Take Aways from Mike T

Mike T is a legend. He has benched 217.5 kg, squatted 347.5 kg, and deadlifted 377.5 kg in official competition — and even more unofficially. Those numbers are bonkers, and in heavily tested federations, by the way. His list of championships, both national and international, is longer than I care to list.

But beyond his accomplishments as an athlete, he has done something much more valuable. He is the founder of Reactive Training Systems — a powerlifting coaching company that has generated a multitude of champions. As if that was not enough, he has also made some of the tools we use today so easy to implement that we barely give them any thought anymore. In my opinion, he is a true pioneer in the sport of powerlifting and strength sports in general.

This January, he visited Denmark, and I had the privilege of participating in his workshop. Most of what he presented and talked about was extremely powerlifting-specific and only relevant to people competing at the very highest international level. But something appeared — something that has been scratching at the back of my head for many years. How to layout a training schedule that takes individual load management into account, so you do not peak immaturaly for different bodyparts/ movements. Bear with me as I try to unwrap this in a single blog post.

Are you familiar with Rated Perceived Exertion (RPE)? Or maybe Reps in Reserve (RIR)? Then you should know who Mike T is. Mike took a concept that was made generally available in the book Supertraining and conceptualized it into the RPE format we know today.

The idea is that you assess the intensity of any given set and make sure you are within the estimated zone required to provide the stimulus you need for whatever goal you have. RPE and RIR are tools used to assess the intensity of a given set.

Now Mike has been cooking something new. Tools for assessing load management across cycles of all sizes — not just individual sets.

In powerlifting and strength sports in general, it has been the norm to calculate and track total load for ages. However, with the help of Nathan Jones from Stronger by Science, the RPE/RIR concept was merged into “just” counting hard sets and taking that into account in the overall training plan. Given that a set is hard or stressful enough, the body apparently does not care too much whether it is 5 or 10 reps, or even the exact load on the bar. This seems intuitive now, but it was not when it was first published.

But that was not enough for Mike — because Mike is a nerd. A huge, fantastic nerd.

He has spent years refining how to track load management. While counting hard sets is a very viable option, he argues that there are two types of stressors: peripheral and central.

You probably intutively know the difference. Lifting an all-out max at a competition can leave your entire body exhausted — centrally fatigued. Compare that to an enormous pump session in the gym, where the muscles burn, swell, and end up sore as hell. Both are stressful, but not in the same way. Recovery is different, and therefore it is not sufficient for Mike to only look at the number of hard sets.

Mike presented a sample Stress Index table. Everyone’s table will look different because people react differently to different stressors. Some thrive on peripheral work, while others benefit more from central stimuli. Trying to understand your own response patterns can benefit your gainz for life.

You probably know the guy who grows best on sets of 3s and 5s — and the guy who thrives on 15+ reps. They might not only benefit more from the stimulus, they might also experience less stress and therefore recover more easily from that type of work.

Getting into all the details is beyond the scope of this post and my intellect, but if you watch the recording published by Reactive Training Systems themselves, you should be well equipped.

What I want to get into here is that the principles are fantastic, but the tools may be too powerlifting-specific to directly benefit general Exercisers, Bodybuilders, and Motionists.

When Mike develops a personalized Stress Index table for his athletes, the goal is workload planning and identifying Time to Peak (T2P). And this is where things start to become relevant for us mortal humans.

Mike begins by creating a generic microcycle or training template — a week of training, or a sequence of sessions, that is run repeatedly. As a gym bro, you would probably just call it your training split or plan; the exercises, number of sets you execute and on which days before repeating it the following week.

He takes that microcycle, calculates the Stress Index using historical RPE ratings, and then repeats the cycle again and again and again, until the athlete peaks in strength for the primary lifts and a pattern emerges.

Once that happens, he can work backward. For example, you might discover that squat strength peaked after 10 squat sessions (or a certain amount of accumulated stress), while bench peaked after only 5 sessions.

Based on that information, Mike adjusts the training plan to account for the amount of stress and stimulus required to peak at a reasonable pace, aligning all lifts to peak together for competition.

They use RPE and bar speed / Velocity on top of counting sets to get a more detailed view of stress — but I assume you might be too lazy to do that in a highly structured manner over a very long period of time.

So what if you are too lazy? What if we simplify things and just count hard sets? Can we still utilize the same principles? I hope so.

If your squat strength peaks after 10 exposures while your bench peaks after 5, we can assume that your quads are much more tolerant to work than your pecs. That would suggest you should train them roughly twice as much to peak at the same time and maybe consider increasing your work capacity for your pressing muscles, to give you more wiggle room.

If you are a Motionist like me, you could try the following to see if a pattern emerges:

1. Look in your locker and find a microcycle or template you really liked

2. Lay it out and count the number of hard work sets per movement pattern (press, squat, hinge, pull/row)

   1. Select a primary lift per movement pattern

   2. Be wary of overlaps that could impact performance

3. Repeat the cycle until you have peaked in all four movement patterns

   1. Log performance and RPE / feeling for each session

4. Take a break and do light or experimental training for two weeks

5. During your break, evaluate how much work was required to peak

6. Make minor adjustments so peaks should theoretically occur at the same time

7. Repeat step 3 and see if the same pattern emerges

Hopefully, you will identify a pattern that works optimally for you and learn how to distribute volume so your body parts peak together — avoiding under-stimulation or overuse in the middle of a productive hypertrophy block.

Mike spent a lot of time explaining how he used RPE and velocity tools to calculate his Stress Indicators. Through years of data across multiple cycles, he discovered that he personally benefited greatly from high-rep deadlifts.

A super-senior, highly decorated world champion powerlifter realized that something completely different from what he had done for 20 years, worked better for him.

That is astonishing.

Mike is not a normal person, and I know I could never be as structured or dedicated as he is. But it certainly forces you to open your eyes and reevaluate.

This is what Mike calls Emerging Strategies. It is something I plan to experiment with extensively, and I hope anyone reading this will do the same. Load management and peaking at the right time matter across all aspects of physical culture — and this is the closest thing I have seen to getting it right.

Strength is a very strong indicator of hypertrophy. When performance peaks, it may indicate that you are approaching the current limit of what can be gained from that phase or cycle.

In that sense, peaking is not just relevant for competition — it can also signal when it is time to take a deload or a short break before attacking the next phase. Rather than blindly adding more volume, peaking in performance can help guide when to back off, recover, and then hit the iron again.

Now, Mike also shared several other interesting points:

1. When you are collecting data about yourself, it will always be biased. That is because you, yourself, decides on the stimuli and you are always biased to what kind of exercises you “like”.

2. When you want to grow or gain muscle, you need to increase work capacity. Else you are simply too limited in regards to what you can work with — If you can only handle 2 sets of Squats a week, it will limit you eventually. You should increase your work capacity very slowly and you should select exercises that are easy to tolerate. Swap out a tough exercise with something which is much easier to tolerate and then increase the total workload gradually. Especially the tonnage, until you adapt to a high work capacity — If you like oldschool bodybuilding, you will notice that this sounds a lot like Flex Wheelers approach to growing. He just did it from a recovery perspective; picking easy digestable foods and slowly increasing the amount of calories consumed to that he could increase his metabolism and work capacity.

3. Mike prefers increasing frequency and number of reps done with easily tolerated exercises before increasing the number of hard sets. His reasoning is that once your body had adapted to handling higher volumes it is very difficult to tune it down again and resynthesize.

4. Mike is more interested in transfer than specificity. In my view, these are two sides of the same coin, but his point stands; just because an exercise is specific does not mean it adds anything. Sometimes, strengthening the weakest link through less specific work is exactly what drives progress. Very West Side Barbell inspired.

This post could easily have been twice as long, but I hope it motivates some of you to try the simplified Emerging Strategies outlined here — and to share your findings.

Thanks to Mike for spending his Saturday evening at Taarnby Styrkeløft Klub, and thank you to Fnug for facilitating the event.