lets see if I understood your thought correctly: snatching in a GTG manner might not be as stressful as done in a regular session (more compressed), therefore not promoting adaptation? My experience with GTG swings has been that I can go a bit heavier than if I do them more compressed, so this added weight could compensate the reduced stress. Thinking about it, I did this doing S&S which is sets of 10. Had it been sets of 5 with good rest, ala A+A, maybe I would have been using the heavier weight on a normal session, not being able to increase it if I did GTG.
Maybe, you might be able to go heavier, but it may require the cumulative effort for a certain duration to get the stimulus. Some times you need to view it in terms of dynamics and the accumulated stresses. See below for a toy example.
So, in your opinion, would you say that there is no significant difference between starting on the 1:30 compared with starting on the 2:00? I think this is the case, except when approaching a test where you need to compress rest.
I think that's true. In fact, below is a toy example that shows this. Since this is biochemistry, I can reduce it to some simple chemical kinetics equations that will account for most of the dynamics and yet still be easy to calculate. Here are the very simple assumptions I made:
When you're working (swinging, snatching) you are creating lactate "waste" every unit of work adds a unit of waste, so the total waste in the system increases linearly while working.
When you're resting, the waste is getting chewed up by your mitochondria. This will follow a decay pattern that has a half-life. Let's say that the half life is 15 seconds. In the first 15 seconds, 1/2 of the waste will be removed. In the next 15 seconds 1/2 of that will be removed (leaving 1/4 of the original behind), in the next 15 seconds 1/2 of that will be removed (leaving 1/8 of the original behind). This is a common decay pattern so I feel comfortable using it (if anyone has better references to the actual biochemistry, I can use the real pattern - I'm just putting my physical chemist hat on and making it simple).
Maybe some pictures will make this nicer. So here's what one repeat in my toy model looks like. For the first 15 seconds, you are working and adding to the lactate load in your cells. When you stop, it decays with a half-life of 15 seconds. My red dotted line is just to illustrate that there's some threshold where bad things might be happening. Just a guess. But I bet that as you approach that threshold, you start to stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis (good) and too much time over that threshold is when the glycolytic acid bath is bad.
So what happens at 60 second repeats? We start our next repeat before all of the waste has been burned up, so that means the peak at repeat 2 will be higher. Though it will reach some asymptote. Here's what 30 minutes of 60-second repeats looks like in my toy model.
And surprisingly, that's not much different from a two-minute repeat. The peak isn't much higher - that's good. But the total time near threshold is also less since you're spending more time at rest. Is that ok? I don't know. That's a question for Al. The infrequent excursions to threshold is very GTG, and we know it works well in weight training.
And just to show that my very rough estimate for my model isn't all that far off from reality, what's a 30 second repeat look like (kind of like an S&S test day).
Whoops - it won't let me insert that here, I exceeded the number of images I'm allowed in one message. The next message will have the 30 second repeat image.