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.
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.
Most of us know the Deadlift as an exercise that works the lower back, along with its effects on the glutes, hamstrings, traps/mid-back, and just about everything else.
Nearly everyone stresses the importance of keeping the lower back extended or at least neutral while deadlifting, or doing any other movement for that matter – that is, keeping your back arched or, better, flat. Stuart McGill, one of the foremost experts on the spine, considers that neutral spine position to be both the strongest (from the standpoint of minimizing damage) and thus the healthiest.
Accordingly the deadlift is taught with a flat lumbar spine. The rationale is to protect and stabilize the spine – which is the role of both the spinal erectors, the numerous abdominal muscles, and most everything else in the trunk. This is good advice, in general. However, there’s reason to question the notion that you must never let your back round under any circumstances. Continue »
I’ve always hated the Good Morning. It gets a lot of attention from a lot of really strong guys, and because of that advice I’ve tried to give it a fair shake over the years. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to find a way to make this an enjoyable exercise.
Usually I consider not liking an exercise to be a good thing, since that pretty much means you suck at it and will benefit from getting it stronger. That’s not what I mean here. Yeah, it’s awkward if you don’t do them regularly, but it’s not just that. The mechanics of the lift are just weird.
I think that part of the problem was trying to follow what Westside was doing a few years back when they were really pushing them as Max Effort exercises. They seem to have backed off that somewhat lately, although it’s still pretty common to see maxed-out GMs floating around.
I mean, it just goes without saying at this point, but this guy is spectacular.
For those of you not aware, I’m talking about Latvian powerlifter Konstantin Konstantinovs. Why is he awesome, you ask?
That’s 954 lbs for a triple, in a belt only. Yeah the plates are on 6-inch boxes. That shouldn’t matter, but you’re not a believer. OK:
That’s 837 lbs for 4 reps and 939 lbs for a single, both raw – and I mean real 100% raw, because he doesn’t even have a belt on. Holy shit. I just about passed out from that much badass in one spot. I love his videos for all the Latvian yelling, which reminds me of Rocky IV, only this time you want the Russian to win.
The best part? He’s a 275er, and at only 30 years old, I’d bet money that he’s going to break the 1000 lb barrier before he’s done. That’s no mean feat, considering that only two men alive have come remotely close to that, Gary Frank and Andy Bolton, and they’re both SHWs.
Konstantinovs is no one-lift pony, either. He’s benched 551 lbs and squatted 727 lbs, both lifts also completely raw (although to be fair, he did at least put on a belt and medical knee-wraps for the squat). He’s just spectacular any way you look at it.
The other thing about the K-man (that’s my clever Internet name, which sounds pretty lame now that I think about it) is his unique form in the deadlift. If you’ll notice, he pulls with a hunchback. His lower back is fairly neutral, as all the experts say it should be, but his upper back is rounding like hell.
This has set a fire under all manner of Internet form nazis, because we all know it’s not Real StrengthTM unless it’s done with absolutely 100% textbook form. Just imagine all the poor physiotherapists and Certified Personal Trainers that are in tears right now because of this round-backing. He really needs to back off to a more reasonable weight, around 135 lbs, and iron out these form errors so he can really be strong one day.
Now that the form-wankers are appeased, I have to admit that I’ve been playing around with this style the last two months during preparation for our upcoming meet. And to be blunt about it, I’m sold. When the weight gets heavy enough, I tend to default to high-hips stiff-leg pulling anyway, along with inevitable lower-back rounding. I could get all worked up over it, but my thought process over the years has been that my body wants to be in that position for a max deadlift, so why fight it?
What I’ve noticed with the hunch-backing method is that it tends to exploit this high-hip starting position and slightly reduces the ROM of the lift – the result is that I can bring more glutes and hamstrings into the lift. I’ve noticed that my starting position is a lot stronger; the bar has more snap off the floor, versus my original style which resembles a clean-style deadlift. I’m convinced that I was wasting a lot of movement by being in a sub-optimal position. In any case, I’m going to pull with this approach in this meet to confirm my suspicions, and then go from there. Who knows, maybe it will help me finally break that 600 lb goal of mine.
For the longest time, I’ve been against most people lifting with any kind of supportive equipment. Maybe against is too strong a word, because I do see a value in some situations. My beef with it is that people with no real business wearing gear end up wearing the most of it.
I’m not really talking about powerlifters here. They’ve got their reasons, and not all of it is the latest trend of gear-whoring (which is why we see squats and benches shooting through the roof since around 2000, while the DL has gone up maybe 50 lbs in 30 years).
No, the quintessential example here is Gym Curl Guy. This guy is in every gym. He’s the one walking around with a leather belt on; if he ever actually touches a weight, he’s doing something like concentration curls.
I have to wonder what this guy is protecting. Since this is also the same guy that will try to tell you that deadlifting will wreck your back, well…you know. It’s an old football injury from high school, surely. Nothing to do with the fact that he’s never bothered actually strengthening the core or anything. Is lifting in supportive gear a good idea? Read more.
So I’ve been conned into doing the CAPO deadlift meet this weekend. For those that don’t know, CAPO is the Australian arm of the WPC – which means it’s non-tested and pretty liberal with equipment use.
Translation: I’m not going to do very much.
Not that it would matter, as I’m doing to be coming into this completely half-ass, with no real training for it. I don’t even have a singlet, so I’m gonna have to lift in shorts. Good times.
No idea what I’m going to aim for. I’m only going to be in a belt, but that usually adds a good bit to my lifting since I almost always train in street clothes. With that plus meet-adrenaline, I might surprised myself.
The plan at the moment is to open at 225kg (495lbs) and go from there.
I don’t tend to buy a lot of fitness/sports/strength-related products. Don’t get me wrong, I have a shelf full of books and a hard drive full of documents – I love reading about all this stuff.
What I mean is that in terms of the sheer amount of products out there, and what I tend to see people actually shelling out money for, I don’t buy a lot of things.
It’s just not common for me to see something that interests me enough to bother with. Even the stuff that looks interesting can turn out to be lukewarm, worth a read but not worth the cost. So it goes.
That said, if it’s on the right subject I’ll still get worked up. When I first read that Mike was putting this together, I got excited.
In the last segment , I went over the concept of high-volume/high-frequency training.
To summarize briefly, high volume weight training as used by bodybuilders isn’t very productive; but a high volume of work used by strength athletes can be of benefit.
Why doesn’t it work so well for bodybuilders? Bro-ish bodybuilders use high volume because they’re after a pump. In their mind, the pump is more important than anything else; more important than progression, weight on the bar, or tension-time.
Since those concepts are the responsible factor behind muscle hypertrophy (aka, bigger muscles), these are what you should work on. Something like 5 sets of 5, or 3-4 sets of 10, or something along those lines will go a lot farther towards getting a muscle bigger than doing 10 variations of the same exercise for 5 sets of 12 each.
The story changes for a strength athlete. When you have an exercise that you want to improve, it makes sense to train it often. The nervous system likes repetition. If you’re a powerlifter, you want to get good at the squat, bench press, and deadlift. If you’re an Olympic weightlifter, you want to improve the clean & jerk and the snatch. Continue »
