Eric (and Cookie Tree)
the quest for the “growth zone” is the deep secret of PE. Although considering myself still a Newbie, I may give you some ideas about how to identify the “zone”.
First: keep a detailed record!
And when I mean detailed, I mean VERY detailed. Like: “did 25 jelqs lasting 4 seconds each, OK-overhand grip, hands alternating at each stroke, very light pressure”. Only by doing this, you will be able to identify what is really working and what does not. If you want, I have a huge Excel I could share. But beware, that’s a Swiss precision PE logbook ;-) and you need a few minutes EACH day to fill things in!
Second: plan ahead!
Look at it in an engineering way, so you plan what you’ll do and how you’ll do it. And then do it exactly the way you planned it. If you can’t do it on a planned day, skip the entire training unit or catch up another day, supposed you have enough resting days you can use as buffer zone. But don’t, and I mean ABSOLUTELY don’t switch during a planned sequence of units suddenly to a different exercise or routine type for whatever reasons. Stay extremely consistent within the chosen routine. I planned my gradual step-up to the Newbie routine 3 months ahead, and since the fourth month I am now on a one-month ahead schedule I establish the day I measure.
Third: change only one parameter per modification.
What I mean by this I have to explain by a simple example.
Assume you had a routine of 200 dry jelgs lasting 3 seconds per day, all done with the right hand in a upside OK-grip with intense pressure, 4 times a week, no warm-up or warm-down. Your skin got a bit irritated by the intense dry jelqs, so you want to switch to wet jelqs anyhow. After your monthly measurement, you notice no gains.
At the same time, you read in TP that warming is important and get convinced of a “less is more” post. So you decide to switch for the next month to 5min warm-up, 50 wet jelqs lasting 5 seconds each, executed at low pressure with an overhand OK-grip and alternating hands at each tenth stroke, 5 minutes warm-down, 2 times a week. After 4 weeks, you measure 0.2in more length and 0.1in more girth. Hooray! But: you had modified 8 (!!!) parameters from the previous routine. But you are growing, so you don’t care!
You keep another month and then realize a stall in gains. Your morale is at lowest point! Sure, a plateau is never desirable, but your real struggle is different: you can’t tell what made you grow so much the previous month and you can’t say neither what stopped the growth this month.
That’s what I mean by changing only one parameter per routine modification. My approach is maybe a bit heavy and statistic oriented, but yes I am, beside my history studies, an engineer in my second academic career. I treat PE for myself as a scientific approach, and I know the body is an extremely complex system. And complex systems tend to react to complex changes in unpredictable ways, so keep the changes simple and you may get a better action-reaction correlation. Even this can’t be guaranteed, by the way, so please don’t sue me if it doesn’t work.
Fourth: fix it only if it doesn’t work!
But then really fix it, establish a new routine planning ahead and observe during a new probation time of three months. Routine alternating is the tenor of all recommendations for your situation you get at TP, sure. And they are probably right, especially if coming from or supported by the veterans.
But remember point number 3: change only one parameter at the time per routine modification. And give a new routine more than only a week to hit in, probably a tree month time is appropriated. I am struggling myself with this, it’s just impatience and the will to progress faster. But here comes one of my beloved favorite quotations: patience is a male virtue!
That’s why I recommend only fewer measurements over time, monthly is already short. I guess quarter-years measuring would be optimal, but this gives you only 4 “routine modification windows” per year. Might be too little for most among us.
I hope I gave you some ideas on the methodical approach to “nitpickers PE” - and I hope it helps.