What is a Threshold and Why are they Important for Training?
Over the decades of my training experience, the principles of Precision Point Training have slowly formed in my mind. One of the major things that led to the formation of these principles is the idea of thresholds. Why do I think that thresholds are important? First of all, thresholds indicate a distinct point where there is a change in how things operate. For example, when an airplane travels down a runway, it increases speed until it reaches a specific point where it is traveling fast enough to begin rising from the ground. The minimum lift off speed is a threshold that marks the speed that gives the plane the ability to do something that it couldn’t do when traveling one mile per hour slower. You can also see obvious thresholds with water. When water reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius, it changes from a liquid to a vapor. When it reaches 32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius, it changes from a liquid to a sold. The important concept here is that a threshold is a point where a small change makes a big difference.
Most of the time in life, a little change will make a little difference in the outcome of things. This is not true with thresholds. Little changes makes a big difference with a threshold. One degree of change usually makes a small difference in water as it just stays water that’s a little hotter or cooler. However, at one degree under the boiling point, an additional degree of heat no longer makes a little difference, it makes a huge difference as water transitions into steam.
A Training Example of a Threshold
So what? How does any of this threshold stuff apply to strength training? Since I believe that the main reason that the body becomes stronger is to make the training stress easier, I look for thresholds where a little change in training makes a big difference in how hard or easy the training is. For example, what if the maximum amount of reps that Fred can possibly do with 250 pounds in the squat is 12 reps? We will study this example one rep at a time from the first rep to the last rep of the set, and look for a training threshold. Fred starts out on his first rep without too much problem. He continues to the second, third fourth and fifth rep. Each succeeding rep may feel a little harder than the previous rep, but there is only a small difference in how hard the reps are when comparing them with one another. Fred continues on to the sixth and seventh rep and they feel only a little harder than the previous reps. However, Fred senses on his seventh rep that the next rep is about to get harder. Sure enough, when Fred gets to the 8th rep, his rep tempo changes and his rep speed starts to slow down. While each successive rep only seemed to get a little harder on reps one through seven, the reps become significantly harder to a greater degree when Fred reached his 8th rep. The ninth through the twelfth also become harder until the last rep was extremely hard and Fred couldn’t do any more. The point of this is that there is a threshold during a set where doing another rep is no longer just a little harder, it’s suddenly quite a bit harder. For Fred this happened on the eight rep.
In Fred’s case, his eight rep is a harder rep that’s sitting right on the threshold of an easier rep. If Fred’s body can make a small change in strength and give him the ability to be one rep stronger, then Fred’s eight rep will be as easy as the seventh. The small increase in strength will make a much bigger difference in how much easier it becomes between the seventh and eight rep in comparison to how much easier it becomes between the sixth and seventh rep, or between any of the previous reps. For Fred to take advantage of a threshold where the body transitions from a harder state to an easier state, Fred can use the eighth rep as a stopping point in a set for his squat workouts until a small strength increase causes the 8th rep to become a lot easier. By doing this, Fred is amplifying the effect of training in agreement with the goal of his body, which is to adapt in order to make training stresses easier.
A Training Threshold Where Sets Start to Become Harder
I believe there is another threshold where training suddenly becomes harder. This threshold occurs when a person reaches a set where they can no longer do as many reps as they could on their first set of an exercise while using the same weight. If this occurs on a lifters fourth set, they have reached a threshold where training has suddenly become harder than it was than the first three sets. I personally don’t believe the lifter should do the fourth set unless they have made the transition from harder to easier on the last rep of the first three sets. Once this has occurred, a lifter may continue using the same number of reps per set, and add on one additional set until they can complete the fourth as easy as the first three. By doing this, the lifter will once again cross the threshold from a place where training is harder, to a point where training is easier.
For those who are familiar with Precision Point Training, before I ever thought of the term “precision points” to identify the limit rep, the marker rep, and the limit set and the marker set, I simply thought of these points as thresholds where a small change of strength would make the biggest difference in how hard or easy training was within the phosphocreatine system. No type of training has ever worked great for me, but once I found a training frequency to compliment this type of training, using the concept of training thresholds worked better than any other training system I had ever tried. I believe there are other thresholds that mark a transition from harder to easier, but they still need to be discovered, or emphasized if they have already been discovered. In light of all of this, I believe that if using training thresholds works at all for me, it will work for anyone who applies it correctly. Give it a try. Best of training to you.