The One Biological Heuristic Every Strength Practitioner Needs to Know

A Simple Heuristic That Optimizes Training Efficiency on the Road to Point B.

A Simple Heuristic That Optimizes Training Efficiency

In designing the programming for our hamstring training, we utilized heuristics¹ to generate our training solution. In less than an hour in a coffee shop—with half an espresso still left—the outline was done. I had allocated much more time for this project, considering its scope, but by using heuristics as constraints on the programmer, the general outline emerged in under 45 minutes.

After reviewing the rough draft, I saw that all the elements of Point B were accounted for and scheduled to be trained weekly at what we believe are optimal volumes and frequencies. I said to myself, Everything is in here. All the trainable ecologies we discuss—like the neurological network of absolute strength, connective tissue architecture, and more—were trained every week. This was feedback that reinforced just how important it is to have heuristics and how much cognitive load they remove for the strength practitioner.

Having grown up in the neurological paradigm and working and training where the 'Big Bang' of this training philosophy first occurred, programming for absolute strength naturally came first.² However, what stood out this time was how because the neurological training was linked with joint-specific training—two of the elements of Point B had been optimally trained in conjugation.

Our heuristic states: Controlled Articular Rotations (CARs) for fundamental joints are performed on neurological training days—in parallel, at a set ratio of 1:1.³

This meant that as I programmed the training work for the neurological network of absolute strength, the biology that the nervous system would utilize to move—specifically joint function—was trained in parallel. Just like that, almost all of the programming for joint function across all training waves was completed efficiently and ecologically.

With the extra time I had allocated for this project, I found myself wondering: What if the lifters at Westside Barbell during the 1990s, during the train maximal era,⁴ had used this simple heuristic? Could they have been even more dominant? From a Point B perspective, they likely would have been in a much better position regarding joint function. Perhaps Louie wouldn’t have needed a left shoulder joint replacement, and the surgeons on the west side of Columbus, Ohio, wouldn’t be driving Porsches—courtesy of performing joint replacements on a group of lifters from a small barbell club.

We share this to spotlight the power of heuristics in programming. By simplifying decision-making and aligning training with the feedback loop of Point B, heuristics free up mental energy for thought experiments like this—explorations that become possible when we have the time to reflect.

Slide from Absolute Conjugate Strategy Founders Meeting.

A More Dominant Westside Barbell: You Decide

Just as meteorologists set the starting conditions for a weather system and run it through a model to predict what emerges, let’s apply a similar approach to two different training systems. Imagine one system where neurology and biology training volumes are not linked and another where they are linked through our heuristic. In the linked system, training is performed at a 1:1 ratio between the neural network of absolute strength and joint function. Now, consider the outcomes: would Westside Barbell have been even more dominant if they had adopted this approach?

No Heuristic vs Heuristic

During the train maximal era at Westside, lifters were taking training maxes multiple times per week—focusing on neurological training with no in-parallel biological joint function training. Interestingly, the lifters themselves often mentioned that on dynamic effort days, where the intent was to develop speed strength, training would quickly escalate to where the intent was more competitive, and soon they’d be taking training maxes.⁵ This is likely why Louie would later say something to nature of, "It's hard to fck up taking a training max, but easy to fck up speed-strength training by going too heavy."⁶

From a Point B Joint Function perspective, what emerged was joint-specific accommodation. The joints were accommodating biologically to the specific movement zones of the lift—rather than the joint’s full anatomical workspace. As the load increased, the lifters nervous system’s freedom to explore different joint ranges of motion decreased, compressing the available degrees of freedom for joint movement.

This type of biological accommodation was something I witnessed firsthand during table assessments of joint function when I treated the lifters at Westside. The reality was that all the athletes were systematically biologically accommodating to the lifts at the Point B scale of joint function. As a result, there was endless work to reverse and combat this accommodation—something we also saw in the Patrick Kane case. The bottom-up feedback loop was clear: joints were accommodating to the lifts, which is exactly what we don’t want.

The Missing Context