Hi Ellington,
I’ve been reflecting on my training to make it as effective as possible and was interested in your views on the relative values and merits of intensity of effort vs. inroad.
When I look back at the earlier Nautilus body of knowledge everything was focussed on intensity and I trained with that as a primary aspect. Following your guidelines in the Extreme HIT eBook most (not all) of my strength training is now a notch or two down on intensity and several notches higher in working for a deeper inroad.
I know you have said before that inroad was a key factor in Tyler’s success and my personal results replicate this. Eighteen months on what is your current view on the best balance? E.g. Do you think inroad remains the more important aspect or do they have equal importance or even different importance depending on what you’re trying to achieve and why?
I’m thinking now that intensity and inroad have equal importance. But I reserve the right to change my mind as I need more time with my current experiments.
I’m currently favouring inroad over intensity BUT that may because after all those high intensity workouts I needed something akin to a change of pace.
Intensity is how close to your maximum effort level your reaching
Inroad is how much strength you lost by the end of the set
Example: Doing a lift with 101% of your 1RM would be maximum intensity but have very little inroad and produce almost zero growth
Doing 15.5 reps with your 15Rm you’d be at maximum intensity but have a large inroad as your strength would be down to less than 67% of your fresh strength, so the inroad would be 33% or more.
Imagine a flat, horizontal line drawn on a piece of paper from left to right,with the flat line representing zero effort. Now imagine a squiggly sine wave come off the zero effort flat line, the sine wave representing efforts of various sorts. You get out of bed each morning, shower, brush your teeth, walk to your car, drive to work and so forth. These are small efforts causing the sine wave to barely move above the flat line. Then, all of a sudden, you come to that point in the day where you do a heavy set of Squats to failure. All of a sudden the sine wave departs straight up off the paper and across the street! The distance from the flat line to the apex of that spike represents the inroad.
Inroad would be your percentage below baseline that your strength diminishes during a workout. For example, if you do a set of bench to failure with 300 pounds for 10 reps, and your next set you can only do 5 reps. From there you can calculate your level of Inroad by looking at how much strength you lost (I don’t remember the exact equation.
And intensity can either refer to weight on the bar (percentage of 1RM or TM) or relativity to failure. Coach Thibs likes to refer to the latter as “intensiveness” to clear up any confusion on semantics.
Inroad is your momentary strength deficit at the literal end of a set. Not later, but at the end of the set.
If you are using 80% of 1RM and go to failure, that means your strength is a bit less than 80% if you can’t lift 80%, so at that split second in time, you have a bit over a 20% inroad into your starting strength. Darden explains all this in a few of his books too.
My POV: You make an inroad (depletion) into your muscles capacity the first second you move a weight. This inroad increases as you do more mechanical work. At the end of a set you’re inroaded. Later in the day you’re still inroaded but less so as your body recovers.
Jones believed that a break over point of about 20% inroad was required for max. results and that greater than 20% was probably too deep. The example most often given is if you can curl 100 lbs for 10 reps when you’re fresh and then make a 20% inroad you will only be able to curl 80 lbs at that point. Put the bar down and wait a few seconds and you will already be recovering from that inroad.
Measuring a change in strength is the only way to measure inroad, but it is not actually inroad itself.
I have to admit that I’m confused… What is the purpose/benefit of calculating inroad? I mean I understand that it is relative strength lost, but what is that calculation used for? do you adjust your training weights or reps afterwards, or is this a measure of progress?
I agree but it’s not what I said or asked. My question was contrasting intensity of effort against inroad which offers the optimum results? The answer was it’s probably both - although views may change.