How to microdose your training away: Notes on MRV, MED, and COVID
The art of sport science - the science of the human body performing at maximum capacity - ought to be redefined as “the art and science of making the most out of what you’ve got”, especially with a global pandemic out there.
Making the most out of what we have standing before us requires more than the ability to program. In fact, the primary qualities of good, successful coaches and sport scientists are flexibility, ability to ask for feedback, and general communication skills.
Without those skills, it truly does not matter how rock solid your textbook-perfect strength training program is, because it’s written in stone when everything about sport is written in the sand with waves crashing over it at best.
I want to introduce you to microdosing, something I use with White Lion Athletes and myself, and something I speak about on social media like it’s my fourth job.
First, let me define three concepts that we need to understand and prioritize in order to discuss microdosing:
Baseline is an athlete’s current fitness status, the average of their ability to perform at this moment in time. The job of a coach, a sport scientist, and medical staff in a team is to improve the athlete’s baseline of fitness and performance at all times while helping them to maintain their health - not sacrifice it.
Minimum Effective Dose (MED) is the smallest amount of work (training) possible that will still get a positive adaption (result). The goal of MED is to move the training threshold, the athlete’s fitness baseline, just a tiny bit in each session. While anything below the MED will earn us close-to-no results at all - just maintenance of the current baseline - overshooting the MED in the long term can be tricky.
Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV) is the absolute maximum work (training and competition) that can be accomplished and still adequately recovered from. Keep in mind that recovery is equally important for athletic performance as training is; the body actually heals itself and adapts to the stimulus of training while resting. MRV ought to be a core consideration of every sport scientist and coach, as prescribing too much work and overshooting an athlete’s MRV will lead to a performance decrement in the short term and injury, overtraining, lack of motivation, and burnout in the long term.
With these three terms in our back pocket, we now have a pretty good idea of how little and how much training to prescribe, and where to start.
But there is, of course, more to the equation than Work + Rest = Performance Improvement.
(If you want to get all specific about it, check out this article on the work:rest formula.)
Applied neuroscience research over the last two decades have made indelibly clear that the brain and body cannot differentiate between the types of stressors it receives; that is, there are no “positive” (training, partying, traveling) and “negative” (grief, injury, exams) stressors.
Stress is always neutral to the brain and body, and, while we sometimes perceive stress as positive or negative with our (un)conscious minds, our nervous systems are much more concerned with the amount and longevity of the stress and with recovering adequately from it afterward.
That means that, when we have multiple stressful situations occurring in our lives at once - think global-level stress with a pandemic and wild politics, personal stress with relationships, family, work, and school, and sport stress with training - we need to be extremely cautious of what kind and how much stress we add and how much rest is needed to turn that work into results.
ENTER: MICRODOSING.
Microdosing is in no way a term or concept unique to sport. It originally hails from the medical world and, just is in sport, is the practice of administering very small doses of something (for example: medication, a mode of training, or psychedelics, if that’s your gig!) to benefit from its physiological purpose and minimize any negative effects.
If we look at this from purely a sport perspective, though, the core definition would remain almost identical.
Microdosing in sport is essentially the practice of prescribing small amounts of work in accordance with the athlete’s MED in order to get a psychophysiological adaption and minimize negative impacts, such as too much stress, potential injury risks, movement concerns, recovery times, and otherwise.
In layman’s terms, microdosing is literally trying to get a maximal bang for a minimal buck and, therefore, collecting innumerable bangs across time, while preventing any extra bucks from slipping away.
Practically speaking, this looks like “mini workouts”, or spreading out the week’s training prescription across the whole week. Microdosing allows for small, targeted, (near-)daily workouts and plenty of rest, as opposed to three 2hr workouts per week that require getting a lot of work done at once.
Up until 2019, I loved long, jam-packed workouts for myself and I often complained about only getting one “athletic training” day per week with my teams. Nearing the end of that year, I realized how limitlessly tired I myself was from those workouts, and that the exhaustion was pure fatigue and poor management that my body could not handle anymore, not just the great post-workout euphoria of gains upon gains.
Then COVID hit. And all of that shit changed.
I do not wish for 2-3 workouts a week of 45-90min with my teams anymore. They have far too much to deal with in life, and adding training volume and intensity into an unnecessary clump of a session quickly proved to be a waste of time and energy - for them and for me.
Instead, we developed a system of microdosing that entails the following process:
Managing workload: identifying what kinds and how much work needs to be accomplished this week in the cycle (MED + external load monitoring)
Identifying MED: through trial-and-error, starting by giving too little work and adding up from there
Programming: breaking down the week’s training prescription into manageable daily sessions of maximum 20min with one free-moving rest day
Athlete Monitoring: readiness rating before sessions, wellness questionnaires weekly, 1:1 feedback weekly
Let’s get more specific.
We had already identified our athletes’ MEDs through weeks, months, and years of working with them previously, but having a good handle on how much work athletes need for maintenance vs. progress is crucial. That way, at worst, they were prescribed too little work in a week and will just maintain their baseline. This is, in the short term, a fairly low stakes game of finding what we need.
We then break down the weekly volume and intensity (total amount of work/training for the week and how difficult it should be) into daily mini-workouts.
Example:
A1) Chest/Bench Press 5x5 @ 85%
A2) 1-leg Deadlifts 5x5 per side
2-3min Rest between each Bench set
B1) Decline Pushups 4x6
B2) Banded Triceps 4x12
B3) Calf Raises 4x30
1-2min Rest before starting B1 again
The contents of this example workout include a portion of the week’s volume of Upper Body Push work, mixed in with Lower Body Accessory work. Through this breakdown, the athlete is able to get the work done in less than half an hour (time constraints are always at play!) while still completing not unremarkable amounts of volume (thats 97 reps of chest/tri work) at close to 100% capacity.
Again, the goal of microdosing itself is to eliminate negative side effects while maximizing the benefits.
With that in mind, we microdose workouts with the goal of letting the athlete complete each set and rep of each mini-workout at close to 100% capacity, which is absolutely impossible in longer workouts because exhaustion, while coming nowhere close to their MRV and remaining flexible to (re)program according to match schedules, travel, and the daily new COVID restrictions.
They then have the rest of the day to rest and, about 24hrs later, will complete another ~20min session in a recovered, hopefully motivated state.
Mini-workouts also allow for planning when the athlete has access to a gym (in this case, we might plan a longer session 1-2x per week) vs. when at home or traveling with minimal equipment. Again, the art of sport science and coaching is that everything is flexible and nothing is permanent.
Microdosing is agile AF.
Speaking of motivation, though, microdosing has proved itself to offer psychological benefits as well. These mini-workouts are mentally possible for athletes to process; even if tired, anyone can train 4-6 exercises for about half an hour. That’s doable!
In a stressed or fatigued state, the work can still get done at home or in the gym - and well. Not to mention that, because the workouts are so short and precise, they often leave our White Lion Athletes psyched up for tomorrow’s workout too.
Psychophysiological benefits, minimal regressions, and lots of flexibility? We love to see it!
So what do you think about microdosing? Would you use that for your athletes? Do you use it yourself, if you are an athlete? I would love to hear your thoughts - leave me a comment here or shoot me a DM on Instagram!