For those of you that were concerned, no, I’m not dead. I haven’t even hurt myself again, wonder of wonders. I know, I’m surprised too – for a guy who couldn’t look at a barbell without something tearing, lifting more often was the last thing that I thought would be helpful.
It turns out that putting muscles and connective tissues through a full range of motion on a regular basis is actually helpful in recovering from injuries, or not getting them in the first place. Who knew, right? Besides just about every athlete ever, anyway.
I’ve cut back to “low frequency” of just squatting three times a week. I’ve been taking the more Chaos & Pain approach to things, with my heavy workouts on M/W/F and then just doing whatever for body parts or conditioning (lol) on Tues/Thurs and the occasional Sat.
And yes, I have a few things to chime in, more lessons and wisdoms and such, so feel free to follow along.
Squatting 5-6 days a week is still valid. Nothing about that has changed from my earlier posts, as far as I see it. I also think that anybody who has a problem working hard, or has an irrational fear of overtraining, should do one of these outrageous routines just for the mental perspective.
You don’t die. You don’t explode. If you keep showing up and fighting through the unpleasantries, you get stronger. If nothing else, that’s a hard lesson for most people to learn, and a lesson that frequent heavy squats teach you very well. If there’s one thing that’s becoming clear to me, these programs are indeed hard and stressful, and that’s the entire point. You get out of your training what you put into it, simple as that. I think people interested in being strong should spend at least part of their training year doing something that is highly unpleasant. If you start to like it, then you’re on the right track (provided your numbers are actually going up; assistance work doesn’t count).
Now to spin it to a complete 180. I think that once said beast has been unleashed, you have to find some way to put the chains on. Not being a slackass is the first step; then you have to figure out how to stop your newfound enthusiasm from burning you right the hell out. In one of my earlier posts on this topic, I suggested that you’d probably do well to take light weeks every so often. Well, now I’m talking from experience: you’ll want to take light weeks every so often, and as a step further, you’re probably going to want (if not need) lighter training cycles sprinkled in with the heavy stuff.
While I think the idea of autoregulating rest is solid, I also think you’d do best with a coach there running it. I’d do it with a client, sure. I don’t trust myself to be able to manage my own training to that degree. If nothing else, the old fall-back ratio of one easy week to every 2-3 hard weeks is a good place to start.
These points are why I’m squatting three times weekly for now. This is a practical implementation of that old concentrated loading idea in Supertraining that we all talk about but nobody really seems to do. You first spend a few weeks or months working the hell out of yourself with lots of volume and conservative weights, then you taper back and start working more on pushing out heavier weights.
In my mind, that’s what I’m doing here. The workload is down slightly, and there’s slightly more emphasis on letting myself hit grinders in each session. I don’t mind letting the adrenaline slip a little to hit a weight, because I’ve got a little more time to rest before the next workout. I’m still not going crazy and doing a legit psych-up, mind you. Consider this my “light” cycle.
I don’t want to get all evangelical, because I still hate that, but man this is working really well. I hit a 170kg no-no-no squat just this Friday and was about 90% sure I’d have hit a 180 if I’d gone for it. Unfortunately I’m only about 60% sure the right quad would hold up so I took the safe bet. Point being, despite peaks and valleys, the trend-line has been steadily upwards and more importantly, I feel more mobile and less injury-prone than any time I can recall in the last four years. It’s nice to know I still have the strength to raw-squat 400+ lbs even if I’m not confident enough injury-wise to do it just yet.
I’m trying a slightly different approach now. I’m still using the same daily-max strategy, but I’ve been using box squats and squats to pins as backoff sets. I work up to a daily max, then drop back around 20kg and do singles with the back-off weight. If those are easy, I gradually increase the weight a little until I get tired or bored.
I’ve also been toying around with high-rep backoff work, bodybuilder style. Same as above, hit the daily max – then for backoffs, drop to 50-60% and crank out sets of 10. Or as another option, switch to the dumbbell version and do the same thing. You don’t want to get too crazy with the volume here; 2-3 sets is plenty. But it is a nice change of pace and I think the upper body responds to that kind of thing. At least mine does, I dunno about yours. I’m pretty opposite from most people since my upper body lags a lot due to shoulder injuries and I’ve never been a big pump ‘n tone type, so it could just be me.
The deadlift is still the x-factor that I’m trying to sort out. One thing I have learned is that any heavy/max RPE deadlift work is going to have to take a back-seat, maybe a once-a-month kind of thing. I mean, I kinda knew that, but I’m stubborn sometimes and have to learn the hard way. Keeping deadlift work in will almost surely have to boil down to doing lots of singles in the 60-80% range, focusing on speed and rep-quality over heavy weight. I’ve started trying these out more like a clean pull with a pause at the knee – pull to the knee, hold for a 2-3 count, then explode through with a shrug at the top. They feel nice, so why not? Real power cleans and clean pulls would be another option for a deadlift day.
Every third workout (once per month) or maybe alternate weeks, you could work up to a couple of pretty heavy singles from the floor or standing on a block. This might even take the place of one of the squat workouts if need be.
The Tuesday/Thursday workouts are either back/arms stuff or some sled pulling, maybe some abs or low back work. Nothing crazy, just go in and do a little accessory or conditioning work and call it a day. For now I’ve been putting deadlift training on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well.
There are lots and lots of options to explore, and this is one of many permutations. More to the point, I really enjoy being in the gym more often and not being so Serious(TM) about the whole process. There’s no worrying about overtraining, and no stupid rules about things I Must or Must Not do at the gym. I like that most of all.
I’ve been getting some questions about recovery methods and strategies, given how I’ve been training recently. I figured that would make a good update for this week.
Recovery methods can be broadly grouped into three categories: organizational, manual/external, and chemical. That’s not the precise naming scheme but that’s how I remember it. This reflects your program, things you physically do to your body, and things you take to help recovery. Not surprisingly, most attention focuses on the latter point thanks to drugs and a robust supplement industry. The other facets of recovery are just as important, if not more.
We’ve all heard that we recover outside the gym, not in it. This is largely true, with some caveats. It’s the caveats that make the difference, as they always do. Thinking of recovery as an all-or-nothing matter is, bluntly, wrong. The state of your body at any given time is an on-going balance of building-up and breaking-down. When translated to exercise, you’re constantly recovering from stress and creating new stress. This is unavoidable.
Don’t be fooled by this idea that resting a week between muscle groups or exercises is sufficient for full recovery. As a rule of thumb, “volume” stress will mainly affect muscle and other peripheral/tissue factors, take longer to recover from, and create a milder disruption to the body. By some measures, the body’s tissues can take upwards of 4-6 weeks to completely finish the adaptive remodeling cycle from a single workout; when you start compounding that with multiple sessions, you’re looking at a state of on-going, constant recovery — and this happens on the fly, as you continually train.
“Intensity” stress is a much greater hit to the system, more of a central or neurological stress, but it can peak and recover much faster in many cases. Regardless of what muscle groups were trained, central “intensity” stress can still be an issue; there is a cascade of mostly negative effects on the body that can arise from too much mentally-challenging exercise. Even if one week were sufficient for full tissue recovery, you’re still dealing with different factors that recover at different rates.
The moral of the story: You are never fully recovered between sessions, so it’s pointless to design a program as if you will be.
Rather, we need to chase optimal recovery for the goal at hand, and then program according to how those factors recover in the short term. The Russians designed programs with the goal of riding the recovery curve for whatever they were training for, with minimal impact from post-training fatigue. You’re trying to train as much as you can while minimizing the effects of fatigue.
After muscle growth? Then you should train in a way that keeps protein synthesis maximally elevated. After strength? You need to train in a way that optimizes neurological output and avoids central/CNS fatigue.
This is why the frequent training approach works if you train in a way that optimizes the daily stress while minimizing fatigue. This is why you can see people growing when they train a muscle group two or three times a week. You get the idea.
This is the first step in recovery: don’t get too beat up in the first place. Organize your program so that frequency and volume are in line with how you’re training. Bodybuilding will look a little different from competitive powerlifting and those will both look different than general athletic strength training. Train accordingly and plan frequency and rest days from that.
Manual therapies will cover everything from stretching and foam-rolling to sitting in a hot bath or sauna and everything in between. I don’t have a whole lot to cover in this area except to give an overview of things I’ve tried that seemed to work well.
In the general warmup and/or warmdown, stretching and foam rolling definitely helps a lot. I know static stretching is not in vogue these days, but keeping the hip flexors, piriformis, and shoulders/pecs/lats stretched is what keeps me going. Foam rolling the IT band, adductors, glutes, and lats hasn’t hurt anything either. Granted that’s for my specific set of injuries, but the hips and shoulder girdle are a common trouble spot. Dynamic stretches are another useful warmup tool, good for the phasic or working muscles.
Other methods are useful post-training or to help feel better between sessions. I like hot baths with epsom salts. Whether it does anything physical I don’t know, but it sure feels nice on beat up legs and back. It’s also mentally relaxing, which might be the important part. Sitting in the sauna will be about the same thing. Heat seems to do nice things as far as loosening up tight muscles and encouraging relaxation, so even a hot shower could fill this role.
I haven’t yet resorted to icing, although by all indications it does help with local tissue trauma and inflammation. If you’ve had a massive session and are really beat up in a given muscle, it may be worth a go. This may be one of those things that is most valuable immediately post-training, to manage inflammation, if you’re so inclined.
Massage and other forms of manual therapy are nice. You may or may not have access to a massage therapist or physio that can deliver such services. Even so, having some kind of therapeutic session on a regular basis is probably a good idea. I’m the number one offender in being lax on this, but every time I get some kind of manual therapy done I’m glad I did.
I would add that the benefits to a lot of this stuff will be largely mental. I’m not convinced there is a huge performance-boosting effect here, but you shouldn’t discount them because of that. Mental relaxation and recovery is easily more important than physical, in my ever so humble opinion.
And then we have chemical solutions, which would encompass both legal dietary supplements and neutraceuticals, along with not-so-legal performance enhancing pharmaceuticals. There’s a hell of a line regarding what’s natural and thus ethically okay, and what’s an artificial change in chemistry that should be condemned as a moral failing. I’m largely not interested in having that debate, due to my stance on human self-enhancement in general and the fact that it is incompatible with mainstream views on sporting ethics. So I won’t.
Anabolic steroids (AAS) work by increasing rates of protein synthesis in muscle and other peripheral tissues (for example, they can alter collagen synthesis in tendons), and in some instances by increasing neurological output. These effects are variable between compounds, and some may offer secondary effects in addition to this primary action. In large doses, AAS will tend to increase muscle mass both through increased protein synthesis (new contractile tissue or ‘myofibrillar hypertrophy’) and by increased retention of water, glycogen, and energy substrate (‘sarcoplasmic hypertrophy’). This is the most common way that they are used by recreational athletes, for a quick “cosmetic” effect.
AAS can also be used in much lower doses for a more therapeutic effect, and indeed this is how many athletes employ them. The training schedules of high-level athletes can be extremely demanding. So they take a small amount of winstrol or dianabol to help them recover that much faster and keep up the training.
Besides being an interesting look at the physiological effects, I wanted to point this out because it’s an interesting look at the mindset behind the usage of any performance enhancer, legal or not. Your average gym lifter wants to take something to give him gains. Your competitive athlete wants to take something to help him recover better and thus to train harder.
I can’t tell you how many times I see relative newbies judging any supplement or recovery aid by how fast they add weight on the scale, or how quickly their lifts improve. Creatine is dismissed by a lot of guys as useless because they don’t add 5kg when they go on it, or they don’t instantly see a 10kg PR.
To me creatine is one thing that is almost essential if you want to train hard and often. This is because I fall into the latter camp: I want to take things that help me recover faster. I’m not looking for a magic potion to carry me in lieu of bad training and/or diet. But I digress.
Creatine should be in there because it’s shown numerous wonderful effects on recovery, and new benefits seem to pop up all the time. It’s safe, it’s cheap, and it’s proven. There’s little reason not to take it, unless you’re like me and just forget all the time. The effects on recovery are just too good to avoid it, especially given the price point for plain ol’ monohydrate (which is the only thing that actually works anyway).
I’ve mentioned before that I love ibuprofen as a general means of controlling inflammation. This would apply to any non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID). I try to keep this in reserve for the really bad days, so as not to become reliant on it. That’s probably a good suggestion for you, too.
Magnesium, zinc, and calcium may be worth looking at. These are usually pretty cheap and depending on how you eat you may be deficient. These minerals play an important role in our bodies, so they might be worth adding in for general recovery purposes.
Fish oil is another good cheapie that has a lot of wide-spectrum positive effects on physiology. I don’t think you need to mega-dose. A range from 6g to a high end of say 12-15 grams per day is plenty. Fish oil is omega-3 fatty acids, which are called essential fats for a reason. Your body needs these to do a wide variety of things. So take them.
I’ve seen some indications that ginger and curcumin (found in the spice turmeric) have positive analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects. I can’t really say how much these things help or even what a daily good dose might be. On the other hand, my ground beef, chicken, and green tea taste a lot better now.
Speaking of green tea, that’s just good stuff in general. I try to get at least a cup a day.
And while I’m on that subject, keeping so-called nutrient-rich foods in your diet is a good idea. This is really getting away from supplementation and more into having a good diet, and that’s okay because having a solid diet is a more important recovery aid than messing around with any of the detail-work.
Fruits and veggies can sometimes be underrated in our diets in the quest for More Calories, but there are a whole range of neat little nutrients and such that can be of use to us. Green veggies like broccoli and spinach have a ton of goodies in them. Berries are basically nothing but antioxidants and worth keeping in the mix. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff I’m overlooking, too. The point is, if it grows from the ground and is brightly-colored (and non-poisonous, remember that one!), it’s probably worth eating.
The lesson here: eat good, eat healthy, then worry about the detail stuff after that.
That is a very rough overview of my take on recovery. It’s a holistic thing, as you can see, not dependent on any one thing and certainly not on any magic pill. Take care of your program, take care of your diet, supplement smartly, and add in manual/physical methods as needed.
I had totally planned to cut my Bulgarian/frequent-lifting experiment this week, after eight full weeks. I had no real reason other than to break up the monotony. I’m not hurt; I actually feel better than I have in years as far as joints and connective tissues. I don’t feel burned out, not even close. In fact, I hit a front squat PR on Friday which was 15kg above my regular training weight. Every other lift is cruising along just fine.
A note about that: when I say PRs in this context I’m talking what would best be termed local maxima. These aren’t all-time bests, but rather the best I’ve done within the last three years. As you may or may not know, I’ve had a string of pretty crippling injuries that started back in late 2006 and limited what I could do with heavy bone-crushing weights. So right now, PR means best I’ve done since that fiasco started.
Even so, a quick look at the numbers is illuminating. I started out working with 110kg on front squats for a daily top set. Friday, I hit 120, 125, and 130 for moderately psyched, moderately ugly reps. Push press has gone from working in the low 70s to consistently hitting 85kg. Squatting has netted me my best weight since my quad tear back in October (160kg), I’ve stiff-legged 185kg x5 off a 3″ plate and easily deadlifted 220×2 (no belt/no straps on either). Even benching has improved to the point that I can hit 115-120kg, pain free, on any given day. Bear in mind that I weigh all of 89kg/195 lbs right now.
Given that, I took my usual weekend off along with Monday to think about it. And honestly, I just couldn’t see a reason to change. Progress is still humming along, I’m not hurt or beat up, and I can even say I like these workouts. So why change?
I could labcoat up a good argument, sure. Variation in stimulus is itself a stimulus. Concentration of loading is one of those old Russian concepts we always see batted around, and this is it to a T: spend 6-8 weeks doing crazy high volume with moderate intensity until you push into overreaching, then cut it and shift gears into a low-volume/high-intensity program.
Which is the reason I wrote up my last two posts about linear periodization and APRE — I was going to shift into that kind of system to intensify after the block of accumulation (or concentrated loading).
But I had to stop myself. That sounds like a lot of rationalization for program-hopping, jumping around from program to program “just because”. Granted I have reasonable premises to draw on, but I don’t see that this is substantially different.
Secondly, I’m clearly not overtrained (or overreached, pedants) if I’m still pushing out PRs and not feeling the lifting flu. This is what we discussed over on Glenn’s forum, where contrary to popular wisdom, lifters do seem to adapt if they stick it out – and even feeling crappy isn’t an indicator that your actual performance (functional capability lol) is diminished. Only diminished performance is an indicator of diminished performance.
Thirdly, even the concentrated loading system is supposed to wear you down to a measurable degree. I’m not looking at the book but I’m pretty sure Verkhoshansky said you needed to shoot for a performance decrement of around 20%, or to a point that the athlete is struggling with 80% of his/her bests. This jives pretty squarely with what Glenn said, so figure that if you’re so beat to hell that ~80% is consistently a struggle (note consistently), then you’re overworked and it’s time to rest.
All that said, I don’t think I have much of a case. “I’m bored” isn’t sufficient reason to jump to another program, so I’m riding it out for now.
Taking Rest Days
Earlier this week, I had a bad workout. I came in Tuesday morning after three days off, and I just had no juice. Sometimes that happens and the power switches on after a few warmups, but it never happened. I felt slow, almost achy and generally too beat up to be there. It wasn’t just a matter of not being able to switch it on; even my muscles felt weak and not-quite-achy.
The 80% rule was in effect that day. I hit about those numbers, spent 20 minutes foam rolling and stretching, then came home and started popping ibuprofen.
This was the first bad workout I’ve had since I started this mess. I won’t lie, it messes with your head and turns the second-guessing dial up to 12.
What did I do? I took off the next day, popped more anti-inflams, and came back this morning to resume the normal program. And I had a totally great day. Front squats hit over 90% of Friday’s PR with plenty in the tank, push press hit my daily best, and both of them ended up feeling nice and springy with the back-off sets.
The moral of the story: a bad workout is a bad workout. I’m taking a page from Anthony Ditillo here: if you have a bad day, write it off, take the next day off, handle your recovery, and come back when you’re ready.
I think being able to program in rest days on the fly is another understated strength of this system. If you’re having good days, keep lifting. If you’re having a legit bad day, then take the next day off. If you get to a point where you’re totally beat to crap, take 2-3 days off and see what happens. The idea behind autoregulation is to stop being a slave to “must do”. There are no “must do” rules in this approach.
This includes not only what you do within a session, but when sessions happen. Gauge everything according to what you can do right now. If you need rest, take it.
There’s Volume, and then there’s HOLYCRAPVOLUME
Some other things have occurred to me when looking at this protocol and wondering why it’s not overworking us.
Recently Glenn was over at the weightlifting championships in Bulgaria and he was making regular updates about how some of the other teams were lifting. Read the whole thread, because it’s very interesting. What stuck out to me in particular were his comments on how the Chinese lifters trained.
He talks about one guy that spent (at least) an hour doing snatches, then snatch pulls, and then power snatches. The guy moved through at a quick pace, with very brief rests, and worked up to a smooth max on each before resetting the weight and starting over with the next version. It’s not hard to imagine these guys doing that several hours a day, 6-7 days a week.
Now compare that to what I’m doing. I spend at most one hour a day, five days a week, in the gym. I alternate sets of a squat with a press and then finish up with a back exercise. At most it takes me 8-10 sets to reach a max weight, since I’m intentionally trying to do lots of small jumps and short-ish rests (basically just long enough to catch my breath again between sets, so figure 90 seconds, two minutes or so). After that, I might end up with 3-5 backoff sets. All told, that means the main squat and press will get at most 15 sets in a session.
I did a calculation on the tonnage I rack up on squats in a week, using my average weights and NL for three back squat and two front squat sessions, and it was something around 8000kg or around 17500 lbs per week of just squatting. Over a month, that’s over 70,000 lbs lifted. That’s a lot, but it’s not super-crazy requires steroids to recover from level. Bill Starr suggested once that a modest increase of 10% per month was the advisable route, and looking back at what I’ve been doing, that’s been about the case.
That Chinese guy, that’s crazy steroid volume. What I’m doing? Not so much. It’s easy to argue that I’m recovering better for this particular workload and intensity level spread out over multiple sessions, instead of collected into just two or even three workouts.
Regarding steroid use: it’s often suggested that you need Dr. Zeigler’s Happy Recovery Tonic to thrive on frequency, but I would suggest that it’s exactly the opposite. Which is to say, those thriving on intensity-based workouts (which is to say, lots of RAAAAAAGGHH grinders and regular focus on throwing more weight on the bar, in contrast to this philosophy of “widening the base”) are more likely to benefit from steroids.
Frequency/volume based training could certainly benefit from restorative help at extreme levels (i.e., what the Chinese lifters are doing), and I’m not saying otherwise. For those of us using more moderate programming and incremental increases in weight and weekly tonnage, I’m no longer convinced it’s a requirement.
Elastic vs. Static Lifts
One meme that I’m seeing repeated regarding this kind of training is an old classic. You can train the snatch and C&J regularly because they don’t have an eccentric component. The powerlifts are slow, more static lifts with a large eccentric component, and thus you can’t train them as often.
A few things on this. Old-timers didn’t have bumper plates and tended to lower their weights under control to the floor. They still trained regularly, with what current orthodoxy would call excessive frequency. Beyond that, old timers still used the slow lifts in the same way. That alone is enough to convince me, but if you need more, read on.
It’s fallacious to call the powerlifts inherently slow and grindy. I’m not sure if I’ve ever made this apparent, but I train explosively more often than not. You may refer to this as training more elastically, training fast, making my lifts springy, whatever. But if you watch my videos, what you’ll notice is that even my heavy lifts still move pretty fast to the eye, even if I’m struggling like hell and it feels like a max set. Very rarely do you see me truly grind on anything.
Does this make me fast-twitch dominant or whatever? Have you seen a picture of me? I’m not exactly a natural athlete mesomorph type. On the other hand I have been making it a point to “train fast” for about a decade now. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
You can, and I would submit that you probably should, train the powerlifts in a way that’s elastic and explosive, versus loading them up and Valsalva-ing your way through them with a red face.
“But how will I learn to strain against heavy weights if I never do it?” you ask.
That’s why we have peaking phases. Spend most of your time training with the fast/springy movements to develop strength and general tolerance for weights (energy systems, connective tissues, all that blah blah). When you need to peak for whatever reason, spend 3-4 weeks training to hit One Big Set with a basic linear program. You’ll be disappointed at first, I’m sure. After spending a month training yourself to grind and strain again, you’ll develop the ability to “express that strength” (lol HIT).
My final point is that if you’re autoregulating these things as you should be, the eccentric overload won’t matter. You’ll develop a tolerance to the stimulus, eccentric or no. Compare my workloads to what even a national-level OLer will pull off and you see I’m still handling chump change. The difference between PL and OL volume is relative, not absolute.
I also want to point out that finding productive exercises that use lighter absolute weights may be of benefit here. I mentioned that I started this program with front squats and only later rotated in back squats. I think that this helped me to adapt to the frequency, just because I wasn’t routinely handling heavy weights in the absolute sense. Toying with the exercise selection in that way may be a good approach to consider as far as what’s sufficient and what’s too much for you.
Just let the training guide itself (and don’t be a moron about it). If you let it, it will handle itself.
I’ve had to do a lot of thinking over the past couple of years as far as deciding what I want to do with myself as far as training and goals. I dabbled with powerlifting for years, but it wasn’t ever satisfying to me as a competitive sport. I like hitting big weights, and I even like competing from time to time. What I don’t like is how gear has become such an integral part of training and competing. Even in the IPF affiliates it’s gotten a bit wacky, and don’t get me started on the multi-ply feds.
This isn’t a swipe at geared powerlifting. If you enjoy it, then best of luck to you. But it’s not what I signed up for. The reason I lift weights is, for lack of a better phrase, because of “physical culture”. Bodybuilders back in the day actually had to lift weights in their contests. The earliest powerlifters trained more like what we think of as bodybuilding today. That’s the old idea of physical culture: that you develop both strength and the physique with well-rounded weight training. Continue »
As I’ve alluded to in the past few posts and many of my Twitter updates, I’ve been experimenting with high-frequency training in a half-hearted manner for the last few months and with more commitment over the last six weeks. I’ve amassed a number of general observations and nuggets of practical wisdom that I want to lay out in no particular order.
The individual workouts have to take a back seat to the overall training effect. This means that showing up and doing something is better than taking the day off because you don’t feel like squatting again.
You must have some way of grading your effort, whether that is recording RPEs or just knowing when the lift stops being springy and explosive. Grinding or “training on nerve” is a no-no.
“Squatting to a max daily” sounds far more sensational than the reality. Non-psyched daily maxes aren’t nearly as strenuous as psyched-up or “intense” contest-type maxes.
Pre-workout stimulants and “training on nerve” should be kept to a minimum. I have a coffee before I lift because I train at 7am. Otherwise, keep the workouts as free-range as possible.
Same for gear. All my lifts are being done completely raw, which in this case means no belt.
The common thread here is to remove things which might artificially increase your ability to handle weight. To train frequently requires scaling back your perceived effort in each session. Training aids may boost your ego but the added stress is not compatible with frequent lifting.
Do lots of warmup sets. I consider eight sets to be the minimum as you ramp up to the daily max. Lots of small jumps with brief rest intervals is better than fewer bigger jumps. This will also impact your daily max. This is also good.
The absolute weight you lift on a given day really does matter. I began with front squats, which limited the weight I would handle any given workout. I’ve begun to rotate back squats in on alternate days, which substantially increases the absolute weight on my back. The difference is relevant. Plan to have bad workouts when you increase the stress in ways such as this.
If you’re just starting this kind of plan, being conservative will pay off dividends. Get used to the frequency first, by training often and working to conservative daily maxes. Once you’ve done this for a month or so, you can start to add in more warmups and add in back-off sets. Do this gradually and do not be afraid to cut the back-offs out if your recovery is substantially affected.
How you feel on any given day is deceptive. You will have many days where you come in sore and feeling like crap. You will have good workouts despite this. You will also have bad workouts just as you’d expect. If you keep showing up, you will be pleasantly surprised.
The idea behind this system is to adapt to the frequent workloads. The bad workouts and the good workouts are unimportant next to this. You are conditioning your body for a specific adaptation. The payoff will come months down the line, not with instant PRs. Your body will adapt if you are consistent and patient.
As you adapt to each new level of stress, the PRs will start to come anyway.
While it’s too soon to say for sure, there are some potentially interesting effects on body composition. I’m noticing improved size in the hips, thighs, shoulders, arms, and chest. This could be because I’ve been unable to train these muscle groups in any serious way for the last few years. It could also be from the frequent overload. It could be both. It could be all in my head.
You can eat much more food. In fact, you probably should in order to support the training.
Something will hurt every day. Ibuprofen and Tiger Balm will be your friends.
My chronic injuries, specifically partial tears in my right shoulder and a tear in my right quad, are both complaining about this in subtle ways, but despite that they feel much less fragile than any point I can recall.
As I suggested yesterday, controlling inflammation may be critical for this to work, especially at each stage of the process. Training to a daily max 5-6 days a week is not, in itself, that hard if you are in any kind of shape. Doing lots of warmups and several back-offs may change this. Stay on top of recovery methods between workouts. Ice sore muscles. Take ibuprofen. Keep your diet nutrient-rich and preferably calorie-rich.
It may be that the biggest benefit of this kind of training is the mental toughness and perspective that comes along with it. The Smolov squat cycle and the Russian squat routine once looked outrageous. Now they don’t seem so bad.
You also realize how much you truly are capable of if you just ignore the body’s sickness signals and go lift anyway. The weights still go up. You just feel like crap in the mean time. Even that fades with time.
We’ve all taken it for granted that, when we start to feel burnt out, we should rest, and if we don’t, we’ll soon be overtraining. But if our goal is to force an adaptation to a new level of performance, does that follow? In evolutionary terms, there would be little benefit to the need to rest for 48-72 hours between strenuous bouts of exercise. We assign a special argument to resistance training, yet there is only a circumstantial scientific basis for doing so.
As I noted yesterday, the brain adapts to exercise-induced stressors. It is conceivable, to the point of likely, that even the CNS and its cascade of “overtraining effects” would adapt to Bulgarian-style lifting if the stimulus to do so is provided.
I would also suggest that this adaptive pressure only holds true if you’re training within certain boundaries. Those boundaries are more than we’ve been led to believe, with 100% certainty. However there are still limits. Doing lots of short heavy sets with moderate exertion is different from racking up 50 sets of “bodybuilding style” training to a point of exhaustion.
I’m of the belief that the boundary is past the point where physiological signals tell us to stop, but before the point of true exhaustion, where truly insane drug-assisted training programs come into the picture. That grey area is what is worth exploring, and what I’m attempting to explore with this approach.
My prediction is that you will require down or unloading weeks from time to time. I also predict that if you are paying attention to the daily max concept, this will happen on its own (i.e., you simply won’t be able to rack up stressful amounts of work without breaking the rule on no grinders).
I would also suggest that this kind of training would complement a more intensity-based style of lifting after an interval of 4-8 weeks to milk the adaptations. It would be useful to consider this concentrated loading or accumulation training.
Anti-inflammatories. 400-800mg of ibuprofen taken immediately post-workout, on up to 6-8 hours later. I am absolutely loving this strategy. I train at 7am. I take 400mg at 10pm before bed.
Warm baths with epsom salts are nice and relaxing. Warming or lightly working (via stretching, light repetitive movements, etc) the muscles and relaxing mentally is a good idea in general.
If oral anti-oxidants were absorbed worth a damn, they might be worth consideration. Things like green tea, vitamin E, ginger, turmeric (the curcumin in it) and other neutraceuticals show promise and are cheap, but may not be absorbed enough to matter. I drink a lot of green tea and spicemy foods anyway, because I enjoy the taste.
But there’s no denying that it can suck in the mean time, and there’s no use suffering when the process can be smoothed. I am not a fitness guru that places value on discomfort for the sake of discomfort.
I know I’ve been slack on the blogging lately, but I really have had a few interesting things going on training wise, both theory and application side of things. There’s goodies on the way. For now, since this segues into the concept, I want to have a look at this paper which I got a few days ago:
Autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise (APRE) is a method by which athletes increase strength by progressing at their own pace based on daily and weekly variations in performance, unlike traditional linear periodization (LP), where there is a set increase in intensity from week to week. This study examined whether 6 weeks of APRE was more effective at improving strength compared with traditional LP in division I College football players. We compared 23 division 1 collegiate football players (2.65 +/- 0.8 training years) who were trained using either APRE (n = 12) or LP (n = 11) during 6 weeks of preseason training in 2 separate years. After 6 weeks of training, improvements in total bench press 1 repetition maximum (1RM), squat 1RM, and repeated 225-lb bench press repetitions were compared between the APRE and LP protocol groups. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were used to determine differences between groups. Statistical significance was accepted at p </= 0.05. Autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise demonstrated greater improvement in 1RM bench press strength (APRE: 93.4 +/- 103 N vs. LP: -0.40 +/- 49.6 N; ANCOVA: F = 7.1, p = 0.02), estimated 1RM squat strength (APRE: 192.7 +/- 199 N vs. LP: 37.2 +/- 155 N; ANOVA: F = 4.1, p = 0.05) and the number of repetitions performed at a weight of 225 lb (APRE: 3.17 +/- 2.86 vs. LP: -0.09 +/- 2.40 repetitions; ANCOVA: F = 6.8, p = 0.02) compared with the LP group over the 6-week training period. Our findings indicate that the APRE was more effective than the LP means of programming in increasing the bench press and squat over a period of 6 weeks.
When I first started lifting years ago, I was convinced of a few things, things I knew as truths. I knew that chicks were into big muscles. I knew that you need a huge bench press, because that was the only thing people ever asked about. I knew that training hard, like I knew all the pros trained, was how I had to train if I wanted to get results.
Training three days a week? That’s stupid. All the guys in the magazines are in the gym 2-3 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. Three days is chump change.
The logic behind that thought process is easy enough to follow: if the guys at the top are doing it, and you’re working on the assumption you want to be big and strong like they are, then you should do what they do.
If only it were that easy.
Let’s think about the process of adaptation for a moment. What matters is what adaptation implies: you start out in one condition and end up in another. You start out untrained, and over time your body changes itself in response to training. Those changes are important, and you can’t neglect them
We make the assumption that advanced is better with the assumption that Beginning Lifter will respond the same way as Advanced Lifter. Not all people will respond to the same stimulus in the same way. Complexity for the sake of complexity is not a virtue.
About 4-6 years ago when Westside-inspired “conjugate periodization” was all the rage. Everywhere you looked, people were sporting shaved heads and goatees and box squatting in Chuck Taylors. If you are/were a competing powerlifter, especially one who competes in equipment, then more power to you. That kind of training is effective.
But it didn’t stop there. It wasn’t long before Westside for…oh I dunno, Fixing The Kitchen Sink…could be found. Hell, even I’m guilty of this back at the apex of the fad (though in my defense, I don’t reject the WSB methodology or the underlying thought processes behind it). It seemed like everybody was doing a Westside-inspired workout – and that includes a whole lot of people that had no business doing it.
Contrary to popular belief, powerlifting is not general strength training. Powerlifting is a sport with specific needs. Geared powerlifting adds a whole extra dimension to that. If you don’t already have a base of strength and general fitness, the last thing you need to do is 1) start lifting in gear or 2) start training like the top guys that lift in gear (especially the multi-ply lifters).
Before the flames start, let me clarify both of these points. When I see, oh I don’t know, 15-16 year old kids who are clearly underweight lifting in multi-ply suits, that’s just wrong. When I see people doing “speed squats” with the bar, that’s wrong. If you’re a competing powerlifter with a base of strength, knock yourself out. It’s none of my business what you do.
The point is that the Westside fad and that geared powerlifting in a wider sense have skewed (badly) how people look at powerlifting and even general strength training.
I always say that strength is a fundamental quality. You can’t move a weight fast if it’s 90% of your max. You can’t do 20 reps with a deadlift if you can’t pick it up off the ground. Strength enables. Get stronger so that a 90% weight becomes a 60% weight, and it’s going to move fast. You don’t need speed work if you don’t have a base of strength. You need to get stronger.
Up until around the late 1990s, definitely by the early noughts when geared lifting really took off, powerlifters used a lot less intensity (percentage of max intensity, not “effort”) and a lot more volume most of the time – whether it was the old linear periodization like Coan was credited with, or just doing a lot of heavy sets of 5-6 reps and following up with good old bodybuilding stuff, these guys weren’t maxing out all the time.
You would find light workouts in the mix, which aren’t unlike dynamic-effort/speed training, but in general the theme was to hammer the lifts hard once or twice a week, then follow up with some bodybuilding-type assistance work. You’d be surprised at how many of those guys in the 70s and 80s were using leg extensions, leg curls, flyes, curls, and other non-functional exercises as mainstays.
Even now if you look at a lot of the IPF and affiliated (single-ply) lifters, they use a lot more volume while keeping the intensity moderate (Sheiko anyone?). Or just look at how Siders trains – he’s got bits and pieces of Westside in there, along with just about everything else. Or look at how Wendler’s 5/3/1 has become all the rage (for good reason): it’s a reaction to all the complicated methods used by geared powerlifters, and it’s about as simple as you can get even though it follows the same basic weekly template as Westside routines.
Again, this isn’t to say Westside-esque routines “don’t work”. What I’m telling you is that the less experience you have and the less gear you plan to use, the less it syncs up with your needs. If you’re a relative beginner trying to get stronger, there are much better choices.
Training should be targeted to your needs and your level of adaptation. Altering your program to resemble a high-level athlete in any sport is not advisable. If you’re training for general strength, the last thing you want to do is ditch a basic and effective routine for something unreasonably complicated. Complicated programs work for advanced lifters because the advanced lifters usually don’t have any other choice in the matter. They have to specialize.
Beginning lifters don’t have those same needs. What a beginner needs is to learn how to lift, to build a base of muscle and strength, and generally to “get in shape to train”. A simple program focusing on progressive overload is fine, and that’s a big reason I harp on the 5×5 methodology so much. If followed through, that system can carry you a long, long way into your training career. But it’s not the only way, just a very good one.
The point is that you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself. The other old maxim applies here: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you’re doing a productive program that’s netting you gains each week, then don’t stop doing it. Stick with simple until simple stops working.
These days it seems all the rage to squat “low bar”, which also implies a wide stance (slightly to significantly wider than the shoulders) and more focus on the hips & posterior chain as opposed to the quads.
There’s an argument to be made for this, of course, in that it’s probably going to be a stronger position, making better use of bigger, stronger muscle groups. For most people, this may be a good way to go about it.
In powerlifting, the low-bar style is more the rule than the exception, especially in the current era of gear-fetishism. Even IPF-affiliates with single-ply gear tend to make use of the low-bar variety, although they tend to be far less exaggerated about it than their multi-ply cousins. I’m not going to bag on multi-ply feds and lifters, but it’s pretty clear that the squatting in those feds is a whole different animal from a raw (unequipped or belt+wraps only) squat.
But what about the low-bar squat’s shunned cousin, the high-bar (or Olympic-style) squat? I got to thinking about this earlier as I’ve been in a spiral of training ADD about my own lifting, and I recalled something from a few years ago.
At the time, I’d yet to pull over 500 lbs. I think my best ever was something like 475 or so. I went on what we’d now call the Texas Method or the “Bill Starr intermediate” routine: 5 sets of 5 on Monday, one heavy set of 5 on Friday. I don’t have my old journal sitting right here in front of me, but I recall pretty clearly that Wednesday was given over to DLs, and at that point I didn’t do much but 2-3 heavier sets and something not unlike speed pulls (lots of singles with a moderate percentage).
This program was squat heavy and very minimal on the DLs. Importantly, and relevant to the topic, the squatting I did was high-bar, full-depth Olympic style. In fact, here’s a video taken from around that timeframe:
As you can see, the bar’s pretty high up on my traps, my stance is pretty narrow, and I sink it right down to the floor. That’s the kind of squat I’m talking about.
Now to continue the story, I did squats like that, in the 5×5 program, for about six weeks. I really have no idea what kind of weights I was hitting, although I do recall hitting 365×5 at one point (and switching to triples after that). Now here’s the thing – I took an easy week to test my deadlift, and figured I’d give 500 a try. Based on how pulling had felt in prior weeks, I didn’t expect to get more than one rep. I ended up pulling 500×5.
After that, I was sold on the idea of squatting to help the pull. Fast-forward a few years later, and I seem to have forgotten to listen to my own wisdom. What prompted me to write this is my on-going battle to pull 600 lbs by the end of the year, and the fact that my squatting has been severely hampered lately due to two unfortunate injuries that I’d rather not repeat.
I’ve been focusing on the low-bar style of squatting almost exclusively the past few years, and I can say without hesitation that it’s a pure matter of ego. It’s much harder to squat high-bar, though in the end I really have to wonder if it’s not more productive.
Besides my own experience, I’ve found other wisdom to back up my reasoning. Glenn Pendlay, always a great source of lifting-wisdom, has this to say:
1) There is the assumption that high bar squats, done very deep, do not work the posterior chain. I would propose that they do, and the difference between high bar and low bar and the posterior chain is not as large as some would assume it is.
When I converted from PL to OL, I converted from low bar, powerlifting type squats (medium stance) to closer stance high bar squats with a fairly upright torso, although I dont think my torso was ever as upright as some coaches would prefer. I remember my lower back and glutes being very sore over the first couple of workouts, these workouts were with weights around 365lbs to 405lbs. For comparison, my last heavy low bar back squat set done before this was 730lbs for a set of 3, to be fair this was with suit and wraps. I still remember that set, done in the left hand squat rack in the back of Rip’s old gym, because it was supposed to be a set of 5, and I lost my balance and dumped it on the pins on the 4th rep.
My observations at the time were that the longer lever arm created by putting the bar higher on the back was overriding the decreased angle of the back, and making it even harder for my lumbar muscles to maintan a tight back and for my hip extensors to extend the hip. I am not trying to say that HB squats work the posterior chain more than LB squats, I do not personally believe this, I am just making the point that the differences are not as clear cut as some are making them.
2) As I see it, the heart of this argument is really about the carry-over of LB and HB squats to other things, specifically OL. Here are a few general observations about carry-over.
When I was a good LB squatter, that strength did not carry over well to HB or front squats, as evidenced by some of the numbers above. When later in my lifting career, I became a decent HB squatter, it directly and immedietly carried over to being able to do very respectable numbers in the LB squat. My front squat of 550lbX5reps and HB back squat of 606lbsX10 reps, both done without a belt, these sets done about a month apart, allowed me to do several very, very respectable LB squats, and LB box squats with no practice or training on either the LB squat or the LB box squat. My feeling was that strength gained from HB squatting was just more “transferable” to other things than strength gained from LB squatting. Through many conversations with others, and a fair bit of experience coaching ex-powerlifters in the Olympic lifts, I have found that this seems to be quite universal. HB, Olympic style squatting will make you strong at the LB squat, LB squatting with a more bent over stance and less depth will NOT carry over well to the HB, Olympic style squat. I think the carry over from one to another bears considering, because what what we are really talking about here is the carry over from one type of squat or another to a completely different exercise.
Fred Hatfield, AKA “Dr. Squat” who is a respected authority on strength training, has written a couple of very good books on the subject, and who competed at a fairly high level in both gymnastics and OL before achieving a 1008lb squat at 44 years of age and I believe around 255lbs, has argued extensively that not only should the HB squat be used EXCLUSIVELY for the training of athletes, but its qualities of carry over are such that even POWERLIFTERS who are actually competing with a low bar, bent over, only to parallel and sometimes wide stance squat, should in fact do HB, Olympic style squats for much of the off season. In a rough quote of his words, HB squats build strength, LB squats demonstrate it.
Note his points about overall carryover; it would seem his experience agrees with my own – getting strong on the Olympic/high-bar squat will add more to the PL-style squat than the opposite case, and if you’re a conventional puller, it’ll probably help that too (as in my anecdote).
I like to note things like this, because it’s important from a training economy point of view. This is a case where spending some time bumping the high-bar squat will probably transfer over to just about everything else – front squat, low-bar squat, and yes, even my beloved deadlift.
I’d also like to point out that there is a compromise here. You can still do a low-bar style with a closer stance and a lot of depth. I used to call these “IPF squats” for no real reason except that I could. Here’s an example:
Ignore my hip-tucking, that’s an old issue I had and something you should ideally avoid. What I want you to see is that I’ve still got a close stance and still get pretty damn deep; the difference is where the bar sits on my traps.
Glenn says roughly the same thing:
I also think the HB vs LB controversy has less meaning than has been assigned to it… for example, one certainly can squat with the bar in a low position and still do a pretty upright, deep squat, that as far as body position would satisfy any Olympic lifting coach. One can also do a HB squat and get quite bent over, I have personally proven that many times! Simply changing the position of the bar on the back doesnt magically change a good exercise to a bad one, or vice versa.
I like this part too:
I am not so sure that I agree with Fred Hatfields view that HB, Olympic style squats are so superior and have such a superior strength transfer to other activities that not only all athletes should be doing it that way, but even competitive powerlifters who compete with a low bar squat should do much of their training with the HB squat. I am inclined to think in this direction, but it is certainly not as clear cut an issue as the one pertaining to OLers. Fred’s accomplishments and achievements do lend some credibility to his views though.
(The original post can be found here: http://www.board.crossfit.com/showpost.php?p=404418&postcount=93)
So in short, I really have to wonder if all this “powerlifting” I’ve been doing lately is for the worst – most of my squatting has looked more like that second video, low-bar position but still relatively narrow stance and still going pretty deep (minus the hip-tuck, I’ve gotten over that these days thanks to a lot more mobility work).
I think giving the high-bar Oly stuff a shot may be worthwhile.
The title is a topic that’s come up a lot over the years, and it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve written about this quite a bit in the past, on forums and in some detail in Maximum Muscle, but I think this is something that could use some elaboration for my blog audience and those of you that aren’t familiar with my older writings.
I also want to scoop all these upstarts that think they’re on to something. What I want to do is define “CNS Fatigue” and talk a little about fatigue in general, as it relates to strength training and exercise in a broader sense.
Firstly, just so we’re all on the same page, CNS is short for Central Nervous System. That’s the brain and the spinal cord, for you bio-illiterates.
Fatigue, at least in exercise-science terms, is a reduction in your ability to express physical fitness for a given task. Fatigue is a temporary reduction in your ability to perform at some activity, in other words. Note also that fatigue is fairly specific, although like everything else it can overlap with other things. Get tired from lifting weights and you may still be able to go for a run, as an example.
Fatigue can be both slow-acting and fast-acting, depending on the activity and the rest time allowed. Doing singles with 10 minutes rest between each rep will generate less fatigue than doing sets of 10 with 60 second rests between each set. Work out every day and you’ll accumulate more fatigue than working out once a week.
Fatigue is largely a function of the work:rest ratio, in other words. More work and less rest yields higher fatigue.
CNS fatigue (also known as central fatigue) is therefore a reduction in performance attributed to factors in the CNS, as opposed to the peripheral nervous system and neuromuscular system (peripheral fatigue; that is, the rest of the body besides the brain and spinal cord).
The question is, how much can you separate the two? It’s hard to distinguish central (CNS) action from peripheral (rest of the body) action because the CNS tends to influence everything, and is in turn influenced by everything. CNS fatigue will filter down through the rest of the body through hormonal feedback loops and similar mechanisms, so it’s not always so clear-cut. Continue »
