Getting maximum value from your programming and the exercises it contains is as much an art as it is a science. Those who master this process will make much greater gains in the long run as compared to those who handle it in a more laissez-faire fashion.

A skilled lifter is going to be able to autoregulate their way into a series of positive adaptations spread out over the course of several weeks, or possibly even several months, and extract maximum gains from a movement over that extended time period. Through this process they will extract maximum value from each major exercise in their program before that inevitable staleness begins to kick in.

Whereas, somebody who's training in a less intelligent fashion, or who simply can't resist the urge to always kind of push things to the absolute limits, may burn an exercise out in literally just a handful of training sessions.

What I'm talking about here is similar to the concept of "slicing the bologna thin," making a little bit go a long way. So, let's say that I introduce a new movement variation into my training program. Over the first few weeks with it the general trajectory that I am going to follow would go something like this:

• Week 1: I'll work up to something challenging for 5 reps. Maybe an RPE 8 or 8.5, but probably not a 9 and definitely not a 10. 

• Week 2: I'll do the same thing again but this time I'll push the envelope a little bit more and aim for that RPE 9 or 9.5 effort.

• Week 3: Now is when I'll just go balls to the wall and work my way up to a true 5RM, an RPE 10 effort. This is a set of 5 reps where I absolutely could not have done another rep without failing.

• Week 4:  Deload week to recover from the RPE effort.

• Week 5: Start the process over again, but this time with 4's instead of 5's. So that would now give me another 3 weeks of productive training.

• Again, in the 4th week of the wave (Week 8) I would deload to help reset the fatigue barometer.

• Then starting a new wave after that (Week 9) I would repeat the process again but with 3's this time.

Off the bat this has bought me 12 super productive weeks of training all with the exact same movement, and if you're really about that life you can extend this process even further into 2's and even into singles.

You'll get the most productive and sustainable training with your 3s, and 4s, and 5s when you utilize this concept, but 2's and 1's still have their place. If you take this concept all the way through from start to finish that is 5 months of milking the absolute shit out of a single exercise, from 5's all the way down to 1's, with each and every single instance providing a positive training stimulus from your exposure to the movement. And each of those stimuli nudging you forward slowly and surely.

In reality, you don't even have to take it nearly this far to be able to buy far more value from each individual movement in your program than most people are accustomed to getting. For example, you could just do a wave with 5's and a wave with 3's and then switch to a new movement and do the same thing.

In this case since you're only spending 8 weeks on each individual exercise, so you can probably go back to them relatively soon in your rotation and make another good round of gains. If you had just 3 or 4 different movements in an 8 week rotation like this you would keep making gains pretty much forever!

Another option would be to mix different rep targets into the same wave while keeping a consistent RPE cap from week to week, instead of keeping the reps the same and raising the RPE cap each week. So for example, with this style you could hit 5's in week 1, 4's in week 2, and 3's in week 3 all with the same RPE cap. Then you would raise the RPE cap slightly when you move into the next wave, and repeat the process.

So there are a variety of ways that you can set this up and utilize this concept. Just run it in a way that jibes the most with your personality and training preferences.

Now, on the flipside of all this, imagine if I switched to a new movement in my program and simply went out in week 1 and worked my way up to a ball busting set of 5 reps, RPE 10, right from the onset. Not only would the overall ceiling for that particular RPE 10 effort be much lower in this first week and in this scenario than it would be in the 3rd week or the 4th week (if you had taken the time to build the movement up), but also, and far more importantly in the grand scheme of things, in this case you would only get ONE SINGLE STIMULUS out of the movement.

You would get one single nudge forward, one single impetus for progression before forcing yourself into a corner where you have to dial up the knob and crank up the intensity level to new heights in order to find the space to create another positive stimulus. You are shoveling out a massive hole when you only needed to spoon up a little bit of dirt. You blew your load way too soon, and now your stuck in an embarrassing refractory period waiting for things to charge back up again.

Not only did you get less positive adaptations out of the movement, but you also caused more total fatigue in the process of doing so. That's not a good trade off! Contrast that with the method I described earlier, and in that former scenario you would get 3 or 4 of those same positive adaptive stimuli before having to really dial things up. Each one of those adaptations building off the one that came before it. Each one just as valuable as the one that would eventually come after it. Brick by brick you build the house. Slice the bologna thin and you can dine on meat for weeks, but if you eat the whole damn block in a day then you're just gonna go hungry tomorrow.

Obviously what I've just described is more of a strength protocol, as opposed to a hypertrophy one, but you could run this exact same type of concept for more hypertrophy oriented training style as well. In this case you would just start with a higher rep target, perhaps 15s instead of 5s, and work your way down to 10s instead of 1's. Alternatively,  you could start with 12s and work your way down to 8's. 

But basically, by bumping up the rep targets you'll get in a lot more total reps, more total time under tension, higher total volume, more muscle damage, etc, which will create a greater stimulus for hypertrophy.

If you only take one thing away from this, the point I'm trying to make is that there is immense value to delaying gratification when it comes to training. Essentially, that's what this whole concept is. A lot of people have a hard time resisting going all out all the time.

In fact, i would say that a big part of my job as a coach is just stopping people from going all out all the time! Stopping them from essentially being their own worst enemy because, the fact of the matter is, with a properly designed training program it simply makes way more sense and it creates far better long term progress to leave something in the tank most of the time.

By culminating the intensity gradually, as I've described, not only does the absolute ceiling become much higher, but you get multiple equally potent adaptive stimuli from the exact same movement before being forced to discard it due to staleness. Whereas, if you are constantly burning through movements super quickly you'll just make everything stale and you'll simply run out of exercises that are fresh, potent, and effective. Then you'll be stuck in the mother of all plateaus! So this method just makes way more sense.