The stress should be a slow but steady descent into lowering your EQ. You are accumulating tissue fatigue, and as a result you will begin to see a drop in EQ. I haven’t seen LV put a number to it, but I would guess (LV correct me if I’m wrong), if your best EQ is a 10 on a 1-10 scale, I would say you are dropping down to about 5-6.
Note that this will happen in a nonlinear fashion, in practice. Your EQ will go down over the phase as you carry more and more fatigue, but due to the variance in recovery rates (I suspect) EQ will bounce up and down while going down in general.
Its a lot like weight training, where you are really doing a bit too much, and over a period of 2 weeks, you begin to get increasingly fatigued. You begin to get some joint soreness, muscle soreness and strength starts to drop. This is because the cumulative tissue damage is collecting. If you continue at that rate, you are going to end up with an injury.If at the end of those 2 weeks, you say “screw it” and take a week off from training, you will notice that you may grow like crazy for a week, and when you go back into the gym, you are stronger!
Good analogy, except that from what I’ve seen weight trainers tend to work out when they are fully recovered from the previous workout. Our workouts are daily, and we are intentionally going back to the gym with sore muscles, for a period of time, and then backing off, which most weight trainers don’t do (unless you consider the sets of an exercise, or exercises in a workout, instead of the workouts themselves).
So with this approach, you want to slowly ramp up the fatigue accumulation, which will be indicated by feel of “fatigue” as well as slow drop of EQ. [Xeno had used a multiplier to accomplish this, but didn’t use a physiologic feedback indicator,which is a fatal flaw IMO]
I did not know Xeno did this actually, I posted about it in my log (I think we are talking about the same thing). I understand what you mean by it being flawed, it’s flaws run deeper than I realized when I wrote the post on my log. Maybe a mix of the two would be ideal (reply on log, preferably).
You don’t want to try and overwhelm your tissues with a huge massive shock, as that (I assume) can trigger toughening, but rather slowly pushing it toward “over training”. You want to time this so it peaks about 2 weeks into it, then recover for a week.
Exactly! Gentlemen, this is what has frightened us off of carrying fatigue - people like to go on 2 day marathons and then cut off, and then they see no results. The key here, which I missed during my first 8 months of clamping, was to draw that overload out for a few more days - then the gains will come. Of course, you have to lessen the fatigue per day to draw it out, to avoid injury.
Its also important not to overwhelm your tissues completely, not only because of the tissue toughening aspect, but the greater the tissue damage, the longer it will take to recover. If you push the time needed to completely recover out past a week, yet only take a week, you won’t grow.
Exactly, don’t get too close to injury levels, you need something that you can recover from within a week (this takes practice, but hopefully with more people participating we can begin to define the right levels of fatigue using some indicators).
Excellent and helpful post, sparkyx.
