want, what we strive for, or to induce overtraining mechanistically so that then we can take a step back and say, actually, how might we identify that prognostically?

[00:03:34.24] But the taper and the deload aspects were pretty much dismissed in the papers. There was no rationale or reason as to how they were designed a particular way. And there were lots of different ways that the definitions were interpreted. And I've used a couple of words interchangeably already, tapering and deloading.

[00:03:52.92] So for me, it was, OK, well, that's something that I want to explore because in my eyes, it's feasible that, yes, the intervention is important because that's what stimulates the adaptation. But the period in time that follows that is just as important because that allows us to either realize potential, i.e. to see an improvement or performance, or if this period is done incorrectly, that we might see some latent fatigue effects, or we might have even lost adaptation because we've miscalculated our building blocks of the deload.

[00:04:24.43] So I reached out to a few colleagues that I knew were doing work in this area, generally speaking, and pitched the idea that this is something that I want to explore, but I want to do it properly. So I want to start right at the beginning, and let's look at can we appropriately define this word?

[00:04:41.69] And you're right in what you said at the beginning. We use terms colloquially as pracademics, as coaches. I could ask a hundred coaches what is a deload, and I would get specific themes of answers, reduction in fatigue and enhancing readiness, and things like that. But in the research, there was no agreed statement. There was no agreed definition.

[00:05:08.24] Now, I am a big fan of philosophy. And I don't want to get into that too much in this podcast, but there's a time and a place. But for me, I'm a big fan of Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century philosopher, talked a lot about existence. And does overtraining exist?

[00:05:30.28] Well, we don't know if it exists until we can appropriately define it. Spinoza talks about how existence is led by substance and substance derived from definition. And it got me thinking the same thing around the deload is I can't set an intervention up. I can't set a series of studies up to explore what deloading is until we can agree a definition.

[00:05:52.04] So our first kind of building block of these series of studies was actually like who are the best people to speak to in order to agree a consensus definition? I'm a big fan of collaborative work, of co-creation. So as an academic, I can come up with a definition, but that definition is my worldview. That's my own bias of that term.

[00:06:12.38] So why don't I speak to coaches, speak to other coaches of which high performance, strength coaches, physique coaches? You tell me what your perception of that word is, how you might deload. Do you deload? What's the framework that you might use to decide upon whether you deload, how long for, how you adjust volume, how you adjust the intensity? And let me look at these themes and pull these key themes out.

[00:06:38.34] And that was our first paper that we published. It wasn't the one that you mentioned in the introduction, but that allowed us to agree upon a consensus definition. That for us was the key starting point. That then allows us to plan our interventions, to start to explore this in a lot deeper way. So that's essentially how it came about was by accident but by proxy because I needed to understand that area better, to understand the complete opposite end of the spectrum, which is overtraining and overreaching.

[00:07:08.39] So you pursued your PhD. This was your dissertation work. What was your path to get there that sort of led you to overtraining and deloading in these topics from an athletic standpoint, from a training standpoint and coaching?

[00:07:25.31] So I passed my undergraduate degree in sport and exercise science many years ago. And after that got into coaching, strength and conditioning coaching, and strength-specific coaching, personal training, fitness instructor. I had lots of quite varied jobs really, working with equipment suppliers and working upskill existing coaches. And I wanted to learn more.

[00:07:48.74] And for me, the best opportunity to do that would be to undertake a master's degree. So I would say probably about 10 years after my undergraduate, I enrolled in a master's degree purely just to learn more, like out of interest. I didn't see it as a career move per se, but just in order to understand the topics better.

[00:08:05.98] And as part of that, the dissertation for the master's degree was working with a PhD student in endurance sports, understanding a little bit more about overtraining. Now, I'll be completely honest, I'm not that interested in endurance sports, certainly from a research perspective, but I was just fascinated by this idea that you can train someone so hard that they might never recover from it.

[00:08:30.76] And it just got me thinking that there are hundreds of papers on this in endurance sports. And you think about the number of hours that people are out doing distance running, cycling, other long, hybrid events and long distance based events.

[00:08:48.96] And it got me thinking, would that actually be the case in the weight room? Could we train someone so hard that they can't recover? Or if they recover, it takes them several weeks to recover. My hypothesis was I actually don't think that's the case. So I enrolled on the PhD myself afterwards purely just to investigate that.

[00:09:09.72] Interesting, yeah. So as we're talking about deloading is a common approach used by coaches to manage workload in resistance training, how does this relate to the bigger concept of overtraining? Or do you see it as more of a slingshot approach to accelerate performance gains?

[00:09:31.20] To answer that question, well, back to Spinoza again in the sense of it really depends on how we define the word. So overtraining, for example, can be used in two different contexts. It can be used as a process, and it can use as an outcome. So if we take it as a process-driven word, overtraining can be a tool as a coach.

[00:09:50.63] Overtraining is purely just training above the recovery capacity, training above the habitual training threshold. We might call that normal training. We might call that a window of opportunity, where our microcycle is quite intense relative to the previous one in order to induce as much of an adaptation as possible. We sometimes call that a planned overreach. And the terms sometimes are used synonymously.

[00:10:17.09] But a planned overreach is just a form of overtraining. It's an intentional decision as a coach to say, let's just hit the gym hard in order to stimulate as much adaptation as possible. But then the complete opposite side of the coin is we then need to reel it back to remove that excess fatigue, remove that soreness, make sure you're not feeling beaten up and broken in order to recover so then either we can go again or move on to the next thing.

[00:10:44.54] So overtraining in that sense is not bad. It can be good and it can be positive. And again, if we look at some of the consensus documentation, there is a specialist task force consensus document, a joint one by the SSM and the ECSS, that talks about overtraining as a verb, as a process of which might result in performance decrement, which is usually what we associate with overtraining, but also performance improvement above baseline, which we never really talk about.

[00:11:14.72] And we can go on social media. We can go on Instagram or X and look at hashtags, overtraining. And they're usually just like avoid, avoid, avoid. It's bad, it's bad, it's bad. But actually can be a positive thing if we use it in the right time, the right place.

[00:11:29.18] We've then also got overtraining as an outcome, as a noun, I suppose. Now, realistically, we would call that the overtraining syndrome. That's the result of training too hard for too long. Now that's a medical disorder. So this is not something that we can dismiss as I am overtrained in the same way that we can't say I have had a heart attack without that being clinically diagnosed.

[00:11:53.43] So the overtraining syndrome, how that's defined specifically is a performance decrement with or without associated physical and psychological symptoms, but specifically that lasts longer than four weeks. And that's the bit that most people miss off. If we've recovered within fewer than four weeks, that's not the overtraining syndrome. That would get dismissed clinically. It's something else, residual fatigue, unexpected fatigue, overreaching, which we can talk about as well, but is not the OTS, the Overtraining Syndrome.

[00:12:26.69] Now the problem is in our coaching world, but also in our academic world as well, is that the overtraining syndrome is often shortened to overtraining. So now you've got one word which is used as process and outcome. And we wonder why the interpretations of that are often mixed up.

[00:12:48.47] So how do you add clarity to those discussions? We're using one word to describe multiple things and a really closely connected word, overtraining versus overreaching. That can be really confusing for coaches in the field. How do you approach functional overreaching? What are your thoughts on that?

[00:13:07.83] Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned functional overreaching because I think we could map out a schematic here like a timeline where we have acute fatigue. So we train hard in the gym, and we recover within a few hours to days. That's just acute fatigue. And that's expected. Like that's par for the course. That's part of the process.

[00:13:26.69] We've all gone in the gym and hit like a super high volume leg day. And we're sore for a couple of days. That's part of it. But we rebound. We get a little bit better. We get less sore the next time. We put more load on the bar, and the process continues. It's what we call progressive overload. It's the basis fundamental principle of training.

[00:13:44.98] We then, at the opposite end of the scale, got this overtraining syndrome. I now am training so hard and not within one training session, clearly, but maybe a block of training that is just so hard and so intense that it takes four weeks or longer to recover from.

[00:14:01.18] And the little nudge-nudge, wink-wink with this is we've never really seen it in the literature. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that we've not seen it objectively within either the studies that are aimed to induce it or through recorded observational data.

[00:14:19.38] Now you've got this disparity. You've got this gap between hours and days, but also months. So we've got this segment in the middle, which is overreaching. Again, frustratingly, we've already talked about planned overreaching could be a tool, a process, but now is an outcome.

[00:14:36.02] Now overreaching is where we see a performance decrement that takes weeks to recover from. If we recover positively, we would typically call that functional overreach. And it's functional because it had purpose. It had intention. That could be a microcycle, which in my world we might call that an impact microcycle. We're training really, really hard. It will be tough. Suck it up.

[00:15:01.61] When we get to the end, we'll deload. You will come out the other side. You will be stronger. You will be faster. You will jump higher, whatever the basis of training was. Again, that's what we want as a coach. And most modern models of periodization do incorporate those opportunities to really layer on and strategically layer on a stimulus.

[00:15:22.41] If we recover back to baseline and we see no improvement or we're dangling on the edge of the cliff towards the overtraining syndrome, we typically might refer to that as nonfunctional overreaching. It's nonfunctional because even though it was strategic and it was intentional, we haven't seen any gain.

[00:15:40.65] There's been no positive net outcome. And we've needed to take so long off of training or had to reel back training for so long that we've lost the adaptations initially that were masked to fatigue, but now we've lost them as training residuals.

[00:15:57.91] So one thing that comes to mind with this is we're looking at workload essentially. We're looking at workload. We're trying to stimulate improved performance. I want to know your recommendations for coaches so that they can put this into practice within effective programming. And maybe on a bigger scale, how does this all fit within workload management as we define it today for athletes?

[00:16:30.11] Much like with the deloading work, we created a loose framework of guidelines for coaches because for me, coming from a coaching background, there will never be a one size fits all. I would love there to be. And I think when I started my PhD, I had quite a reductionist view on this. There will be this perfect, golden microcycle that we can implement with all of our strength athletes, and they will all get stronger, and they will all get bigger.

[00:16:59.26] The problem is is that you have-- well, it's not the problem, actually. It's a blessing in a way, but you have to treat the individual athlete as a human being, so what I mean by that is all of the things that we know as coaches about their training gauge, their likes and dislikes, their individual goals, but also what's happening in the periphery as well. So the way that we might manage in a long-term capacity-- a student athletes program would be completely different to a pro athlete.

[00:17:27.08] So for example-- and this to me would be common sense. And I'm sure you would think the same way is is it an appropriate time to start to double up volume for a two-week period right when a student athlete's got exams? Absolutely not. It would just send them over the edge. It's just too much stress.

[00:17:45.73] You've got training stress. You've got exam stress. It's the same way as if someone's got like a big workload, a lot of hours at work, they're doing overtime and things like that. It's all about understanding how the psychology can impact the physiology of training.

[00:18:00.85] Now, that aside, I think the framework is ultimately, well, what's the adaptation we're trying to create? Now, for me, the work that I've done, it's about how do we improve maximal strength output. So that will be specificity. Again, it all boils down to the underlying principles of training, so specificity.

[00:18:20.29] If I want my athlete to be able to squat more, there needs to be more squatting in their program. If I want them to be stronger, there needs to be more high-intensity work. There needs to be more absolute load on the bar. I need to do it frequently because strength is a skill. And we know that.

[00:18:38.28] From our work, what we've seen is that skill acquisition is really, really important in a planned overreach. If we're doing something more often, we're likely to get better at it, and we mold all of that together. And that gives us our loose framework.

[00:18:53.14] Now, there isn't really much literature out there about hypertrophy and impact cycles. We've played around with things like specialization cycles. They seem to work, but we've never done that objectively in the gym. But that's something that we will be looking at in the future.

[00:19:08.94] For me, that will be an area that I'd like to pursue in the future is looking at more like the morphological effects, the effects on muscle from an impact cycle where we don't use that typical like bro split approach or push-pull legs, but we go, actually, what would happen to quadricep development if we just squatted every day?

[00:19:28.88] Like what would happen to muscle protein synthesis? What would happen to cross-sectional area, things like that, and muscle thickness? I hope that answers the question. But that would be the loose framework that we would apply.

[00:19:40.58] Yeah. And one thing I hear is that you're considering a wide range of factors in your programming from-- you mentioned academics. But from an athletic or team standpoint, it might be sleep quality, or team travel, or other anticipated challenges that a team might face that would influence programming decisions.

[00:20:02.30] So one thing I'm hearing is deloading and functional overreaching ideally are these intended efforts. It's intentional that you're putting this as part of a programming approach. One thing, functional, overreaching, we often think of as a preseason within a lot of sports. We want to push athletes a little bit past where they're at so that they're prepared for the season ahead.

[00:20:33.09] But at the elite sport level and within tactical strength and conditioning as examples, we're seeing more flexible or fluid programming approaches or periodization. How do you think this concept of deloading and overreaching applies to those environments?

[00:20:52.53] That's a great question. And before I answer it, I just want to complete a small loop with the overtraining. And it's just based around a comment that you made there with things like monitoring sleep quality.

[00:21:05.37] For me, the position of this overtraining phase or this planned overreach or whatever we want to call it, we need to be pragmatic as coaches. And what I mean by that is that we need to accept that sometimes if we're chasing an adaptation and we are in an extremely intense block of training, sleep quality probably won't be optimal. Stress might be a little bit higher than anticipated. Soreness might be a little bit higher.

[00:21:31.86] I mean, we did a pilot. And with a small group of people, we put them through a squat every day program. And they were reporting soreness that was 257% higher than baseline at certain points. They were in a world of hurt. But as a coach, if we know that we are preseason, we're not in competition phase, and it's our only opportunity to chase that stimulus, we take that on the chin.

[00:21:56.80] I think it's important that we let the athlete know that that's how they should be feeling. And don't worry, that's normal. But that way of approaching an overreach would be completely different to say if we are maybe a few weeks out from a really important competition and we need to start to think about scaling back training and getting them competition ready.

[00:22:15.86] That's possibly not the best time to try new things, to go through a really brutal impact cycle. And that's where we might make more competition-ready programming decisions. Kind of just wanted to complete the loop on that.

[00:22:32.00] But with the deloading, so I think similarly to how most modern periodization models have this built-in opportunity to layer a big stimulus on, there are also opportunities to have these restoration cycles, recovery cycles, deloads, whatever terminology you want to attach to it.

[00:22:55.28] Now, in a summated microcycle approach, like you said right at the beginning, it's normally three weeks of which the training demand increases gradually. The fourth week is a deload, and then we go again.

[00:23:07.18] Now there are benefits to that. There are specific benefits to that. It's preventative. So it will allow our athletes to progress gradually and minimize the risk of nonfunctional overreaching, potentially the overtraining syndrome, although I think we've kind of said that that's possibly not something we need to worry about too much. And particularly with good coaches, I think we'd have to make some really poor training decisions to reach that point.

[00:23:33.89] But also from the athlete's perspective as well, if you've got an athlete that's training hard and is just, coach, I just need some time off, and you can say, look, look at the program. We've got two weeks left. When we get to this point, you will get your deload. Let's just suck it up. Let's just work hard and get to that point. And it gives an athlete a goal to work towards. That could be a positive.

[00:23:56.27] Now the negative is that what happens if we've overshot the program? What happens if we've gone in too hard too soon? And then we say to the athlete, you've got two weeks left, and they just cannot get to that point. They just need some time off, even if it's a couple of days.

[00:24:12.21] Now if I'm not a flexible coach and I've spent a lot of time planning my periodization, I might be reluctant to do that. And then the athlete starts to lose trust in me. They perhaps increase the risk of training apathy, just losing the love for training. They might look for a different coach. They might end up with non-functional overreaching syndrome. They might end up with some other issue that stops them from reaching their full potential.

[00:24:41.80] The other downside is that actually we might end up wrapping them up in cotton wool. We might end up being too preventative. Now how many people work so hard in three weeks that they need a deload every fourth week? I'm sure some have.

[00:24:58.42] The question we need to ask ourselves as coaches, do we have to have a deload every fourth week? Probably not. And there are ways that we can mitigate that, and there are ways that we can work around it.

[00:25:09.36] Now, taking a flexible and fluid approach, it may well be that we use autoregulation. Now, oftentimes, we talk about autoregulation as changing the load on the bar every session based around readiness. And we can use things like velocity-based training, and reps and reserve, RP, to navigate those training decisions.

[00:25:28.07] But what about if we use our experience as a Coach, So like our tacit knowledge, our experiential knowledge, something's not right with this athlete today or our objective data? Your jump scores are down. Your sleep scores are not where they should be. You're reporting muscle soreness, like lots of different things that we can triangulate rather than making that decision of, oh no, you've got another two weeks left or, yes, you're going to have a deload week. Why not just have a lighter session?

[00:25:57.23] So the deload doesn't have to be-- and we always call it a deload week. But it doesn't have to be a week. Why does it have to be a week? We're in control of our own time. So why can it not be, OK, everything's telling me today that we just need a lighter session?

[00:26:13.87] Go and do some arm curls. Go and stretch off a little bit. Go home, get on the Xbox, have a sleep, Do what you want to do. Come back tomorrow. Let's hit it hard again. So that might be an alternative way that we can look at things.

[00:26:26.83] But again, there are advantages and disadvantages to that. The advantages I think I've kind of covered already is it's fluid. It's flexible. We mitigate the risk of overreaching. The athletes got lots of trust in us because we're making decisions collaboratively.

[00:26:42.85] But athletes can very, very quickly realize that if they fudge their jump score, if they tell us that they're sore, they get to go home early. So as a coach, it's understanding the personality of the athlete and understanding the interpretation of the scores that we might use to make those training decisions.

[00:27:03.77] Yeah, so there's an interesting balance there. Rigid thinking can hurt us as coaches. But also being too flexible is potentially just as damaging because you lose control of the progress of the program, potentially the athletes lose motivation or find ways out of doing what they need to do, whether they like it or not sometimes.

[00:27:26.68] Absolutely.

[00:27:27.16] I think this is a really interesting discussion about how flexible we need to be as coaches. And this is a time in history when we need to be very dynamic to relate and connect with our athletes, to provide the service that our institutions hope we can provide as strength and conditioning professionals.

[00:27:49.64] I really like this topic, this discussion because it gets to the core of what we do of inflicting workload on our athletes, challenging our athletes with work. That's what we do. It's not natural as human beings to want to do more work. And that's our job, to get people to take on more, to challenge themselves. So with all these trends and innovations, where do you see the future of strength and conditioning going in the next 10 years or so?

[00:28:23.91] So we are actually at the point of analyzing some data that's asked coaches that very, very same question. So what I want to do in strength sports, which is where my passion lies, is to plan out that trajectory over the next 5 to 10 years of how can we as academics assist coaches in their practice.

[00:28:43.67] I have never been a fan of for me in my white coat and my lab glasses, conducting experiments and then going back to coaches and going, this is how you should train your athletes. To me, that just creates friction. And oftentimes, the laboratory environments are quite controlled, and it's not reflective of real life.

[00:29:06.75] So what I wanted to do is flip that around, use that collaborative approach to say, right, let's create a group of people, a group of people that live this life, that train athletes regularly at a very, very high level. Where do you feel that sports science can assist you over the next 5 to 10 years? And we've done that, and we've collected that data. And that was from powerlifting in this particular case.

[00:29:30.25] And the themes were broad, but there were a lot of similar themes as well. So for example, how might we use velocity-based training, specifically things like velocity loss thresholds to dictate intensity? So at what point do we say that is enough, that you've done enough repetitions in that set at a specific workload, whether that's relative or absolute to say that is enough that we've stimulated an adaptation?

[00:29:59.05] Individualized periodization-- so in a team environment, most, if not all coaches, do this already, but how can we provide a program that's specific to an individual athlete within a team environment? And things like heart rate variability, has that got value within a strength training environment? Because most of the research, again, similar to overtraining, is in endurance sports. Does it have function in strength sports? That's something that we need to explore.

[00:30:27.96] And there are lots of ideas like that. But for me, the biggest one will be variability, response heterogeneity. So typically, if we give the same training program to a bunch of athletes, they will all respond differently, what we might call supercompensation kinetics.

[00:30:45.30] Some will just soak up volume, and they will just grow in size, and their strength will be through the roof, whereas those others will stagnate. Some will find it really interesting, some will find it boring, some might end up with non-functional overreaching, and some have got functional overreaching.

[00:30:59.92] Now, variability, mathematically very, very difficult to determine. But if you put all of that to one side, very, very clearly, some athletes respond to different training programs better than others, but we don't know why as such. So for me, it's taking a step back and looking mechanistically.

[00:31:17.83] What are perhaps some of the physiological and genetic variables that might dictate the type of program that someone might succeed with? But what are also some of the lifestyle or non-training related factors that might dictate that? And that will be a challenge, but that's something that I want to start to unpick in a little bit more depth.

[00:31:38.33] Yeah. As the field expands, we need to dig a little deeper to really uncover that further understanding of the recommendations, the programs, the terms we're using. I think that's one of the themes of this episode. And I think it really challenges us as strength and conditioning coaches.

[00:31:59.49] And I'll joke that a lot of times we put strength first for a reason. It challenges our view on overtraining, overtraining syndrome, the prevalence of these within most athletic environments outside of maybe elite endurance sport, where you see some overtraining syndrome or more of it anyway. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you after the episode and continue the conversation?

[00:32:27.46] Probably the best way to contact me or how we share ideas, which would be via Instagram. My handle is Lee, so L, double E, 3, E, double L. I don't share much content on there, but I'm always open to discussion. And if anyone wants to drop any questions or provide any comments, I'm always willing to answer them.

[00:32:49.44] Perfect. We'll add that to the show notes. I'm going to add the article we mentioned earlier in the episode as well so that you can reference that article on deloading and all the topics that we discussed today.

[00:33:03.34] Thank you, Lee, for sharing with us today. And to all our listeners in the NSCA coaching community, we value you and want to continue providing value to you and your career through this podcast and all NSCA programs, so keep tuning in. Thank you to [INAUDIBLE] exercise equipment. We appreciate their support.

[00:33:23.14] Hey, guys. It's Dr. Bryan Mann coming at you from Texas A&M University. Hey, this is a call to arms. If you feel like there's something that needs to be done, something that needs to be changed, this is your call to go ahead and sign up for the volunteer opportunities within the SIGs, the different committees, or just to get involved in your local chapter. Please go to the website for more details.

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[00:33:46.56] This was the NSCA's Coaching Podcast. The National Strength and Conditioning Association was founded in 1978 by strength and conditioning coaches to share information, resources, and help advance the profession. Serving coaches for over 40 years, the NSCA is the trusted source for strength and conditioning professionals. Be sure to join us next time.

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