Episode #47: You’re Not as Advanced as You Think You Are | The Repeat Novice Effect & What It Means for You!
If you consider yourself an intermediate or advanced powerlifter, at some point in your barbell training journey, you may become a novice again. This is something called “The Repeat Novice Effect” and occurs when you’ve experienced an extended break in training. It’s crucial for your long term success that your program reflects the change in your training status.
In this episode of the PRS podcast we’ll talk about when and how your training should change to accommodate changes in your life or interruptions in training. With extended time off from training for even as short as four weeks, you may respond more similarly to how a novice responds and should take advantage of that for a few reasons.
As a repeat novice you have the potential to make a lot of progress quickly and this is a great opportunity to take advantage of that. Returning to training as a repeat novice on an advanced program can often do more harm than good such as cause injuries or over training.
Listen to this podcast and check out our free resources on how to begin training, restart training, and continue training while staying injury free.
Resources:
PRS Beginner Barbell Strength Training Program (free download)
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Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:00:00] Welcome. Come back to the Progressive Rehab & Strength podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Rori Alter, Head clinical coach here at Progressive Rehab & Strength, with my lovely co-host, as usual, Dr. Alyssa Haveson. And we are back to talk more about Strength training and programming as usual. But this is in the fourth and final episode in our series of beginning barbell strength training; we've talked about where you should start with the beginner program, what exercises we've provided a free program for you to follow that has a tells you exactly what to do, how to change things. It's really a fantastic program. We've talked about technique, the lifting manual, and how to film your lifts. We've also talked about ways to keep yourself healthy and injury free under the barbell and what is specifically unique about the sustainable training method. And we've linked you to free resources all along the way, including the Sustainable Training Builder and the Healthy Barbell Training Guide and today we're going to be talking about the perpetual novice or the Repeated Novice Effect. So let's define those two things. So the perpetual novice, well, actually, let's define the Repeated Novice Effect first. So when you're a novice, your body can respond very easily to stimuli. So your training stress, you don't need a lot of volume, you don't need a lot of frequency, and you don't need a lot of load to make progress. And you recover really really well between training sessions, and the longer you train without an extended interruption, the less novice you become, meaning the less progress you can make in short periods of time, so the less progress you can make every 24 to 36 hours.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:02:02] So as you become less of a novice, you become more of an intermediate lifter. Or you can make progress on a weekly or monthly like monthly basis, and you just need more recovery and more variability and a little bit more training volume, a little bit more training frequency, and generally a little bit less training intensity. Um, so. The Repeated Novice Effect is when you have been training for an extended period of time, and you start to recover. You take longer to recover. You need a little bit more volume, a little bit less intensity, and the training becomes a bit more variable and in general, takes a little bit more time to train. You have to do a little bit more all this kind of stuff, right? It's not as easy as it used to be. And your gains don't come as frequently as they used to come. Now let's say you go through a period of time where you don't have access to barbells or you were sick or you had, you know, finals and summer break and you just or you were traveling for work for a month and a half, whatever. And you get this extended break from barbell training, which happens to a lot of people, more people than you think that it happens to you come back to training and your body has had such a gap in training exposure that you can respond like a novice for a little for a short period of time.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC, SSC: [00:03:36] So one thing that we see people do is that they try and jump right back into the program that they were in before their extended break off, or they try and use the loads that they were using before that, that that gap in training. Sometimes that gap in training is really long, like six months for whatever reason. Um, and so we've coined this term the Repeated Novice Effect, where you can go back to a beginner program. And make a lot of gains really quickly. And sometimes exceed where you were. Prior to that stop or cessation of training. Now, we don't see that people are able to be on this sustained novice program for as long as they were previously. So maybe you were able to do it for seven months to a year or a year and a half previously, this time maybe for two, three months, the longest period of time I've had someone on a novice program utilizing the Repeated Novice Effect I think was like 16 weeks, which was really cool because they made so much progress and they exceeded their prior levels of strength. Um, so is there anything that I'm missing about this Repeated Novice Effect?
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC, CSCS: [00:05:00] I don't think so. You know, I think a lot of times when people try to go back to their previous program, it's just a recipe for disaster. It's really hard to go anywhere, and you often will feel defeated because things are really hard. You're not you're not ready for that, but.