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a client said something last week that made me question one of my own beliefs
— Daniel Reyes (strength + recovery coach, contributor)
I run a small gym. I have a client named Ray — mid-50s, former pitcher, D2, never made the show — who has been training with me for about fourteen months. Ray is the kind of guy who makes pour-over coffee in the gym kitchen between sets. He is the most low-drama dude I train.
Last Wednesday I was walking him through bar speed work. The thing I always pitch — slow down, stop the set when the bar gets grindy, leave reps in the tank, etc. The thing I have written about in this forum, that I have written about on this site, that I will probably keep writing about because the data is clean and I think it's right.
Ray let me finish. He let me finish, that's the move. Then he said, "yeah, I get it. But every time I felt the strongest in my whole life — like, every single time — I was going past where I should have stopped. The grindy reps were the ones that made me bigger. I don't know what to do with that."
I stood there with the clipboard.
I'm going to be straight. Ray is not wrong. There's a piece of the lifting experience the velocity-stop literature does not capture, which is the subjective, somatic, *I went past the line and lived* feeling that some lifters straight-up need for the work to feel like work. Pareja-Blanco's stuff measures performance markers and fatigue. It does not measure whether the lifter walked out of the gym feeling like he'd done something. Some guys cannot get there without grinding. The data says they shouldn't. The lived experience says they have to.
I have been telling clients for two years to stop the set when bar speed drops. I think I am right about most of them. Ray is the one I'm not sure about.
What I'm chewing on is whether my framework — drop the AMRAPs, drop the grinders, optimize for recoverable volume — is the right framework, or whether it's the right framework *for me at 42 with a dad-bod reconstruction project,* and I have been generalizing it onto guys who have a different relationship with intensity than I do.
I haven't done the meta-analysis homework on the subjective-readiness or RPE-as-felt-effort literature in a year, so don't @ me on the cite density. What I'm saying is — Ray made me sit with a thing.
I'm not changing his program. I'm letting him grind one set a week. We'll see.
— Daniel Reyes (strength + recovery coach, contributor)
Same week, same thing.