In a Cave with a Pen Light: Lessons from Mike Tuchscherer
I attended a full-day seminar by Mike T (Tuchscherer), and I want to share what I learned about strength programming, RPE and reviewing training data.
This is not going to be very relevant to those of you who are brand new to the gym, but if you have been training consistently for at least a few years on a sensible program and have made decent progress, then these concepts can help you take your training to the next level. If not, finding a sensible program and training consistently is still the best place to start. You can get a free beginner powerlifting program here.
For those of you who don’t know him, Mike T helped popularise RPE in powerlifting and strength training more generally. So, even if you have never heard of him, he has most likely influenced the way you train and/or coach.
Now, this is my breakdown based on the notes I took from the seminar and other content Mike T has put out, so it will be flavoured with my own interpretation and thoughts.
If you want to hear it from the man himself, you can look up Mike Tuchscherer or check out the Reactive Training Systems (RTS) podcast.
Strength coaching is creative problem-solving
Mike’s overarching philosophy is that, as a coach or self-coach, your job is to find solutions to the problems that you or your athletes need to overcome in order to get stronger.
The creative part is that we can never have all the data and information that we need to make “perfectly” informed decisions, and at the end of the day, we are dealing with people, not robots. Because of these two factors, we have to take the best data we can gather and try to provide a creative solution to the real-world context in which our athletes live.
Pay attention: every training block is an experiment
If we don’t pay attention and record what we do, then we will just be making wild guesses, even after years of training.
Each week of training, or each block (a number of weeks with the same overall structure), is a mini-experiment we run.
We have a hypothesis that something might work based on science and our previous training. We try it, and then we review it to see if it worked better or worse than what we have tried previously.
Over time, we build up correlations of “when I do this, I get this outcome”. We add these together to create a training approach that works best for the athlete specifically.
Mike has a great analogy about our training journey being like wandering around a dark cave. Our training data and experience are a pen light, and we slowly discover and map more and more of the cave.
Is this a perfect system? Not at all, but it is the best we have.
We can’t track everything, and real-world data is messy.
But the more of these correlations we have, the more of the map we discover and the more confident we can be that we are moving in the right direction.
What strength training data should you track?
First, we need to figure out what to track.
For most purposes, sets, reps, RPE and weight, along with some subjective ratings for sleep, nutrition, etc, seem to do a pretty good job.
Now, we need to figure out what to do with it. Staring at a giant table of numbers and trying to compare these raw values is probably not the easiest way to do this.
What do we care about? If you are a powerlifting or strength athlete, you generally care about 1RM strength, so being able to easily calculate and track an estimated 1RM (e1RM) for the competition/main lifts is most important.
This then becomes our thermometer for defining “what works”.
Training block makes e1RM go up = Good. Block does not make e1RM go up = not so good. (There is more to it than this in analysing trends and time to peak, but this is a single post, not a whole book 😅).
How do we “quantify” a block of training in a way that allows us to compare one block to the next? Many people use volume (sets x reps), but this lacks any consideration for intensity.
The number of “hard sets” (sets above a given RPE) is pretty good, but rep ranges are ignored completely.
Relative volume (sets x reps x %1RM) is also good but still treats all “reps” equally regardless of where they were in the set or how many reps there were per set and ignores proximity to failure (RPE).
These metrics are better than looking at the raw values but still lack resolution, which makes it difficult to compare two blocks of training and the overall “stress” (hint hint) that they expose our bodies to.
This is where Mike’s Stress Index comes in. This is a custom formula that he has developed over the years that allows us to more accurately compare different blocks of training and how different set numbers, reps ranges, and RPEs affect our training.
In short, it calculates the sum of the stress of each rep of a set, allowing us to take into account the intensity on a per-rep basis. (If you want to look more into exactly how to calculate and use it, then check out Mike’s resources and the Training Lab on the RTS website).
Now, this is a model based on theory and training data, so is it perfect? No, but once again, I think this is the very best that we can do with the science and tools we have available to us!
How to review your training blocks
The final takeaway that I will share here is the process that Mike recommends for reviewing your training data.
Training and “life” metrics are recorded and calculated for each week, and then at the end of a block of training, we review the trends and correlations of those values to see if they can shed any more light in our cave (keeping the analogy going 👌).
The most significant new lesson for me was the way that Mike does Meta Block reviews. I had considered them and compared blocks before, but his method tied everything together in a formal and structured process.
These are just what they sound like: a block review of block reviews. Here, he reviews the data across multiple blocks of training to pull out overarching trends and correlations between what has worked to improve e1RM consistently. For example, he constructs a correlation table showing which other exercises correlate with an improvement in e1RM.
For instance, every time I have pin squats in a block, regardless of other differences, my competition squat seems to improve more than when I don’t have pin squats in the block. These are the sort of insights that you are very unlikely to reliably notice in your own training or your athlete’s training, especially if any one thing produces a meaningful but not obvious improvement.
But these small, meaningful improvements, all used together, can create a training approach that works significantly better than what you would be doing otherwise. In a similar way, he also draws correlations between improvements in performance and certain numbers of reps per set or particular RPEs.
Every time I hear Mike speak, I learn something new that I can integrate into my own training and coaching.
The difficult part isn’t just recording your sets, reps and RPEs. It’s deciding what those numbers mean and whether you should change something in your next block.
That’s something I help people with through coaching. I review your training, lift videos and progress over time, and use what we learn to adjust your program. If that sounds like something that would improve your training, check out the link below.