It’s been a while since I wrote in this blog. I used to use it to showcase client PBs each month and chat about some of the real world coaching issues me and my clients had dealt with.
That ran for around 4 years. It felt like it had run its course, and while it was nice for clients, I want to go in a different direction. I do have an articles section on my website, and when I write I try to write things that are not only useful, but implementable. I like the articles as they are, so they’re not moving here.
What I do lack is a space to give my unsolicited opinion on things. And the blog feels ideal for that. So going forward, this is where my opinions on training live. Where I can, I’ll back them with the science, because evidence is what gives an opinion weight. But the opinion comes first. This isn’t training theory, and it isn’t a how-to.
Anyway…
Squatober finished 2 days ago and Deadcember starts in around a month and the two always make me laugh because the cycle’s the same every time.
Do something every day, be ecstatic you make progress or even PB at the end while picking up some niggles you didn’t have at the start… Then not get close to what you achieved until the same time next year.
I get the appeal. It’s simple, it can be social with the shared pain, and it feels like work.
I just don’t think it does what people think it does.
Month one is mostly skill
The classic study here is Moritani and deVries (1979) where neural factors accounted for the larger proportion of the initial strength gain over eight weeks of training, and hypertrophy contributed more later.
That’s the 6-8 week window. Early on, you’re getting better at the lift, not building much new tissue.
Later work shows tissue change starts sooner than that. One 35-day study found changes in muscle size were detectable after only 3 weeks of training. But a review argues that early increases in muscle size are mostly swelling from muscle damage, with true hypertrophy only after roughly 18 sessions.
Either way, month one is mostly better coordination, more recruitment and a lift rehearsed to death.
That’s real. It’s also the cheapest kind of gain and the quickest to go.
It’s how Smolov and its Jr cousin and any high frequency program works. They’re great in a peak where you need to specialise, not so great as normal training.
Your tendons are on a different clock
Muscle adapts faster than tendon. That’s the problem with daily loading.
A meta-analysis of tendon adaptation concluded that an effective intervention applies high loading intensity over a longer duration, more than 12 weeks.
So the nervous system says go. The tendon hasn’t caught up.
Daily heavy squatting or pulling on a tissue timeline of 12+ weeks is where wear and tear builds. Nothing dramatic on day 12. Just creeping stiffness, cranky knees, a back that won’t settle.
That’s a mechanism, not an injury statistic. I’m not claiming a number.
What happens afterwards
Fast adaptations don’t stick around.
Zatsiorsky’s book spells out the rule. The longer you train, the longer you hold the adaptation. I have an article on this called soon ripe, soon rotten.
His evidence is a classic study by Hettinger (1966). Three groups. One trained every day. One trained twice a week. One trained daily, then dropped to twice a week. Then all three stopped.
The daily group gained fastest. After about 20 weeks they had the biggest gain on the chart. Within roughly six weeks of stopping they’d lost about half of it. By about 30 weeks it was gone.
The twice-a-week group trained for close to a year, gained less, and was still holding most of it more than a year after stopping.
Quick in, quick out. Slow in, slow out.
And that’s after 20 weeks of daily training. A month builds far less to hold on to.
That was isometric training, not a barbell. In my view, a month of daily squats or deadlifts follows the same pattern.
Which leaves you with the number you finished on.
It’s a 1RM from a nervous system at peak rehearsal. Go back to normal frequency and that was never your working max.
Program off it and you’re loading a figure you can’t repeat.
The best case for the other side
Fair challenge. Daily squatting can work.
A case series put three competitive lifters through 37 consecutive days of daily squat 1RM training. All improved. One gained +2.3% by day 37. Another gained +10.8%.
But it was three people, all highly trained. The authors said it shouldn’t be run year-round, and that novice to moderately trained lifters don’t need it.
That’s a peaking tool. Not a social media challenge for everyone.
Who is it actually for?
It depends where you are.
Beginners. You don’t need it. You’ll progress quickly on normal training.
Intermediates. In my experience this is where it’s most useful. It’s still excessive, and the story plays out like I described at the top of the page. PB, niggles, long wait to get near it again.
Advanced lifters. You probably don’t need it. In my experience, whatever you gain is mostly neurological, and it’s back to baseline by the end of the following month.
When unsustainable training has a place
Unsustainable training isn’t always wrong.
I’ve used it because there are times for it. My view is that’s the run up to your most important competitions.
It has a purpose, an end date, and a plan for what comes after. The authors of that daily squat study framed it the same way: a cycle within an overall periodized structure, not something to run year-round.
A competition gives it a point. A month on the calendar doesn’t.
Why coaches run it
I think a lot of coaches who run these do it for themselves. It’s great content. It builds community. It feels like leadership.
But short term engagement and long-term progress aren’t the same thing.
I’m not against daily practice
Let me be clear on that.
Practising a lift every day isn’t the problem. Plenty of good lifters touch their main movements most days.
That’s the problem with the concept. Squatober and Deadcember sell go hard or go home. Every day. Max effort. Suffer, then post it.
That’s not practice or training. That’s a dare.
Practice means you leave the session able to do it again tomorrow. Go hard or go home means you hope you can.
Skill gets built by repetition you can recover from. All-or-nothing just burns through the cheap gains in the first couple of weeks and leaves you with the bill.
Daily work can have a place. The “every rep must hurt” version doesn’t.
What I’d do instead
Just train it normally. Two or three times a week on something you want to push in rep ranges that fit the goal.
That gives your joints and tendons time to recover between sessions. It gives the tissue time to catch up with the nervous system.
Keep it going for months, not a month. Then test it. Then you have a number you can trust.
And if I can’t convince you otherwise, your best bet is to take your normal training volumes and split that across the 5, 6 or 7 days you plan to squat with no increase in normal volumes or intensities.
And if you want something sustainable thats going to increase your squat, why not give the Get Big Get Strong Team a try.
Talk soon
Adam