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The Conjugate Method while Monitoring Fatigue, Monotony, & Strain to Optimize Training

By Coach Travis Mash, MSc

One of the biggest mistakes I see in strength and conditioning is assuming more work automatically equals more results. Obviously, athletes need stress to adapt. Without stress, there is no reason for the body to get stronger, faster, or more powerful. However, there is a point where productive training stress becomes excessive fatigue, and that is where good coaching comes into play.

I have talked about this several times on www.MashElite.com. Training is simply a stressor applied to the body with the hope of producing a positive adaptation. We create fatigue, allow recovery, and hopefully experience supercompensation, leaving the athlete more prepared than before. The trick is applying enough stress to force adaptation without digging a hole so deep that the athlete can’t climb back out. (Mash Elite Performance)

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This is where three simple concepts become useful: fatigue, monotony, and strain.

Fatigue Is Part of the Process

Fatigue isn’t necessarily the enemy. Actually, some degree of fatigue is exactly what we are looking for during periods of hard training. If an athlete trains hard Monday through Friday, I don’t necessarily expect them to feel incredible on Friday. Depending on the phase, accumulated fatigue might be exactly what I programmed.

The problem occurs when fatigue exceeds the athlete’s ability to recover. Another problem is that each athlete is different in the amount of stress they are capable of handling effectively. After the last Olympics, Team USA had a male, Hampton Morris, that earned a Bronze Medal, and even more impressive was Olivia Reeves earning a Gold Medal. 

I was able to interview both coaches, and it was amazing how differently each athlete had trained to get to such a high level. Hampton’s coach was actually his dad Dr. Chip Morris. They trained using a high degree of total volume, but they also tracked the amount of recovery they used on a daily and weekly basis. 

Olivia’s coach is Coach Steve Fauer, and he told a completely different story. They trained 3-4 days per week, and the volume was by feel. There was a lot of auto-regulation. Coach Fauer’s main concern was Olivia’s readiness to train, prioritizing fatigue over anything else. 

There was only one aspect they both agreed on (by ‘they’ I am referring to both coaches), and that one thing was going heavy whenever the athletes were feeling up to it. They both agreed on this one statement, “the sport of weightlifting is all about hitting the biggest one-repetition maximum, so let it fly when there’s gas in the tank.”

That’s why it’s so important for athletes to limit any outside stress, and it’s important to maximize recovery. They should track and view sleep and nutrition with as much importance as their training. Are they going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time each day? Are they getting sunlight first thing in the morning? Are they getting off of screens 1-2 hours prior to bedtime? 

If you want to learn more about optimizing recovery, give a listen to this podcast:

403 – Tools for Optimizing Performance and Recovery With Louisa Nicola

Remember, the body doesn’t distinguish between stress from squatting and stress from an exam, a relationship problem, poor sleep, or a stressful day at work. I’ve written about this before with a simple equation:

Training Load + Life Load = Acute Response

That’s why two athletes can complete the exact same workout and experience completely different responses. One athlete slept nine hours, ate perfectly, and had a relaxing day. The other slept five hours, skipped breakfast, had two exams, and just broke up with his girlfriend. The workout might be identical, but the total stress certainly isn’t. (Mash Elite Performance)

What Is Training Monotony?

Training monotony gives us another piece of the puzzle.

Simply put, monotony describes how repetitive the training stress is from day to day. If every day produces approximately the same workload, monotony increases. If hard days are balanced with lighter days and recovery sessions, monotony decreases.

This is one reason I’ve always liked varying the stress throughout the week. Hard days should look like hard days, and light days should look like light days. The way training monotony is calculated is by taking the average daily training load divided by the standard deviation. A 1.5 or less is manageable, but staying at 2.0 or higher for a long period of time is putting your athlete at risk of injury at worse and creating stagnation at best.

Image 1 Monotony and Strain for Ryan Grimsland

The problem isn’t necessarily a high training load. Elite athletes have to tolerate high training loads. The problem is combining high loads with very little variation and inadequate recovery.

The research surrounding overtraining has specifically recommended varying loads from day to day, alternating hard and light training days, incorporating complete rest, and monitoring stress outside of training. (Mash Elite Performance)

One thing that I don’t think is talked about enough is varying exercise selection. Yes, we can have heavy volume and moderate intensity days, moderate volume and low intensity days, and everyone’s favorite low volume and high intensity days aka max out days. However, if we are constantly using the exact same movements with the exact same range of motion, you run the risk of monotony in this case as well.

Louie Simmons talked a lot about the lack of variations causing athletes to stagnate their training. He referenced the Law of Accommodation which states that the body’s response to a constant, unchanging stimulus will decrease over time. As a lifelong athlete, I agree. 

Yes, eventually an athlete must perform the movements in their sport specific to competition. However, the longer one trains and perfects his or her technique; the less important specificity becomes. I’ll explain my point a bit more later on.

Strain Brings the Two Together

Training strain gives coaches a way of looking at the total workload combined with the monotony of that workload.

Conceptually, think about it like this:

Strain = Training Load × Monotony

Now we have something more useful than simply knowing how much work an athlete performed.

An athlete might accumulate a large weekly workload, but if that workload is intelligently distributed between hard, moderate, light, and recovery days, the athlete may tolerate it quite well. However, another athlete might accumulate a similar workload with nearly identical stress every single day. That athlete’s monotony—and therefore strain—can become much higher.

That’s an important distinction.

More Isn’t Always Better

This is where the art of programming meets the science.

Progressive overload is absolutely necessary, but progressive overload doesn’t mean blindly adding more weight, sets, reps, and training days forever. Volume has diminishing returns, and fatigue has to be managed alongside the desired adaptation. Even velocity loss within a set can be used as a “fatigue dial,” allowing coaches to intentionally manipulate how much fatigue they create. (Mash Elite Performance)

The goal isn’t to eliminate fatigue.

The goal is to create the right amount of fatigue at the right time and then allow recovery to produce adaptation.

That’s why monitoring simple variables can be so valuable. Look at bar velocity during warm-ups. Monitor jump performance. Ask athletes about sleep, soreness, mood, appetite, and perceived fatigue. Watch performance trends. Most importantly, know your athletes.

Numbers don’t replace coaching. They give the coach more information to make better decisions. I use GymAware to make sure my athletes are in the quality of strength that they should be. GymAware and Velocity-Based Training simply keep my athletes getting the right amount of stress without unnecessary fatigue.

At the end of the day, the best program isn’t the one that looks the hardest on paper. It’s the one that provides enough stress to create adaptation while allowing the athlete to recover and ultimately perform when it matters.

Using the Conjugate Method to Make all of this Easier-

Whether you are coaching Olympic weightlifting or Athletic Performance, I recommend altering exercise selection. If you are coaching a young athlete, it’s important to master the movements that are important. If you are coaching weightlifting, then stick with snatch and clean & jerk. If you are coaching athletic performance, stick to the basics: cleans, squats, front squats, push press, bench press, depth jumps, and landmine rotations. 

Heck Louie Simmons would agree. He used the Repetition Method for this very application. He used high reps for young athletes to make sure their neuromuscular system was efficient for a certain type of movement. Then he moved on to the Dynamic Effort Method and Max Effort Method that I think a lot of people really don’t understand, but that’s another article coming really soon.

Once you are five years in, Pierce, Kyle C., et al., 2021 would say that technique is pretty much decided. At that point, it’s important to:

For Ryan Grimsland, we build his programs like this:

Day 1-

Day 2-

Day 3-

Day 4-

Day 5-

Train hard. Vary the stress. Monitor the response. Recover. Adapt. Repeat.

That’s programming. One thing that I had forgotten was to keep it fun. Ryan is the one that reminded me. His lifts started moving in the right direction when we made this move. I’m going to make a video and a sample program to show this conjugate approach in the coming days.

P.S. I’m booking my Advanced VBT and Powerlifting & Weightlifting for Athletic Performance Clinics for the Fall and next year. If you are a strength and conditioning coach at a University, college, Professional Team, High School, or Private Facility, email me at:

Travis@RiseIndoorSports.com to discuss hosting a clinic. 

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