Contrary to the bodybuilding mythology, true strength training is not about your muscles but about your mind.
In any endeavor mental focus delivers more than any physical transformation, a concept clearly understood by martial arts masters. “Focus is the ability to control the muscles of the body in a coordinated effort and then contract them to their maximum degree…” explains Jack Hibbard, a Green Beret vet and expert in tameshiwari, the ancient art of breaking boards and bricks barehanded, “The deeper the concentration, the tenser the contraction of the muscle; and the tenser the contraction, the stronger the muscle grows.”
Like I said before, it all boils down to tension. Effective ‘mind over muscle’ strength training can be summed up as honing your skill to contract your muscles harder. In Russian sports science there is even a term, skill-strength.
Some bodybuilders are quick to argue: “But it’s all technique!” So what if it is? “The most important aspect one can learn to improve strength is to learn proper technique,’ bench press champion George Halbert sets the record straight. “There is a mode of thinking out there that I describe as “He’s not strong, he’s just got good technique.” This is just confused thinking… Have you ever heard anyone say, “he is not a good shooter, he just has good technique” or “he’s not really fast, he just has good technique”?”
An important point to drive home: ‘technique’ does not refer just to the groove of a particular exercise! There are two generalized strength skills that apply to and fortify all displays of strength: staying tight and power breathing.
“Keep every body part tight during the entire movement.” This is one of Ernie Frantz’s famous Commandments of Powerlifting. Frantz, whose book had the rare honor of being translated into Russian, is a legend of powerlifting and a successful bodybuilder with a rugged physique along the lines of Franco Columbo’s. He swears that practicing tightening up his entire body throughout the day has helped his strength. Practice. That loaded word again.
I have addressed Power Breathing in many of my writings. In a nutshell, if you compare your brain to a CD player and your muscles to its speakers, your abdominal cavity is the amplifier, the volume control. The greater the pressure inside your belly – the greater your strength in any effort. Unless you have health restrictions, practice high-pressure breathing in the context of bodybuilding exercises and by itself, and you will get stronger in every lift.
Then, of course, there is the specific practice of your pet lifts. But all strength practice follows the same laws that govern the practice of any skill. How do you improve your tennis serve? Do you hit the court once a week and keep on serving until your balls could not knock out a sick mosquito and you can barely lift your arm? No, you come to the court as often as possible, ideally more than once a day, and slam those little yellow balls until you feel that your serves are about to slow down. Why not do the same for your iron games? It worked for old-timer Arthur Saxon, who put up 400 pounds overhead with one arm.
The basic tenet of motor learning is specificity. Applied to strength, it means heavy weights. But not super heavy! As they say, practice does not make perfect; perfect practice does. An ugly, shaky, max is not perfect; a 70-80% 1RM controlled lift is. Never train to failure for the same reason, always leave a rep or two in the bank.
Heavy weights imply low reps. The perfect reps for strength are 1-6. A narrower 4-6 range is even better. Fives build muscle in addition to strength. Get plenty of rest between your sets and exercises. Long breaks will enable you to keep lifting ‘perfect’ heavy poundages. No pump and burn here!
Here is another axiom of motor learning: frequent brief practices are superior to infrequent long ones. Russian researchers discovered that breaking up a strength workout into smaller units is very effective. In other words, one set of five every day is better than five sets of five every five days. Very counterculture in the bodybuilding community, but I presume that you are more interested in making gains than in fitting in.
With all of the above in mind, here is the program.
THE 5X5X5 MIND OVER MUSCLE PROGRAM
1. Select five basic exercises for your whole body.
2. Perform all of them five days a week, Monday through Friday.
3. Do only one work set of five per exercise, leaving a couple of reps in the bank.
4. Focus on staying tight, power breathing, and the perfect groove.
5. Taper in week four, peak your 1RM in week five, and switch to a different type of routine.
Select five basic exercises for your whole body, for instance, the three powerlifts, pullups, and dumbbell side bends. Or clean-and-presses, deadlifts, dips, barbell curls, and Janda situps. You get the idea.
Perform all of them five days a week, Monday through Friday. Do only one work set of five per exercise. It will feel very odd to wrap up a workout when you still feel so good, but that is the way neural training is. Steve Justa, a supremely strong and muscular man, once said, “You should feel stronger at the end of every workout.”
The weight is ideal if you have managed it with a couple of reps to spare. To establish that perfect poundage start every workout with a couple of lighter singles. For instance, yesterday you squatted 300x5 and felt that you could have done 300x7. Today squat 225x1, 255x1, and 275x1. The feel of 275 should tell you whether you should stay with 300, go up, or go down. And don’t sweat it too hard if you do not hit it right, occasional easier and harder sets will do you good by introducing more variety. The usual 5x5x5 pattern is a very strong start on Monday, a PR on Tuesday, Wednesday could go either way. Thursday and Friday are downhill as fatigue builds up. By Monday you will be rested and ready to smash new records.
Powerlifters and weight lifters have learned the hard way that trying to continuously go up does not work. Through trial and error, they have figured out that if one takes it easy for a week, after three weeks of hard training, week five will be awesome. So unload in week four. Use this simple technique: work up in singles to establish the poundage for your usual set of five, then do only three reps with it.
In week five work up to a comfortable single on Monday. That means whatever you can put up without getting psyched up, usually in the ballpark of 90% 1RM. Russians call this poundage ‘the training max’ and Bulgarians lift it daily. Your Monday deadlift workout might be 315x1, 365x1, 385x1, 405x1.
Go for a max single on Tuesday. Repeat his Monday ramp-up and finish it with a new PR or PRs. The lifter in the above example would pull 425x1, possibly 435x1, and, if he feels unstoppable, 445x1.
THE MIND OVER MUSCLE TAPER AND PEAK
1. Do a triple with the weight you would have normally used for a set of five in week four.
2. In week five work up to a comfortable, around 90% 1RM, single on Monday and max on Tuesday.
3. Take the rest of the week off and switch to a different type of routine the week after.
Take the rest of the week off and switch to a different type of program the week after. You will be strong, confident, and raring to go back to volume training.
You may never admit it in public, but you know that the number one reason you are bodybuilding is to improve your self-esteem. Face the music: no amount of meat will give you true confidence. The following Internet post caught my eye: “I’ve found something remarkable about my [strength] training. I’m a lot more confident than I was as [just] a bodybuilder. When all I cared about was getting my muscles bigger and bigger, I still had horrible self-esteem problems. With strength training, though… I feel myself getting stronger, and it’s had a profound impact on how I see myself.” Strength gives confidence that does not go away when your muscles shrink after a missed meal.
There are many effective ways to build strength, but they all boil down to low rep non-exhaustive training. I designed the program outlined here for my S.W.A.T. clients in the Western states. “… I have tried all the conventional methods being taught for 10 years now, with little to no gain in strength. This training, in one week, has already done more for me than all the others put together…” observed a Range Master/Advanced Instructor from one of the agencies in New Mexico at the end of one of my courses.
THE ‘3 TO 5’ METHOD:
STRENGTH TRAINING GUIDELINES FOR SPECIAL
WEAPONS AND TACTICS TEAMS
3-5 Exercises (total for the whole body)
3-5 Sets
3-5 Repetitions
3-5 Minutes of rest between the sets
3-5 Days of rest for each exercise
The simplicity is obvious. If you cannot remember the program’s guidelines turn in your driver’s license and do not operate heavy machinery. Start out by selecting three to five exercises for the whole body. Three of these must be ‘big’ lifts such as deadlifts or squats. Variations are many; you have twelve to choose from in the table below.
TWELVE POWER DRILL COMBINATIONS
RECOMMENDED WITH THE ‘3 TO 5’ METHOD
• Squat
• Bench press
• Deadlift
• Pullup
• ‘Pistol’ or one-legged squat
• Double kettlebell snatch
• Clean-&-press (reclean the bell before each press)
• Extended deadlift (use small plates or stand on a box and squat low)
• Hanging leg raise
• One arm dumbbell clean and push press (reclean the bell before each press)
• Towel pullup
• Split squat
• Pullup
• Dip
• Dumbbell snatch
• Power clean
• Incline bench press
• Front squat
• Squat
• Barbell shrug
• Dips
• One arm pushup
• Good morning
• One arm lat row
• Double kettlebell or dumbbell C&P (reclean the bells before each press)
• Sumo deadlift
• Janda situp
• Close grip bench press
• One arm deadlift
• Jump shrug with two kettlebells or dumbbells
• Power snatch
• Squat
• Handstand pushup
• High pull
• Side press
• Box squat
Bodybuilders may add two exercises of their choice. You can pick isolation exercises if you wish but you must stick to the low rep power format specified for the whole program.
TWELVE SECONDARY BODYBUILDING
EXERCISE COMBINATIONS
RECOMMENDED WITH THE ‘3 TO 5’ METHOD
• Barbell curl
• Incline close grip bench press
• Floor fly
• Preacher curl
• Lateral raise
• Bent over lateral raise
• Alternate dumbbell bench press
• Alternate dumbbell curl
• Incline fly
• Hammer curl
• Concentration curl
• French press
• Janda situp
• Incline bench alternate dumbbell curl
• Alternate dumbbell military press
• Reverse curl
• EZ bar curl
• EZ bar skull crusher
• Arnold press
• Cable crunch
• Rope curl
• Triceps pushdown
• Thick bar curl
• Thick bar close grip bench press from power rack pins
Military, law enforcement, and other hard living types should pick two secondary drills for the forearms, neck, or midsection instead of the above bodybuilding exercises. For instance, heavy gripper work plus neck harness exercises. Or thick bar reverse curls plus Janda situps.
TWELVE TACTICAL STRENGTH SECONDARY
DRILL COMBINATIONS RECOMMENDED WITH THE ‘3 TO 5’ METHOD
• Sledgehammer leverage drill
• Hanging leg raise
• Front half bridge
• Barbell finger rolls
• Janda situp
• Reverse curl with a thick bar
• Rolling bridge
• Heavy-duty gripper work
• Straddle style one arm deadlift
• Finger extensions against a rubber band or in a bucket of sand
• Wrist roller
• Headstand leg raise
• Neck harness work
• Full contact twist
• One finger partial deadlifts (all finger pairs)
• Suitcase style one arm deadlift
• One-legged deadlift
• Fingertip pullups
• Wrist extension with an EZ curl bar
• Wrist flexion with an EZ curl bar
• Thick bar deadlift
• Neck harness work
• Bent press
• Pinch gripping two barbell plates
Do 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps with 3-5 minutes of rest in between. These powerlifting rest periods will seem like eternity to a busy bodybuilder. Deal with it. You may alternate – not superset! – sets of two or more exercises. For instance, C&P – 2min – DL – 2min – C&P, etc.
The high-tension techniques I have written about in my books Power to the People! and The Naked Warrior are essential. Train tight and heavy but pull the plugs on your sets when you still have one or two reps in the bank. Ignore the bodybuilding intensity folklore about ‘doing as many reps as you can and then two more’ and gain!
“I used to be enthralled at ‘the Barbarians’ and Dorian Yates and their balls to the wall training style,” writes US Military Powerlifting National Champion Jack Reape in his article on dragondoor.com. “Getting those hard fought last couple reps were the key to getting bigger and stronger I believed. WRONG! Intensity is not a grimace and a backwards baseball cap, it is a mathematical formula! That Mathematical formula is based on all the reps you do above about 40-50% of 1RM…”
All you need is to train heavy and stay tight; failure is unnecessary and counterproductive. And if you disdainfully blow this bit of advice off as ‘sissy’, do it in 500-pound bencher Jack Reape’s face. It will be amusing to watch you fly.
Add weight when you can, without training on the nerve. Practice each exercise every three to five days. How you split them up is up to you. If you are short on time follow the split by Igor Sukhotsky, M.S. Comrade Sukhotsky, a Russian nationally ranked weightlifter turned full contact karate fighter, squats, bench presses, deadlifts, and practices good mornings and full contact twists three times in two weeks. Monday-Friday-next week’s Wednesday.
Or you could train three times a week and alternate two workouts. To use Sukhotsky’s workout as an example, do squats, good mornings, and full contact twists on Monday. Bench and pull on Wednesday. On Friday do your SQ & Co. again.
Experienced lifters can practice more sophisticated splits within the same three to five days of rest formula. For instance, you could train three times a week, squat and pull three times in two weeks and bench twice a week:
It is also fine, if you want to split the workout further to train almost every day. The ‘3 to 5’ setup offers enough choices to suit anyone.
Waving the training load up and down is essential for progress. There are many complex periodization systems out there that would put a Ph. D. to sleep. Just say no and keep it simple. After three weeks of hard training just reduce your volume or the total reps by 40-50%. In the traditional Ostapenko model practiced by many Russian powerlifters, the sets get reduced. 4x4 becomes 2 sets of 4 reps. 5 sets of 5 reps taper to 3 sets of 5 reps.
I prefer cutting the reps instead of the sets: 4 sets of 2, 5 sets of 3. With the weight you used on your last heavy week; you are tapering and this is supposed to be easy! “I pushed myself hard for three weeks, to the point where I was really getting fatigued,” reports David Valentiner, RKC. “Then… I really reduced my volume … during the 4th week… and I felt better than ever.” In the first week of the next month you are guaranteed to see great gains in strength.
Power to you!
There are two kinds of vodka: good and very good. A simple Russian lad named Misha was too preoccupied with his thoughts to notice which kind he had been consuming. He scratched his head: why do automatic weapons have to be so complex and unreliable? Unburdened by formal education and too stupid to know that a more straightforward design was impossible, Mikhail Kalashnikov put together a weapon that would become the choice of many armies and most terrorists for years to come: the AK-47.
About the same time a poor boy, Paul from Georgia, came up with the Kalashnikov assault rifle equivalent in the iron game: Progressive Movement Training. Paul Anderson would do partial repetitions in the squat, with a weight he could not full squat. Over a period of time he gradually lengthened the movement until he worked his way down to parallel with a new record.
The science behind Progressive Movement Training and the results this method delivered were decades ahead of their time. It took generations of Ph.D. bearing geeks to clue in how PMT produced Paul Anderson’s 1,200-pound squat sans powerlifting gear, a mark that will remain untouched way into this millennium. That might give you a hint why the hard to impress Russians called Paul ‘the Wonder of Nature’.
Paul Anderson recommended to start squatting from a pin about four inches below the lockout, with a weight about one hundred pounds over your one rep max full squat. “I realize that this is a very light weight in comparison to what you can quarter squat with,” admits Big Paul, “but this is part of the plan.” Burning out on max singles is not.
Two sets of twenty to twenty five reps are performed. “I would say the secret lies in taking a lighter weight that you can do many repetitions with and just working it down that way.” It is amusing that in his recommendation to do high reps in the Progressive Movement Training routine Paul again beat the science geeks to the punch. Much later Meyers (1967) discovered that the greater is the number of contractions, the higher is the transfer of strength to the untrained part of the exercise ROM.
Ironically, in Paul’s day scientists did not believe that such carryover was possible at all. Strength gains were thought to be highly joint angle specific, that is limited to the exercise range at which you train (Williams & Stutzman, 1959; Gardner, 1963, etc.). Only a few years before Paul’s death the lab rats caught up with his instinctive knowledge. The new generation of scientists realized that while most gains indeed occur at the specific training angles, there is a transfer to the untrained angles as well. In fact, most carryover of strength takes place in the range of plus-minus twenty degrees from the exercised angle (Knapik, Mawdsley & Ramos, 1983). By the way, the scientific term for Paul Anderson’s method is neurological carryover training. It was coined by 900-pound squatter and Powerlifting World Record Holder Dr. Fred Clary.
Every three workouts – once in three days for Paul, and once in three weeks for mere mortals - lower the power rack pins three inches and knock off three reps. You may want to experiment with smaller drops, one or two inches. Anderson recommended one-inch sheets of plywood for precise movement graduation. It is not the only way. Paul’s mentor and ‘world’s best deadlifter’ Bob Peoples would pull his deads standing in a hole he had dug in the ground and fill it up with dirt as his strength grew! Peoples’ deadlift was another remarkable success of neurological carryover training: 725 at 178 pounds of bodyweight in the days before steroids, speed, industrial strength powerlifting belts, and canvas underwear!
Bud Jeffries quarter squatting 1,700 pounds with Iron Mind’s Buffalo Bar™. Photo courtesy StrongerMan.com. This photo originally appeared in the Iron Mind 2002 Product Catalog.
Watch an awesome display of one-gear power!
I have observed that squatters with weak hip flexors have a hell of a time with graduated squats. This muscle group’s job is to ensure tightness when descending the last two inches into the hole.
Keep lengthening the movement and knocking off reps until you are down to two repetitions. Then take a few days off – Paul himself rested for two or three days – and try for a new personal best in the full squat. “I believe that you will find that you have gained quite a bit of strength during this drawn out Progressive Movement routine,” promised the ‘Wonder of Nature’.
When you are down to two reps, most likely you are not going to be all the way in the hole. Don’t fret. Neither was Paul. Your max will still go up because you will have worked down to your sticking point.
According to Dr. Fred Clary, the reason you are not likely to get all the way down, is a sharp transition from one muscle group to another, at some point of the lift. “I have found that whether I be pressing, bench pressing, squatting, etc., I seem to have to change gear as the bar travels,” admits Big Paul himself. “On the other hand, I have seen fellows who rammed a press to arms length or stood straight up with a dead lift in an almost sudden gesture, without any evidence of this “changing gears”.
From my coaching experience I can tell you that the latter lifters are more likely to work a heavy partial into a full movement. Generally they squat with a wide stance. You will do yourself a favor if you get Bud Jeffries’ How I Squatted 900 Pounds video from Strongerman.com. Watch Bud squat and deadlift: a smooth display of one-gear power.
I have observed that squatters with weak hip flexors have a hell of a time with graduated squats. This muscle group’s job is to ensure tightness when descending the last two inches into the hole. When a bodybuilder with weak hip flexors reaches this depth with a bar bending weight, he just collapses. If that is you, learn to ‘pull’ yourself down into the hole with your ‘situp muscles’, before embarking on the Paul Anderson program. Rock bottom front squats would also come in handy.
Anderson and Peoples’ unique program will work even better on the deadlift. It is easier to perform a shorter movement without ‘changing gears’. To make neurological carryover training work on the bench, you must change your groove – so the bar travels in a straight line from your sternum slightly towards your feet, rather than arcs toward your face. That will ensure that the pecs do not suddenly surrender the weight to the shoulders and triceps, but dominate the whole movement with constant assistance from the latter. You should also sort of push the bar from your elbows rather than your hands. It is a subtle point, but it will make a huge difference in the quality of your pec workout and the amount of weight you are going to put up.
These days there is an exercise far superior to the power rack bench press – the board press. Lifters used to press from the pins set in a cage at the sticking point level. The problem was, unlike the deadlift, the BP does not start from a dead spot. So, even if one got stronger in the power rack, he did not always get a carryover to his regular bench groove.
A few years ago a so-called ‘board press’ has emerged from the powerlifting Westside Barbell Club in Columbus. Set a couple of boards, two, four, or six inches thick depending on your sticking point, on your chest. Lower the bar to the boards, pause while staying tight, and press back. The exercise has a feel very similar to the regular bench and thus has a great transfer of strength.
Champion bencher J.M. Blakley warns not to bounce the bar off the boards. He mentions another innovative cheating technique to avoid: letting the bar and the boards sink into the chest, then heaving the works up with a chest push. Treat the board press they way you should the conventional BP – and you will do fine.
The board press – the ultimate assistance exercise for a big bench.
Set a couple of boards, two, four, or six inches thick depending on your sticking point, on your chest.
The exercise has a feel very similar to the regular bench and thus has a great transfer of strength.
A direct grove will also benefit your one rep max because changing the direction of the movement with a maximal weight tends to stall it and lead to a failed attempt (Rodionov, 1967). As Nietsche put it a century earlier, “formula for success, a straight line.”
By no means should you limit the application of neurological carryover training to ‘big’ compound exercises like the powerlifts. Because the same muscles start and finish the movement, in isolation drills like the barbell curl, you would do yourself a favor by applying the Progressive Movement principles to one joint moves as well. Start the graduated standing barbell curl in a power rack with a one-inch movement and work your way down. Make a point of keeping your abs tight and don’t lean back. It helps to think of pulling yourself towards the barbell rather than the other way around.
Just like I said before, don’t accept ‘the full range of motion’ as dogma. Try Paul Anderson’s quantum alternative and you might leapfrog from a 500 squat to 550 without even bothering with anything in between!
Russian sports science is crystal clear on the roles of volume and intensity in training. Intensity delivers short-term strength gains for peaking, largely due to neural adaptations. Volume makes lasting changes in the muscles and other tissues. With that in mind, here is a high tonnage program that will easily pack ten to fifteen pounds of beef on your frame in two months, provided that other gaining variables such as nutrition and rest are taken care of.
Surprisingly, the routine will not take much of your time. On a couple of Mondays you will suffer for over 90 min, but on the rest of the training days you will be in and out in no time flat, sometimes in as little as twenty minutes and fresh as a daisy. This is purposeful; workouts greatly varying in length and difficulty are a lot more effective than conventional flatliners.
One of the most efficient ways to crank up the volume, while simultaneously refining your lifting technique and sparing your nervous system, is a modified DeLorme Method.
Right after World War II Dr. Thomas DeLorme of the Harvard Medical School devised an effective set-rep scheme for building muscle and might. Deceptively simple, the DeLorme Method called for a set of ten reps with half your ten rep max, then, after a brief rest, another tenner with three quarters of your top ten, and finally an all out set of whatever you can get with the ten rep maximum (DeLorme, 1945, 1946).
The DeLorme Method causes significant strength increases when employed for a short term (DeLorme & Watkins, 1948; Leighton et al., 1967). Although more effective strength training protocols do exist, DeLorme’s ascending sets build an excellent foundation for heavy power training. A friend of mine, Mike, progressed from hardly being able to pick up his toddler without back pain to pulling 475 after I put him on a routine that rotated the original DeLorme with working up to a heavy single every other workout. What might interest you more than Mike’s powerlifting exploits is the fact that ladies refer to him as ‘a hunk of a man’. The 50-75-100 approach builds slabs of beef quicker than you can say ‘moo’!
In the Soviet military, a few of my brothers-in-arms dug a bigger than regulation size physique and made spectacular gains, with a modified DeLorme workout – despite excessive exercise, sleep deprivation, stress, and a limited protein intake.. Ironically, even though you can find references to DeLorme’s work in most Russian university weightlifting textbooks, these bodybuilders in uniform had never heard of the American scientist and the 50-75-100 percentages were a pure coincidence. The Red Army trained with ‘kettlebells’, cast iron balls with handles that came in fractions of a pood or 16kg. Standard K-bells came in three sizes, one, one and a half, and two poods; 16, 24, and 32kg respectively.
The military press with two kettlebells.
A Russian soldier would strip down to ‘uniform two’, BDU pants and boots, and start with a few repetitions with the lightest, 16kg, kettlebell or bells. After a brief rest, anywhere from a few seconds to a minute, he would repeat the drill for the same number of reps with the next kettlebell up, or 24kg. Then 32kg, and after a brief rest start all over with 16kg.
The technique was called ‘a weight ladder’. Salagi, or greenhorns, were specifically instructed not to pyramid like this: 16, 24, 32, 32, 24, 16. A pyramid quickly burned out the muscles whereas a ladder pushed and backed off, thus maximizing anabolic workload: 16, 24, 32; 16, 24, 32; 16, 24, 32; 16, 24, 32; 16, 24, 32… Longer rest periods were usually recommended between each series. Sometimes another exercise was inserted between series or a number of series. For the record, a series is defined in Russian textbooks and gyms as a specified sequence of sets that would be performed more than once, e.g. (16kg x 5, 24kg x 5, 32kg x 5).
You were supposed to try to stick to the same rep count – whatever you could hack on your top sets without going into the do or die mode – for the light, medium, and heavy sets. You were not supposed to rep out with the lighter bells. It goes without saying, five repetitions with 32kg are twice as hard as the same with 16kg, but that was intentional. Constant loading and unloading is easier on your head and spurs greater gains. You can think of the DeLorme method as a miniature powerlifting cycle compressed from weeks into minutes.
Naturally, with fixed weights, rigidly sticking to the classic ten-rep protocol was not an option. You were stronger on one legged front squats than military presses and your buddy was in a league of his own. Troopers improvised. Sets of five happened to be in big favor – and indeed they had been tested successfully in a clinical setting by E. Krusen (1949), in a protocol similar to DeLorme’s.
Fives is exactly what you are going to do on the following DeLorme inspired program. They are safer and more effective than higher reps. The numbers will still be based on your 10RM to give you a running start.
Another modification of the original protocol is the introduction of the time tested heavy-light-medium approach as an alternative to busting your chops every workout. Read Bill Starr’s classic Strongest Shall Survive to learn the logic behind the H-L-M setup.
You will be doing only two basic drills, the bench press and the powerlifting style deadlift. Tight and bounce free. A one second pause on the chest for the press (do not relax); a one second pause on the floor for the pull. No arms, no calves, nothing else. The only acceptable addition is a couple of heavy sets of abdominal work.
Bench before deadlifting. The dead is not affected by the bench as much as the other way around. The ‘rule’ that states that ‘bigger’ exercises should always be done first does not apply when you are stressing different muscle groups.
DELORME METHOD INSPIRED SIX WEEK HYPERTROPHY CYCLE
Monday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5, 100% 10RM x 5) x max
Wednesday (50% 10RM x 5) x the number of series performed on Monday
Friday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x the number of series
performed on Monday
• Do two exercises, bench presses and deadlifts, in that order.
• Perform all your sets at a medium to slow tempo with a one second pause on the bottom.
• Rest for approximately 1 min or as long as it takes to adjust the poundage between sets. Rest for three minutes between series.
• On Monday perform as many series as possible in good form. When you have successfully completed five series, add five pounds to the bench press and ten pounds to the deadlift 10RM and recalculate the 50% and 75%.
You will start with a conservative ten-rep max instead of an aggressive five-rep max to meet the requirements of ‘cycling’. This fundamental principle of training states that your progress will cease if you are always training at your limit. For best gains you must start easy, build up to a PR, and back off to easier training again before climbing the next peak. I know that starting out light and training not to failure will mess with your HIT brainwashed head, but that is between you and your therapist.
Assuming that your 10RM in the deadlift is 200 pounds – a rough estimate will suffice – on Monday you will perform the (100x5, 150x5, 200x5) series as many times as you can. Stop when you can barely make 200x5. The only rest you get between sets is whatever takes you to add plates. Rest for three minutes between series. Walk around and loosen up your limbs as if you are shaking water off.
Assuming you have completed four series on Monday, on Wednesday you will do only (100x5) x 4. This light session will aid recovery and painlessly increase your weekly tonnage.
Friday will see you doing another four series, this time with (100x5, 150x5). This medium day is building back up to a tough Monday workout.
On Monday you shall hopefully make five or six full size series of (100x5, 150x5, 200x5). When you have made a fiver, it is time to add weight to the 10RM you have used in planning your workouts. The deadlift calls for a ten-pound jump, unless your 10RM is higher than 400 pounds or lower than 100 pounds. 200 + 10 = 210. Recalculate your 50% and 75% sets based on 210, 105 and 160, and keep on plugging away. Add only five pounds to your bench press.
Since the souped up DeLorme workout calls for up to seventy five reps per exercise, most bodybuilders, spoiled by trendy infrequent low set training, will be totally unprepared for such a manly workload. That is why before tackling the real thing you should do a two-week long introductory cycle that gently builds up the tonnage.
INTRODUCTORY CYCLE
WEEK 1
Monday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x 3
Wednesday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x 4
Friday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x 5
WEEK 2
Monday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5, 100% 10RM x 5) x 2
Wednesday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x 7
Friday (50% 10RM x 5, 75% 10RM x 5) x 5
You will also get a chance to get into the deadlift groove; I can bet dollars against roubles that you have not been doing those lately. By the way, Comrade, none of those ‘fitness model’ straight legged deads with your neck crooked to the side to watch your butt in the mirror! The good ole’ powerlifting style deadlift. Conventional or sumo, your choice. Ask a PLer to show you how. And no, you are not supposed to wear a belt, so make sure to base your percentages on a beltless ten-rep max. No straps either. Chalk up and use the staggered powerlifting grip: one hand facing forward and the other back. Don’t forget to switch hands to even out the load on your back. Make sure to keep your triceps flexed to avoid pulling with your arms and hurting your elbows.
The bench press, even though you think that you have it down pat, also requires a precise technique, especially when you are handling such an Olympian workload. If you do not want your shoulders to flare up, you will make a point of keeping them pressed into the bench, your shoulder blades pinched together, and your chest as high as possible. If you do not long for aching elbows, you will not snap them out at the lockout.
Off to the gym you go!
Behold the anabolic power of a cyclical high tonnage regimen! When a long lost friend bumps into you two months from now, checks out your newly bulging physique, and exclaims, “Weren’t you a hardgainer?!”, give him Inspector Clouseau’s uppity look: “Not any more!”
It was the mid-1980s, the euphoric years of Gorbachev’s perestroyka and glastnost, when bodybuilding exploded in the Soviet Union. And exploded it did. Under the direction of retired weightlifters, scrawny kids from the rough part of town filled out into he-men worthy of a Charles Atlas ad. All that on a porridge and potato based diet often supplemented with soy animal feed for extra protein. Where there is a will, there is a way. Hard and ingenious training overcame cards clearly not dealt in their favor.
The following routine born in the basements of tough town Lyubertsi is unique, yet very simple, as all things that impress.* It got a two thumbs up from Sergey Zaytsev, the USSR champion in BOTH bodybuilding and powerlifting. Two workouts were alternated, usually three times a week:
RUSSIAN BODYBUILDING UNDERGROUND
‘FATIGUE CYCLING ‘PROGRAM
The exercises listed are nothing special and neither are the loading parameters. If you look at the routine carefully, you will notice that both workouts are made up of identical exercises, sets, and reps. The only difference is the order of the drills. Explains a veteran Soviet bodybuilder who gained big on this program, “As a rule, you can lift more weight in a given exercise in the beginning, rather than the middle or the end of your workout. However, if you have already conquered that weight fresh in the past and have no psychological barriers about it, you should be able to work yourself up and make the numbers late in the workout. The next workout, when you are scheduled to do the same exercise fresh, the old weight will be too light and you will definitely add more.”
What is the point? – In a perfect world, you could add five pounds to all your lifts every workout and grow stronger ever after. Before you know it, you would be benching a grand. Nice try. It is too bad, but in this galaxy the physiological law of accommodation spoils all the fun in just a few short weeks. The law states that an organism gets desensitized and stops adapting to a training stimulus after a period of time. Your body figures, “Hey, it hasn’t killed me, why bother to adapt?” At this point a change in the program is called for.
This is where most bodybuilders screw up. The easiest thing to do is to simply overhaul your workout completely: new exercises, sets, reps, new everything. The day after you are sore to the bone and happy as a clam. But are you making gains or just fooling yourself?
Scientists who study complex systems – the human body is one of them – know that in order to thrive, these systems must teeter ‘on the edge of chaos’. To use a political analogy, a country with no structure, anarchy, is doomed. And a totalitarian state with too much structure such as the Soviet Union is bound to stagnate eventually.
If the training schedule is totally erratic, there is no structure or direction. You get very sore but you are not building much muscle and even less strength. If, on the other hand, your training hardly changes at all, you will hit the wall and stay there for years. What is required is enough change to stimulate gains but not too much, so your training does not lose its focus.
Until now the only surefire way of doing this was powerlifting style cycling. You stick pretty much to the same exercises but after reaching a PR you back off to very light weights to make your muscles get somewhat out of shape and become responsive to training again. The author of Brawn Stuart McRobert aptly named this process ‘softening up’. Although hard to handle psychologically, cycling is the only training structure that is reliable over a long haul.
Not any more. The Russian ‘fatigue cycling’ technique is another dependable plateau buster in your strength and muscle building toolbox. The routine maintains the structure (the same exercises, sets, and reps) but jolts the system with the fresh stimulus of a new exercise order.
Here is a powerlift-based routine structured according to the fatigue cycling principle. Train twice a week, for instance Mondays and Thursdays, rotating the three listed workouts. Wrap up each workout with some ab work, low reps also. If you wish, you can do some light beach work such as curls on Saturdays.
And one more routine for you to choose from. Rotate the two workouts and train three times a week.
FATIGUE CYCLING ‘NEVER LIE DOWN TO TRAIN’ PROGRAM
Follow any of the above routines for as long as you make gains, then switch to a basic powerlifting cycle without changing the exercise. If you have a couple of years of training under your belt do not feel the pressure to up the poundage for each ‘fresh’ lift in every workout. Staying with the same numbers for two or three sessions is legit for an experienced muscle head.
Here is an arm specialization routine that is built around the fatigue cycling principle. Do the workout A on Mondays and B on Thursdays. On Tuesdays and Fridays perform the infamous twenty-rep squat routine plus 5x5 of your favorite ab exercise.
In the Soviet Special Forces we successfully applied the fatigue cycling principle to a number of exercises we were tested on, especially pullups and snatches with a 53-pound kettlebell. In fact, we did a lot of strength training once fatigued from a ruck march, a run, or an obstacle course. You can apply this setup to your sport conditioning as well. For instance, a fighter could alternate strength training before and after his martial art practice. In addition to cutting back on plateaus, such training builds guts.
In order to get good at something you must practice it specifically. On the other hand, if you keep doing the same thing you will eventually plateau. This is the conflict between the laws of specificity and accommodation. So effective training must be ‘same but different’! A puzzle for a Zen master. Solved.
* When referring to training in Lyubertsi in this and other pieces, I have used material from the book Bodybuilding Our Way by ‘Dr. Lyuber’.
There are many effective routines but few are powerful enough to acquire cult status. The Five-Sets-of-Five… The Twenty-Rep-Super-Squats… The Smolov…
Shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, powerlifting coach S. Y. Smolov, Master of Sports designed what is undeniably the hardest and the most effective squat program ever. This strong statement is backed up with extraordinary gains from lifters on both sides of the pond. After I wrote up the Smolov in Powerlifting USA magazine a few years ago I was swamped with incredible success stories. Here is one. A drug free master lifter took his squat from 560 pounds to 665 in thirteen weeks! Then he went on to win the world lifetime drug free master title and to set a world squat record in his class! Usually, a report like this is followed by ‘individual results may vary’ in small print. Not in the Smolov’s case! Such gains are typical. I repeat: many advanced strength athletes have added 100 pounds to their squats in just over four months!
Now for the bad news. Quoting the above powerlifter, “I have never worked harder in 25+ years of exercise.” Coming from a world champion, these words carry weight. The original Smolov routine calls for four heavy squat days a week totaling 136 reps with very heavy weights!
I am a realist; most iron athletes just do not have the conditioning to survive the full Smolov. Following is a kinder, gentler version of the program adapted to two days a week.
THE RUSSIAN SQUAT ASSAULT
The percentages are based on your current, not projected, max. Review the matrix to get a feel for the routine. You will be squatting with 70, 75, 80, and finally 85% of your max on four consecutive workouts for the specified sets and reps. Make sure not to confuse the reps and the sets; it is ten sets of three and not vice versa! Put up your weights at a slow to moderate tempo; dynamic efforts do not belong here.
The fifth workout will drop back to 70%, except this time you will need to add ten pounds. If your squat max is 200 and 70% is 140, the workout number five will have you squat 150. Keep following the sequence and add ten pounds to your higher percentages as well. E.g., 75%1RM = 150. 150+10=160. 80%1RM = 160. 160+10=170. 85% 1RM =170. 170+10=180.
The routine repeats the same four-workout cycle one more time for a total of three. The third wave calls for a fifteen-pound increase in all the percentages. Pay attention that you will be adding fifteen pounds to the original 80%, 160+15=175. Do not make the painful mistake of stacking an additional fifteen pounds to the 80%+10 lbs. of the last wave. Review the following sample cycle to make sure we are on the same wavelength.
If you squat three wheels or more, double the poundage jumps: twenty and thirty rather than ten and fifteen. This is how the routine would look for a bigger squatter.
SAMPLE RUSSIAN SQUAT ASSAULT CYCLE BASED ON A 400-POUND 1RM
If you are having a tough time making the numbers, cut the reps and up the sets to keep the weight and the total repetitions constant. For instance, if 280x9x4 is killing you do 280x4x9 instead.
The mad Commie who dreamed up this evil cycle promises that once you have survived these weeks your legs will turn into car jacks.
Rest for a week after completing the above cycle, then test your max. This stretch is usually good for fifty pounds on your squat and inches on your thighs.
Then you have some choices to make. After the above loading cycle, powerlifters usually spend two weeks recouping with light and explosive lifts – and then head into the peaking cycle to get ready for a meet. If you choose to do that, you will add another pair of big wheels to your squat but do not expect to gain a lot more muscle. This not the place to go into the intricacies of peaking, using support gear, and other purely powerlifting concerns. If inquiring minds really need to know, they can find a free reprint of my old Powerlifting USA article on PowerbyPavel.com.
A much more fitting choice for a power bodybuilder is to follow the Smolov application of powerlifting champion Marty Gallagher. He chose to bench as well as squat following the same Smolov format and added some arm work to top it all off. (There have been reports of impressive bench gains on this routine as well.) Here is Gallagher’s weekly split:
Monday – squat
Tuesday – bench, arms
Wednesday – off
Thursday – squat
Friday – bench, arms
Saturday – off
Sunday – off
“This… squat/bench specialization program… lasts for 4-8 weeks. After this specialization program is over I will then hit a back specialization program for 4-8 weeks. Afterward this is all over I will roll into a standard powerlifting program. In addition, I hit the steep mountain trails 5-6 days a week for 40-60 minutes.”
Please note that after the Smolov, America’s top powerlifting coach goes back to conventional training. The Russian Squat Assault was designed as a shock treatment to deliver unprecedented gains when everything else fails; it was not meant to be followed on an ongoing basis!
Russian expatriate powerlifting authority Andrey Butenko spoke up about the Smolov regimen, “I’ve used this squat program many times and I was drug free. It gave me huge gains and that’s the only program I would recommend for fast and guaranteed improvement… my weight has gone up with huge increases in the legs and the back… it is very, very, very intense… or insane, but it does work… I’ve done it a hundred times and it always worked… It kills but it works!”
Accept the Russian Squat Assault challenge! This brutal routine will flush every cowardly myth about ‘overtraining’ down the toilet and make your legs swell with muscle and power! Comrade Smolov promised that your gains will surprise you and he has not let anyone down yet. Squat till, as Soviet weightlifting great Yuri Vlasov put it, there is ‘dark red twilight in your head’ and ‘the roaring of blood in your ears’ and you will earn it. The power.
Bound for Columbus, where I was to speak at the Arnold Classic martial arts seminar, I changed planes in Chicago. Suddenly the usual preflight hustle of military pressing non-regulation size bags into the overhead compartments stopped and somebody whispered, “Dorian Yates!”
‘Shadow’ was working his way to his seat avoiding eye contact with other passengers and hopelessly trying to remain inconspicuous. Medium height, in a baggy leather jacket, and far from his peak condition, he should not have made a larger than life impression, yet he rendered everyone speechless.
Dorian exuded the quiet strength of a man with whom, as the Russians say, ‘you would go on a recon mission’. That look of an old war horse who does not need his campaign ribbons to show that he has been around. That look of a hand-to-hand combat expert whose efficiency in violence is advertised, rather than hidden, by his serene composure.
You cannot fake that look. It must be earned by facing a great challenge and living up to it. A challenge like Mr. Olympia’s 700-pound squats. They made him sweat blood and made him a better man for it. Heavy squats forged Dorian’s physique to the point where he looked more like a rock on the Moon than a carbon based life form. More importantly, heavy squatting built the champion’s inner strength. Subtle, yet irresistible like gravity, Dorian’s force field made the passengers on the Columbus flight turn his way even though his Olympian guns were far from his prime. The presence of strength…
Take a hint: squat! Forget your hamstring striations and quad separations, and add a hundred pounds to your squat, even if it kills you! Forget the pump and train like a weightlifting champion. Three powerful techniques you are about to learn, two of them from my native Russia, will help you to achieve squatting greatness in the shortest time possible by conditioning your nervous system to the peak of performance. Get the power and you will have the look. Guaranteed.
Robert Roman used to conquer gold for the Soviet Empire on the weightlifting platform. Today he is a top coach who has trained many young lifters to greatness using his revolutionary methods. Roman is convinced that developing superior sport specific body awareness will make a difference between being good and great!
It is not enough to have muscle, you have got to know how to use it. Soviet experiments revealed that even elite lifters made huge errors in estimating the height of the lift, the magnitude of the force, etc.1 When special techniques for maximizing what Roman calls the ‘muscle-joint sense’2 were developed, the top guys outdid themselves and some unpromising also-rans became world class!
Robert Roman’s sportsmen develop their muscle-joint sense by lifting … blindfolded! Their coach explains that because we so heavily rely on our eyesight, we do not pay enough attention to the various sensations in our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints. When blindfolded, the lifter is forced to listen to his body. Contrary to what a mirror gazing bodybuilder wants to believe, this tremendously improves the technique and its stability!2
Kick off your muscle-joint sense training by getting a pair of blindfolds. Roman does not recommend lifting with your eyes closed because it distracts you from what you are supposed to be doing. Training with the lights turned off may be an effective alternative, but the gym owner might object, at least if he finds you before he stumbles on a dumbbell and cracks his head against the Smith machine. So blindfolds it is.
Start squatting light with your eyes open, then cover your eyes. Keep alternating open and shut eye sets or reps, but do not add wheels until you own a given weight, blind. Do not just go through the motions but concentrate on the feedback your body has to offer: muscular tension, joint angles, etc. When something feels wrong, correct it and remember what you have corrected. Make a point of sinking every squat to parallel, that is the top of the knee higher than the crease on top of your thigh. Have your training partner watch your depth but ask him not to give you any feedback until you are done squatting. You must rely on your senses.
The purpose of this drill is not to make your squats pretty, but to make them heavy. The squat is a very complex lift and by finessing your skill, you are guaranteed to lift a lot more iron. Just ask four times Powerlifting World Record Holder Dr. Judd Biasiotto, who spent a lot of time developing his squatting body awareness with special techniques of his own. “… I was able to become aware of the muscles I was using during each segment of my lifts. When I got stuck at a certain part of the lift, I knew exactly which muscles to recruit and/or concentrate on to make the lift.” And stood up with 605 pounds at 130 pounds of bodyweight! Today Judd Biasiotto is a successful bodybuilder who routinely squats 330 pounds for 30 reps. Have no doubt that his proprioceptive sensitivity training paid off!
There is a Russian joke about a guy who wore shoes two sizes too small for him. When asked about his bizarre behavior, he complained about his miserable life and concluded that his only happiness in life was to come home and take off his shoes! You will be even happier than this dude if you lose yours – at least for a part of your squat workout.
The forcefulness of a muscular contraction is determined by the sum of the mental effort and various reflexes. When Dr. Fred Hatfield bounced out of the bottom of his 1,000-pound squat, he took advantage of the stretch reflex. Another power boosting reflex is called the extensor reflex. This reflex causes the leg musculature to contract in response to the pressure on the sole of your foot. It is a protective measure against loading.
Research suggests that always wearing shoes diminishes the sensitivity of the foot 3, which may turn off the squat friendly reflex. Too bad, because when the barbell is intent on squashing you like a bug on the windshield, you could use any help you can get! The rare squatter who has recognized this problem is Dr. Fred Clary, a human crane who has elevated 900 pounds! Fred regularly performs heavy, 1,000 pounds plus, walkouts barefoot ‘just to fire off those receptors’.
Clary believes that such training sensitizes the extensor reflex receptors and enables him to squat heavier. And not him alone. Long before he became a Senior RKC instructor, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Senior World Champion Steve Maxwell, M.S., read about barefoot lifting in my book Power to the People! He ordered all the people he coached to lose their shoes – and every one of them succeeded in knocking off a couple of extra reps on their leg exercises!
The proof is in the pudding, it pays to add barefoot walkouts or squats to your routine. But since the gym owner might object if you go native with your dirty toe nails scraping his floor, get yourself a pair of deadlift slippers. They look almost like ballet slippers and are probably available in pink. Have fun.
It is ironic that the barefoot populations of countries with nice climates and no extradition, suffer fewer running injuries than Americans and others who look up to Imelda Marcos 3. Scientists believe that running, aerobic, and other fancy shoes cause injuries that would not have happened without them4.
The extensor reflex recruits the leg muscles in a precise pattern according to the direction of pressure from the ground 5. Poorly designed shoes may redirect the pressure where it does not belong – and alter the proper recruitment pattern 6. Besides, shoes with high shock absorption delay the transmission of pressure to the sole of your foot 6. That has the effect of a devious KGB trick devised to find out if a person who pretends to be deaf really is. The men in black have the American spy suspect read a script into a microphone and feed it back to his headphones with a slight delay. This will not phase a deaf guy but will totally confuse the enemy of the state who is faking it. He will stumble and be unable to continue. The cushy soles of your workout shoes, thick as the platforms hippy girls wore at Woodstock, will play the same joke on your extensor reflex. Although the consequences, a reduced squat poundage and increased odds of injury, are less drastic than the firing squat in the Lubyanka courtyard, this is considered a problem in this land of minor inconveniences.
So lose your sneakers on steroids, once and for all! When you are not lifting barefoot, wear shoes with non-giving soles like all top powerlifters do. Quad squatters go for specialized shoes made by SAFE USA (you may have seen a picture of Tom Platz wearing them) or weightlifting shoes from Adidas. You can track both down through the Powerlifting USA magazine. Ditto for the deadlift slippers from Crain’s Muscle World.
Supersquatters who rely on their hamstrings and glutes more than their quads prefer Chuck Taylor’s Converse old-fashioned basketball shoes. Your Gramps must have worn a pair of these canvas-topped classics with a flat solid sole. You can get a pair for around thirty bucks in any athletic shoe store. The Chucks are probably the best all around shoes for strength training. An understated hard core design.
It is not unusual for modern power programs to include supramaximal walkouts, lockouts, or supports after regular lifts. They condition the body and mind for heavier weights. It works, but what if instead of walking out 600 pounds after your maximum 500 pound squat, you do the overload a couple of minutes BEFORE the heavy full squat? – 500 pounds will feel like 400 and an all time high 515 will go up like 490!
Note Clark’s ‘vintage Arnold’ shoes. While flip flops are not the safest choice of lifting shoes, they sure beat your sneakers on steroids.
Every gym rat knows that the heavier the weight, the more muscle is recruited. Manhandling 600 pounds fires off more motor units than 500 pounds, even if you only hold the bar. This is called the Henneman’s size principle 8, probably because it builds some serious size! Especially if combined with the after-effect phenomenon 9, or the fact that your nervous system is a bit slow on the uptake. Remember pushing your arms against the doorway at the summer camp and then watching them float up involuntarily? It happened because your brain had not caught on quick enough to the fact that the resistance had been removed. Good! After you have supported 600 pounds on your back, five wheels will explode to lockout!
After-effect overloads make you stronger in more than one way. In addition to boosting muscle recruitment, they lower the sensitivity of the Golgi tendon organs, spinal mechanoreceptors, and other governors of strength. After dealing with 600 pounds, these subversive sensors think, “Hey! 515 is not too bad!” and pull the brick from under your gas pedal! This type of disinhibition training has an awesome potential for reaching the final frontier in strength development.
Start your after-effect overload power squat program by deciding what personal best you would like to shoot for today. How about ten more pounds on your max single, or four reps with your all time heaviest triple? It is your call, as long as you keep your reps to five and under. After-effect overloads are strictly for power squatting!
After your last warm-up set load up the bar with 110-130% 1RM. Do not go heavier than that. This will not make the technique work any better but will certainly tire you out prematurely. Besides, an excessively heavy overload might make your regular weight feel so light that your muscles will not contract hard enough to lift it! An optimal, rather than maximal, load delivers the most powerful after-effect 7.
Safety must be considered as well. If you have not done any type of lockouts, walkouts, or supports in the past, take as many workouts as necessary to build up the poundage. When you overload, you should feel super tight and powerful, and not shaky!
Unrack the barbell, walk it out, and set up using the same stance you are about to full squat with. Hold your burden for five to ten seconds, and park. Stay tight and breathe shallow. In two to five minutes– the optimal rest time to take advantage of the aftereffect phenomenon7 – or whenever you feel ready, go for the record!
Why, you might ask, should you bother with these powerlifting techniques? After all, you get a lot better pump doing high reps on the Smith machine! – Because no amount of pumped tissue can make you look powerful. The look comes with the power. Martial artists know the ancient Chinese wisdom: a real master does not fight. He does not have to; his humble appearance cannot hide his lethal skills from anyone. In my favorite western The Magnificent Seven, Yul Brynner sat at the bar stone faced while a young punk was waving his loaded Colt in a hormone fit. The deadly calm of the veteran gunfighter won the shootout before it even started. It is the presence of power. You can’t fake it with a tough grimace from a cheesy action flick or vain flexing of virtual muscles pumped up with Barbie weights. It must be earned on the battlefield, be it the OK Corral, the kickboxing ring, or the squat rack.
References
1. Sokolov L. (1982). Nekotoriye voprosi sovershenstvovaniya v sportivnoy tekhnike tyazeloatletov. (Some issues in improvement of weightlifters’ technique.) In: Sandalov, Y., ed. Tyazhelay Atletika Yezhegodnik (Weightlifting Yearbook). Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport, 1982: 24-26.
2. Roman R. (1986). Trenirovka Tyazheloatleta (A Weightlifter’s Training), Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport.
3. Robbins S., Hanna A. & Gouw G. (1988). Overload protection: avoidance response to heavy plantar surface loading. Med. & Sci. Sports Exerc. 6: 253-259.
4. Robbins S. & Hanna A. (1987). Running related injury prevention through barefoot adaptations. Med. & Sci. Sports Exerc. 19: 148-156.
5. Guyton A. (1984). Textbook of Medical Physiology, 6th ed. Philadelphia: WB Saunders Co.
6. Verkhoshansky Y. & Siff M. (1996). Supertraining: Special Strength Training for Sports Excellence, 2nd ed. Witwatersrand, South Africa: M. C. Siff & Y. V. Verkhoshansky.
7. Verkhoshansky Y. (1977). Osnovi Spetsialnoy Silovoy Podgotovki v Sporte (The Fundamentals of Sport Specific Strength Training), 2nd ed. Moscow: Fizkultura i Sport.
8. Henneman, E., Somjen, G. & Carpenter, D. O. (1965). Functional significance of cell size in spinal motoneurons. J. Neurophysiol. 28: 560-580.
9. Pavlov, I. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes. London: Oxford Univ. Press.
This article was originally published in Powerlifting USA and later translated by its Russian equivalent, the leading powerlifting magazine in the countries of the former USSR Mir Sili. If you have no powerlifting background, it is likely to give you a splitting headache rather than a big bench press. If you do, it will give you a deep insight into the Russian system of training.
Eight out of the eleven gold medals at the IPF Men’s Worlds went home beyond what used to be the Iron Curtain. Wouldn’t you like to know how guys like Alexey Sivokon train?
Following is a bench press program designed by the Russian powerlifting mastermind Boris Sheyko. The man used to train the Kazakhstan team and today is the Chief Coach, Men’s Powerlifting Team Russia. Comrade Sheyko’s credentials include Sivokon, Mor, and Podtinniy. ‘Nuff said.
Heavily influenced by R. Plukfelder and I. Abajiev, Sheyko believes in some serious volume. While Western PLers have gradually cut back to one weekly BP workout the Russian team coach insists on four to eight bench press sessions a week! The arms and shoulder girdle can recover a lot quicker than the legs and back, he says, so why not?! Sheyko likes to quote the expression popular among Russian weightlifters in the fifties and sixties: “To press a lot one must press a lot”.
No, it is not a program just for bench specialists like Irina Lugovaya who owes it her European championship title. The following super system is every bit as effective for full meet lifters. So enjoy the pain, Comrade!
The matrix is designed for five BP workouts a week and is aimed at an advanced powerlifter, a KMS or an MS in Russian classification. The cycle is divided into preparatory and competition periods. Here is how the prep period gets kicked off:
Note the number in brackets following a series; it is the total number of lifts in the series. The number before an exercise denotes its position in a training session. For example, on Monday you bench first, then do some SQ or DL drill and bench again. On Friday you bench second after another lift.
More often than not, Sheyko’s charges – including IPF bench press world champions Alexey Sivokon and Fanil Mukhamatyanov – press twice in one training session. There is a curious wrinkle: the two pressing series are always separated by squat or deadlift work.
Boris Sheyko points out how the Monday load is intense and the Wednesday load beats you up with high volume. Note, says the Team Russia coach, even though the athlete has worked up to 80-85% 1RM, he has done many lighter lifts and therefore the average intensity is low.
If you have a general idea of the Russian approach to strength program design, you should appreciate how this elegant and precise method relies heavily on the calculations of the volume expressed in a number of barbell lifts (NBL) in a given intensity zone, or percentage of one rep max. According to Boris Sheyko, tracking these numbers, as well as the average training weight and total tonnage – or, if you are not up on the metric system, poundage – is mandatory. The Russian coach points out how helpful the numbers are for serving the critical component of any strength training plan: variability, or rotation of heavy, medium, and light training sessions, both in a weekly and in a monthly cycle. Indeed, these calculations have been an integral part of Soviet weightlifting since 1958, when scientist Leonid Matveyev worked with coach Suren Bogdasarov on future world champion Yuri Vlasov’s training plans.
Note how the NBL has been cut back from 201 in the first week to 130 in the second. When the volume goes down, the intensity goes up; in week two Sheyko added more 85-90% 1RM lifts and thus upped the average intensity from 67.1% to 71.5%
PREPARATORY WEEK 3
In week three Sheyko gives his lifters 240 barbell lifts at a 64.7% average intensity. The increased volume in the 65-75% intensity zone has necessitated a drop in intensity. But because there is no one right way to wave the load up and down, the coach muses that he might as well have written up something like NBL 170/69.1%.
Note the brutal eighty-six rep Wednesday marathon. Sheyko warns that you will be a hurting unit and will have to have the grit to make it through. By the way, the above numbers are not the limit; Alexey Sivokon has done one hundred and twenty rep marathons while working up to 90% intensity! Naturally, he cut back on intensity the week after.
PREPARATORY WEEK 4
The following table, which should find its way into your training log, illustrates the variability in the Russian bench press program:
PREPARATORY PERIOD LOAD DISTRIBUTION
In the four to six week long competition period the Russian National Team says good-bye to marathons and reduces the reps to the maximum of three per set. NBL with warm-up weights of 50-70% goes down and the number of 75-95% lifts goes up.
COMPETITION WEEK 1
COMPETITION WEEK 2
Approximately twenty days before a meet, Sheyko plans a prikidka, or a trial run. Experienced Russian National Team members just work up to 90-95% of their max to get a feel for their opener.
During the third week, a Russian lifter also cuts back to four bench days a week.
Observe how he performs a medium volume/low intensity workout on Monday and rests on Tuesday to taper before the Wednesday trial run.
COMPETITION WEEK 4
The fourth week is the last week with substantial NBL and heavy, 80-90% 1RM, poundages. It is time to taper before the competition. Next, or fifth, week the athlete will cut back to three training days a week and throttle down on volume and intensity.
In week five the lifting frequency drops to three times a week and both the intensity and the tonnage are tapered.
COMPETITION WEEK 6
Sheyko points out how the last session before the meet is similar to a pre-competition warm-up.
If you compare the two tables you shall notice that in the competitive period the Russian coach cut back on the volume while increasing the intensity compared to the preparatory period. In the last two weeks of the competition cycle, both the intensity and the tonnage take a dive to enable the athlete to recover well before the meet.
Nothing fancy-trendy about Sheyko’s cycle; just the classic Matveyev formula of progression from volume to intensity and finally the taper. You will not find any exotic assistance exercises in the Team Russia regimen either. “A golden rule is never to use more complex movements than necessary to achieve the desired result,” as Bruce Lee once put it. “… To hit a worthy opponent with a complex movement is satisfying and shows one’s mastery of technique; to hit the same opponent with a simple movement is a sign of greatness.”
Question: Your mass building routines are very one-dimensional. High set/low rep training does not stimulate many muscle tissues that could grow from other regimens. What do you have to say about that?
A functional and realistic physique for a drug free bodybuilder, say a hard 210 pounds at 5’10”, can be easily and naturally achieved with powerlifting style training without the headaches of complicated routines. ‘PL style training’ does not mean an exclusive diet of squats, benches, and deadlifts but the high set/low rep loading you refer to in your question.
So your slow twitch fibers do not grow to their potential. So your mitochondria do not get enough stimulation. So your sarcoplasm, the filler goo in the muscle, does not get bloated. Who cares? Powerlifters do not – and sport more meat than you will ever have.
Power bodybuilding will reward you in three ways. First, you will start filling out your shirts very fast, often within days, provided you eat as heavy as you lift.
Second, you will get as strong as you look. Respect yourself; just say no to purely cosmetic training! The greatest karate master of all time, Mas Oyama, jibed at overgrown dysfunctional meat that “it didn’t do the cow any more good than it will you.”
Third, you will greatly simplify your life by reducing the number of variables you are juggling. Powerlifters successfully build great mass and strength while hardly ever changing their exercises. They just manipulate the poundages, the sets, and the reps. And the fewer moving parts a machine has, the more likely it is to reach its destination without breaking down.
Question: I came across a book on physical culture published in the early XX century. It referred to a workout with weights as ‘a practice’ and so do you. Are you just being cute?
As my leatherneck father-in-law – who can take on any punk a third his age – likes to tell his son when the junior is heading to the health club, “Tell them sissies hello.”
Mental toughness aside, one of the reasons Liederman, Nordquest, and their contemporaries succeeded in the game of strength is the simple fact that they treated their iron time as a practice rather than a workout. Understanding this subtle semantic difference made the physical culturists of the golden era supermen.
Recall the importance of neural adaptations in strength development. You can sum up these adaptations as honing your skill in contracting your muscles harder. Quoting Prof. Thomas Fahey, “Skill is perhaps the most important element in strength.” In Russian sports science there is even a term skill-strength and your date with iron is referred to as ‘a lesson’ or ‘a practice’.
Once you appreciate that strength training – as opposed to bodybuilding – is a form of skill practice, designing an effective customized strength program becomes just a matter of following the fundamental principles of motor learning. There are three.
First, practice must be specific. Do not rep out with a light weight when you are training for a heavy single.
The second rule is an extension of the first one. Practice fresh and stop before your skill starts deteriorating. That means ending your practice before you start dragging your tail – and saying no to training to failure.
Third, practice as frequently as possible while observing the first two rules.
Radical as it sounds, it is plain common sense. How do you go about improving your tennis serve? Do you go out on the court once a week and keep on serving until your balls could not knock out a geriatric mosquito and you could barely lift your arm? “Literally he has worked himself out,” writes Earle Liederman in his classic 1925 Secrets of Strength, describing a man of iron who ‘was ahead of his time’ and trained like today’s gym rats, obsessed with pump and afraid of frequent training, “and this is exactly the thing the strength-seeker cannot afford to do.”
Everyone knows that you will improve your tennis game the most by coming to the court as often as possible, ideally more than once a day, and slamming those little yellow balls until you feel that your serves are about to go south.
Why not do the same for your iron games? Arthur Saxon who instinctively understood the motor learning principles did. He lifted close to his max but ‘not on the nerve’, he got good rest between his sets, and called it a day while he was still ‘full of pep’ – he did not work himself out. Saxon did only low rep work, and he practiced daily. Who was Saxon? – Oh, just some German who put up 370 pounds overhead with one arm almost a century ago.
Although the above guidelines evolved in the quest for wiry strength rather than massive muscles, a bodybuilder will do himself a favor by following them for three to four weeks every six months or so. Being as strong as you look should be worth something, even in this age of soft hands.
Question: Lifting weights makes me sore and tired and my demanding sport practices are suffering. I am committed to excelling at my sport and I am contemplating quitting bodybuilding. Give me a reason not to.
Quit bodybuilding; start strength training. Traditional blitzing and blasting does not meet your needs. As I have explained in Power to the People!, a comrade who has to balance the iron with a sport should drastically cut back on his or her sets, reps, and exercises, increase the weight, and never train ‘on the nerve’ or close to failure. This type of training will make you very strong. And you will not be exhausted; just the other way around, it has been documented to have a tonic effect on your nervous system.
This is not a new idea. Charles MacMahon wrote in his 1925 The Royal Road to Health and Strength, ”Instead of spending more time as I went along I spent less, because the more concentrated the exercise, the fewer times you have to repeat it.
“Once I was in the performer’s tent of a big circus, chatting with a very famous trapeze performer. Just before it was time for him to do his act, he walked over to a nearby ring, hooked his first and second fingers to his right hand around it, and chinned himself twice with his right arm. Then he did the same with his left arm. He did this to “warm up” for his performance, and he told me that it was all the exercise he took outside his performance; except when he had to practice for a new stunt. Everybody knows that it takes more strength to chin once with one arm that it does to chin twenty-five times with two arms. The funny thing is that it causes far less fatigue. The performer knew that, and that is why he was so economical of his time and energy.”
Question: I keep hearing about ‘training the nervous system’. What does the nervous system have to do with strength?
A legend of the iron game, weightlifting champion Yuri Vlasov, quipped that judging a man’s strength by his size was akin to judging a book by its thickness. It is not the beef but a superior ‘mind-muscle link’ that enables one hundred and sixty-five pounders to squat six or seven big ones. The following crash course in neuroscience of strength shall clarify that point.
A skeletal muscle consists of thousands of muscle fibers that generate force when they contract.
A group of fibers is hooked up to the brain through a nerve cell called a motor neuron. This group is referred to as a motor unit, or an MU.
A muscle fiber either contracts, or it does not; there is no intermediate ‘half contracted’ state. This is the all-or-none law. The nervous system varies the force output of an individual motor unit by its firing frequency. Like the cylinders of an internal combustion engine, muscle MUs do not fire constantly, but at intervals. Firing the fibers with a greater frequency increases the muscle’s force and power output, just like increasing a car engine’s number of revolutions per minute.
Firing synchronization with other motor units is another way your nervous system can vary the muscle’s force output. Normally motor units take turns firing to produce a smooth, controlled movement. A good analogy is running. You push off with one leg at a time. The force production is half of what you are capable of, the movement is smooth, and while one leg is working, the other one gets a chance to rest.
Long-term heavy training synchronizes the MU activation. As a result, you become what Russians call ‘an elephant in a glassware store’ (forget them bulls and china, Comrade). Your movement becomes more forceful, jerky, and cannot be sustained for a long period of time, like broad jumping. Fine motor control goes south. Your wife does not let you close to the dishes, which is just as well.
Only a small percentage of available MUs is used at one time. The number of active MUs, or recruitment, is crucial to your max force production. According to Henneman’s size principle, the smaller and weaker the motor unit, the weaker the command required from the motor cortex to fire it. Feeble motor units, built for extended use at a relatively low intensity, are called slow and are said to have a low firing threshold.
Fast motor units are composed of fast twitch fibers. They are large, they generate high force, high velocity, and have very little endurance. Fast MUs are reserved for an occasional burst of effort. Your brain needs to send a forceful command, or neural drive, to recruit them. In other words, they have a high firing threshold.
In every day activities you mostly use your slow MUs. Faster motor units are engaged when the load increases. The biggest, baddest, and strongest MUs are reserved for Reader’s Digest stories, mothers lifting cars off their children, that sort of thing.
MU recruitment, firing frequency, and firing synchronization are collectively referred to as intramuscular coordination. As a side note, one of the reasons testosterone – and the steroids which mimic it – make you stronger is the fact that the motoneurons have receptor sites for the macho hormone. When testosterone plugs itself in, it ‘closes’ the muscle activating ‘circuit’ and increases your powah.
Another neural factor contributing to your strength is inter-muscular coordination. It is a skillfully orchestrated activation of all of the muscle groups within a specific movement, say the deadlift.
All of the above neural factors and a few I have not listed are critical to superstrength and can be improved through patient practice with heavy metal.
Question: I was about to start a squat cycle from ‘Brawn’ that uses low reps and simply adds a little weight to the bar each week for three months. Then I heard that this type of cycling is obsolete. Is it true?
No. Progressive overload cycling is the most reliable muscle and strength building method, period. It has produced great champions like Marty Gallagher’s star pupil Kirk Karwoski. ‘Captain Kirk’ squatted a grand and his legs have been compared to a T-rex’s for their Jurassic muscularity. Take on the following squat cycle and see for yourself how ‘obsolete’ it is.
The cycle lasts sixteen weeks, one squat workout a week. For the first eight weeks you will be doing two sets of five with the same weight. Then take fifty pounds off the bar and perform two more sets. This time pause in the ‘hole’ where your thighs are parallel to the floor for three painful seconds. Add ten pounds per week. For the second eight cut your reps to triples.
Make a realistic estimate of how much you can improve in sixteen workouts and work back to establish the starting poundage. If you are new to power cycling, just take your current 1RM, tested or estimated, as the goal for two sets of three in the end of four months. If your max is 355, subtract 160 pounds – ten pounds multiplied by sixteen workouts – and you will get 195. This is your starting poundage. Your first workout will be 195x5x2 and 145x5x2 pause squats. It may not sound like much but this easy start is one of the secrets to the success of powerlifting cycles.
In workout number eight you should confidently put up 275x5x2 and 225x5x2 paused. Your ninth workout will be 285x3x2, 235x3x2 paused. In workout number sixteen you will squat your old max for two triples, 355x3x2 and 305x3x2 paused. You are closing in on four wheels!
You owe one to record holder Rickey Dale Crain who designed the above cycle. Get his straight shooting book To Squat or Not to Squat from crainsmuscleworld.com.
Question: I have a hit a plateau in my training. I’ve been benching my max for weeks and I am going backward instead of forward. Help!
It has been said that only mediocrities are always at their best. Top powerlifters display their max strength not more than a couple of times a year. The rest of the time they ‘cycle’, or back off into easier training and then build up to a new PR. Apply this form of periodization to your workouts and you are guaranteed to break your personal records! At least if you have the will power to say good-bye to pump and burn and reduce your reps to the one to five range.
Let us use your bench press as an example. Say, your one rep max is 225 pounds and your best set of ten reps is 185. On Monday perform 185x5, 190x4, 195x3, 200x2, 205x1. Rest for 3-5 minutes between the sets, power needs rest. Note that none of the sets come close to failure. It is intentional, a part of the periodization strategy. It may be hard psychologically to stop until you reach ‘complete muscle failure’ but that is between you and your therapist.
On Wednesday add five pounds to all your sets: 190x5, 195x4, 200x3, 205x2, 215x1. You will notice that not all the sets are equally hard. That is intentional, scaled down cycling within a workout.
On Friday add another fiver: 195x5, 200x4, 205x3, 210x2, 215x1. On this and any other of your bench days you may do a couple of your favorite muscle building exercises or, better yet, powerlifting assistance drills like the board presses, after your power sets.
Next Monday, back up to your last Wednesday numbers and work back up. Every week you will add fifteen pounds to your sets and then take ten pounds off and build up again. This is called ‘wave cycling’. If you look at just your singles, your weeks will stack up like this: 205, 210, 215; 210, 215, 220; 215, 220, 225, etc.
You will have worked up to your previous best by the end of the third week and you will top off the month with a PR 230. If it goes up easy – and it should – you may want to try for 235 or wait for Monday and test yourself without the tiring preliminary sets. Try this: 135x5, 185x2, 205x1, 225x1, 235x1, and, if the going is good, 240x1 and even 245x1!
Spend the fifth week repping out with your pet bodybuilding moves and on Monday start another power cycle with slightly heavier weights, say 195x5, etc. A cycle does not have to last four weeks. If your gains keep on coming there is no reason why you should not take advantage of it for another week or two. Three wheels, here you come!
Question: I have spent a couple of months bringing up my weak muscle groups. I thought I was doing alright, both strength and muscle wise, until I benched for the first time since my weakness specialization program. My strength has gone well down! What happened and what did I do wrong?
You did nothing wrong. You just got out of your bench press groove. In other words, your muscles have a great potential, you just need to realize it through specific practice of your target lift. Follow this twelve-day peaking cycle:
Monday – work up to a comfortably heavy triple
Wednesday – work up to a comfortably heavy double
Friday – work up to a comfortably heavy single
Monday – work up to a comfortably heavy double
Wednesday – work up to an easy single with the weight you used for your top triple nine days ago
Saturday – work up to your new max
‘Working up’ refers to doing ascending sets of the same rep count. For instance, if your old max BP was 405 your first workout might look like this: 225x3, 275x3, 315x3. You probably could have put up 350 or more for three reps but don’t. You are just practicing your bench technique; do not burn out by pushing the envelope too soon! Do not do any other chest, shoulder, or triceps exercises. It will be hard on your head because you will not be getting any pump. Deal with it.
Make sure to practice all of the high-tension techniques: irradiation, power breathing, etc. Note that on Wednesday of the second week your top single will equal the top triple of your first bench press session: 315 in the above example. Very easy but that is intentional and a vital part of the tapering process.
On Saturday get psyched up and hold nothing back! You are likely to be pleased with the gains. You have taken advantage of the phenomenon of ‘delayed transmutation’, or creating great performance potential with assistance exercises for the relevant muscle groups – and then peaking with specialized training.
Question: I have gotten the singles bug on my bench press but burnt out very quickly. Do you have a good singles routine?
Kurinov, a Russian world weightlifting champ of Paul Anderson’s era, used to lift very heavy in training and always got emotionally worked up. After a serious of ‘flat’ performances in competition he learned his lesson and from then on he hit maxes only occasionally and only when he was 100% sure of making them without undue excitement.
Although lifting maximal weights brings about the quickest strength development, the great emotional stress which accompanies such training rapidly burns out the nervous system and eventually leads to a decrease in that lift (Rodionov, 1967). According to Vasiliev (1954), training with 1x1RM once a week increases strength significantly for up to six weeks. After that it is downhill, at least for mere mortals.
But training with singles does not have to mean training with max singles. Try the following program from Steve Justa’s great Rock, Iron, Steel: The Book of Strength (available from IronMind.com). This colorful strongman from America’s heartland has forgotten more about effective training than most degreed authorities will ever know.
Pick one lift and train it daily. Do no other work for the involved muscles, although you may carry on with your regular lifting for the rest of your body. On Monday do three singles with 70% 1RM and one to two minutes of rest in between. Add two sets of one daily. Five singles with the same poundage on Tuesday. Seven on Wednesday. Nine on Thursday. Eleven on Friday. Thirteen on Saturday and fifteen on Sunday. 3-5-7-9-11-13-15.
On Monday add five or ten pounds and repeat the cycle. Once a month test your max and recalculate your 70%. Everything about Steve Justa’s program flies in the face of conventional wisdom but trust me, it works. A fellow I know, went from four to five wheels in the deadlift in one year without breaking a sweat. His gains are typical.
Question: I hear a lot about the ‘54321 system’? How does it work?
John McKean sent me an article he wrote about the 54321 routine back in the sixties. It details how to make great gains by doing consecutive sets of 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 repetitions.
“The countdown provides the lifter with several advantages,” writes McKean who has won many titles in powerlifting and all-around lifting and started his writing career in Strength & Health under legendary John Grimek. “First of all, he is relieved of the boredom of doing set after set with the same weight or for the same number of counts. Secondly, he looks forward to each coming set because, in his mind, the decreased repetitions make it easier to perform. Of course there is more weight to contend with but those detestable reps are diminished! It can also be seen that the body acquires a gradual adjustment to an ever-increasing weight. When one can force his mind and body to accept heavier workloads, he begins to improve.”
McKean gives you the freedom to decide what poundage jumps you are going to make between sets. Most experienced lifters jump ten to twenty pounds, John McKean added thirty five pounds per set to his squats, and some big dudes add as much as a hundred pounds between sets! Simple math tells that you should be putting up at least five wheels to make such jumps. Ten pound increases should be about right for the average bodybuilder, e.g. 200x5, 210x4, 220x3, 230x2, 240x1. Note that not all sets will be equally difficult; that is fine and even purposeful, ‘cycling’ within a workout.
John advises that your first workout should start out with the top single twenty pounds below your best. Practice the 54321 system three times a week and add five pounds to each set every workout. In two weeks you will overshoot your old max. If you keep working hard, you may end up with a forty-pound gain on your lift in one month, a typical experience for the 1960s powerlifters and bodybuilders who took on this program.
Presuming that you want to look as strong as you get, finish your 54321 routine with three to five sets of three to five reps, the standard solution by McKean’s contemporaries who felt that the pure 54321 workout did not give their muscles enough stimulation to build them. You may want to do these back-off sets only on Fridays.
If you are a beginner, or the exercise you have chosen for the power countdown does not lend itself to big weights, e.g. the barbell curl, you may make only one or two jumps, e.g. 65x5, 65x4, 70x3, 70x2, 70x1. Or you could even stay with the same weight: 45x5, 45x4, 45x3, 45x2, 45x1. Naturally, take shorter rest periods between your sets if you stick with a flat poundage.
“Like a knockout punch,” concludes hard man McKean, the 54321 workout “is quick and hard but extremely effective.”
Question: I like being as strong as I look and having a dense lifter’s physique. What sets and reps should I do?
In a nutshell, multiple sets of low reps. A classic Soviet weightlifting textbook by V. I. Rodionov lists seven set and rep schemes that you can choose from:
1. 60x2-3, 70x2-3, 80x2-3, 87.5-90x1-2x5-6, 80x2-3, 70x2-3 (percentage of the one rep max x repetitions x sets)
This format is recommended for experienced strength athletes. The first light sets get the trainee into the groove, the last light sets are meant to provide active rest before tackling the next exercise.
2a. 70x2-3, 80x2-3, 90x1, 100-102.5x1, (85-90x2-3x3-4), 70x2-3
2b. 75x2-3, 85x2-3, 95x1, 100-105x1, (85-90x2-3x3-4), 70x2-3
This scheme is recommended for a rare session when you want to go for a personal best. Rodionov warns not to perform many sets and reps before you go for a max to avoid wearing yourself out. The choice of the 90 or 95% weight preceding the max set is up to the athlete. If this weight feels light, up the projected PR by 5-10 pounds or whatever seems right.
If after the max you do not feel up for the heavy back off sets in brackets, drop them and wrap up just with a couple of light 70% sets.
3. 65x2-3, 75x2-3, 85x2-3, 90x1, 75x2-3x2, 65x2-3x2
This sequence is great for finessing your lifting technique. You get to critically compare your technique in both sets with each weight. This approach was a favorite of B. Farkhutdinov, weightlifting world champion from the USSR.
4. 65x2-3, 70x2-3, 80x2-3, 87.5-92.5x1-2x3-4, 85x2-3x3-4
This arrangement allows the power monger to perform a high volume of work with sufficiently heavy weights. Very effective for building strength and mass while honing the technique.
5. 60x2-3, 70x2-3, 80x1-2, 90x1, 95x1x3-4, 85x2-3, 75x2-3
This design is for an athlete whose technique tends to deteriorate when the poundage approaches maximal. Keep lifting a near maximal weight, that would be your opener if you were to compete in a strength sport such as weightlifting, powerlifting, or the bench press.
6. 60x2-3, 70x2-3, 80x1-2, 90x1, 95x1, 85x2-3x3-5
A great method for developing strength, technique, and hypertrophy.
7. 65x2-3, 75x2-3, 85x2-3x4-6, 95x1
The 95% set will feel like a true max after the 85% sets. Skip it if you are not up for it or lift 90%x1 instead.
One way to put the above schedules to work, is to pick three to four ‘big’, basic exercises, for instance the powerlifts plus cleans-and-presses or pullups, and train each lift two to four times a week. Vary the set and rep scheme every workout making sure not to practice the #2 that requires lifting a 1RM more than once a week. Follow the above program for three weeks, blow your old PRs out of the water, and return to your usual training.
Question: I read in Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky’s book that Russian weightlifters stopped using pyramids in their training in 1964. Does it apply to bodybuilders and powerlifters?
Pyramids fatigue the muscles and the nervous system before you get to your money set or sets. That is why they are not optimal when strength is your primary objective. Things are different when you are after more mass.
Although Russian Olympic lifters said good-bye to the pyramid even before the clean-and-press bit the dust in 1972, it lives on in the regimen of the Russian National Powerlifting Team, albeit on a limited basis. In the preparatory period, when the lifters are concentrating on building up the volume, they hit it once a week, usually on Wednesday. Their typical bench press pyramid workout, referred to by the team’s senior coach Boris Sheyko as ‘the marathon’ looks like this: 50%x8, 55%x7, 60%x6, 65%x5, 70%x4, 75%x3x2, 80%x2x2, 75%x3x2, 70%x4, 65%x6, 60%x8, 55%x10, 50%x12 (percentage of the one rep max x reps x sets). Compare it to a more typical workout for the same phase of the cycle: 50%x5, 60%x4, 70%x3x2, 80%x3x5. Note that the latter session, even though it starts light and builds up to heavier weights like a pyramid, uses lower reps – e.g. fives versus eights, with a fifty percent weight – to arrive fresh to the top sets. And it does not employ back-off sets because you are too tired to do more quality work. Besides, as the Russians put it, these descending sets ‘congest the muscles’, and compromise your recovery for the next bench press session.
The bottom line. Although there are much more effective set and rep schemes than pyramids for strength training, pyramids still can be recruited by a powerlifter or a bodybuilder on a part time basis for variety’s sake. Just do not pyramid when you are about to peak your strength – and make sure to make the same muscle group workout following the pyramid less demanding.
Question: My bench press has stalled. Do you have any cool routines to get it going?
Try the following program by Jason Brice of Johnson City, Tennessee. Jason combined one of the power cycles from my book Power to the People! with ‘ladders’, a technique popular in the Russian military for improving pull-ups.
On June 30th, 2001 Brice started out with one set of five reps with 225 pounds, or 67% of his 335-pound max bench (naturally, you will need to plug in your own numbers). Jason did only one set of five reps per workout, adding five pounds each time. What will surprise you is that he benched five days a week, Monday through Friday. The reasoning behind such an unorthodox schedule is outside the scope of this piece; it is explained in Power to the People!
Since you cannot keep on adding five pounds a workout forever, even if you started the cycle with a light weight, eventually you will reach your five-rep max. When Jason reached his he switched from powerlifting style cycling to ladders. ‘A ladder’ means doing one rep, resting briefly, doing two reps, etc., then starting all over when you cannot top the reps of the last set. Brice did sets of 1-2-3-1-2… with his 5RM until his form started to get sloppy. He did this every other day for two weeks.
Then Jason backed off ten pounds from his 5RM established two weeks earlier and resumed a linear cycle: one set of five Monday through Friday adding five pounds a day. When he had a tough time completing his fiver Jason took two days off and tested his one-rep max, something he did every two months. Here is what he accomplished:
“After benching I did one-arm snatch pulls with dumbbells and heavy ab work, wraps up Jason Brice. “… My lifts were witnessed by my co-workers as well as a few powerlifters who compete with me. If I lied about my results they would call my bluff.”
Question: My bench press has stalled. I could use a new routine!
The following program by Moscow bench press champion Alexey Moiseev pushed his bench up by 20kg or about 45 pounds in just three months! More good news: it has enough beach work to keep the bodybuilder in you happy.
Train twice a week, for instance Mondays and Thursdays, heavy and light.
Heavy Day 1. Bench press – 3x3, 2, 1
2. Board press – 3x3, 2, 1
Set a four to five inch thick board, for instance a sawed off 2x4, on your chest. Lower the bar down to the board and press it back up. You cannot help noticing Louie Simmons’ influence in Moiseev’s program.
3. Incline bench press – 3x3, 2, 1
4. Scott or preacher bench curls – 4-6x8-10
5. Triceps exercise of choice – 4x8
Light Day 1. Speed bench press – 7x3 @ 50% 1RM
Lower the barbell slow, explode up.
2. Narrow grip bench press – 4x8-10
3. Bent over lateral raises – 3x8-10
4. Lateral raises – 3x8-10
5. Scott or preacher bench curls – 4-6x8-10
6. Triceps exercise of choice – 4x8
Moiseev adds 5kg, which is in the ballpark of 10 pounds, every set of the heavy 3, 2, 1 workout. If you are not in the major league, there is no dishonor in adding only five pounds.
The powerlifting champion adds another 5kg to all three money sets every workout. Unless you can give the big guy a run for his money, a 5-lbs. increase every workout or even every other workout is just right.
When the gains stalled, Alexey temporarily switched to 3x3 but periodically attempted to put up heavier weights. I believe you will be better off back cycling your poundages and starting another assault. E.g., if 215x3, 220x2, 225x1 has almost crushed you, back off to 185x3, 190x2, 195x1 and build up again. Power to you!
Question: My training partner took your seminar and told me that you recommend waving the weight up and down from set to set. Why?
First of all, you shall get stronger faster. Eastern Europeans’ weightlifting sessions are variable. When Russians hit heavy doubles or triples, they often alternate them with singles or doubles with a weight reduced by 5-10%. Another set and rep scheme popular in the former Soviet Union, by Robert Roman, calls for three sets of three reps with a 70% weight and 3x3 @ 75% 1RM. The weights are alternated from set to set.
Your strength depends on your skill to contract your muscles hard – even more than on their size. Since World War II, motor learning, the fine discipline about shortcuts to skill mastery, has made many breakthroughs that are waiting to be recruited in your quest for strength. One such breakthrough is variable practice, the powerful alternative to conventional constant practice.
Constant practice refers to doing the same thing in every consecutive trial. Multiple sets with the same weight, 455x5x5 or 200x10x3, are examples of constant practice. This method works but it can be improved on. Variable practice, or waving the load up and down every set, is a superior alternative. Many motor learning studies (e.g., Kerr & Booth, 1978) show that subjects practicing under variable conditions perform at least as well as the constant practice group – and frequently do better!
In addition to the strength learning benefits, varying your weight from set to set offers other advantages. Lighter sets facilitate recovery for the next heavy set and painlessly increase the tonnage. Recall how critical volume of loading is to strength and muscle gains. A wavy workout is a lot less monotonous and more enjoyable than one with a static weight. Instead of grinding out 200x5x5 sets try something like 185x5, 205x5, 195x5, 210x5, 190x5, 200x5, 185x5. You will manage a couple of extra sets and will not even notice it.
Question: Watching my friend turn into a powerhouse on a routine of high sets of low reps with plenty of rest in between has convinced me that it is the way to train for raw power. Unfortunately, I can barely spare forty-five minutes for a workout twice a week. Am I doomed to remain a pencilneck?
Not if you try interval or ‘slow’ circuit training.
Lee (1988) found that the already awesome gains reaped from variable practice, or mixing up the poundage from set to set, explained in the piece above, can be far greater if it is combined with random practice. RP is the opposite of blocked practice, or completing all the trials of a drill before moving on to the next one. Doing all your sets of squats before moving on to the bench press is an example of blocked practice. Random practice involves alternating between various tasks within a practice period. It is kind of like circuit training, except adequate rest is provided between the drills.
Random practice delivers predictably great results. The idea of switching between squats, benches, and deads every set may strike you as a bizarre way to annoy the gym owner by tying up three bars and most of the plates on the floor. Yet a breakthrough study by Shea & Morgan (1979) determined that random practice is the way to train. Although it results in poorer performance in practice – you don’t get a chance to gradually work up to your meat set and simply do not have the luxury of focusing on one lift and getting in the groove – it delivers better numbers when you go for a PR.
Ideally alternate between harder and easier exercises, something old time professional strongmen used to do (Liederman, 1925) and the Soviets took up later (Roman, 1962). For example, if you powerlift, separate your squats and deads with a set of benches: SQ-BP-DL-BP-SQ-BP. This arrangement offers another advantage, namely enhanced recovery due to the Setchinov principle formulated in Russia in the early 1900s. According to this principle, heavy use of a bodypart promotes a reflexive relaxation of bodyparts distant from the first one. As a result, a busy person will be able to handle a greater workload within his or her limited training time without sacrificing quality. Linda Crawford who broke four Minnesota State Masters Powerlifting Records routinely knocked off ten sets per each powerlift within a forty-five minute training session – all with at least 80% of her 1RM!
Provided you rest for a couple of minutes between your stations, alternate between tougher and easier exercises and between your legs and upper body, you can build great strength on a very tight schedule. That is if you train at home or are big enough to tie up a few pieces of equipment at a club without consequences.
Question: I finally understand the reasoning behind powerlifting style cycling. But some of these cycles are so complex, my eyes glaze over! Is there a simpler way to cycle?
Cycles do not need to be fancy to be effective. Fifteen-year-old Armenian immigrant Sarkis Karapetyan recently set a world record at the WABDL Utah State Championship by deadlifting 3.14 times his body weight. He did it by following the as-simple-as-can-be cycle from my book Power to the People!
Here is another simple and effective cycle; it was published a few years back in the highly recommended Powerlifting USA magazine.
Let us assume that your two best sets of five in a powerlift are 300 pounds. Add five pounds to this number and work back five pounds a week for five weeks:
Not fancy, but the job is done. Start another cycle five pounds heavier:
Some lifters tend to burn out training so close to their PR all the time. Ten pound jumps will work better giving them a few easier weeks to recover from the last cycle:
Keep recycling and a year down the road you will be moving 350x5/2, another year, and it is 400x5/2…
If you occasionally hit a snag and cannot make the projected weights, take a week off and start the cycle over:
When there is no contest in sight, just keep repeating the five-week cycle. When training for a meet, schedule your training so it falls on week seven, and work up to a heavy double on week six:
Question: My bench is not too bad but I just cannot make any progress in my military press. Help!
In the good ole’ days when the clean-and-press was the measure of a man and the bench was unheard of, Russian weightlifters had an expression: “To press a lot you must press a lot.” The shoulders, unlike the legs, back, and, to a lesser degree, the chest will not budge until you blast them with a high volume of heavy iron.
The following RKC routine is almost guaranteed to ram you through your shoulder strength and size plateau. Pick a kettlebell you can clean and press – a clean before each press that is – roughly six to eight times. C&P it once with your weaker arm and switch hands. Rest briefly. Ideally your training partner will do his set while you chill. Two reps. Another short break. Three reps. Then start over at one… Feel free to rest longer between each series.
Repeat the 1, 2, 3 series five times, which will total you 30 quality reps. Follow this program three to four times a week. Do a skeleton chest and triceps regimen while you are on it.
Add a series per workout until you are up to (1, 2, 3) x 10 = 60 repetitions. Sixty reps with a seven-rep max is a very powerful muscle-building stimulus!
Now start doing 1, 2, 3, 4 reps, starting out with three series which totals 30 reps. As before, build up to 60 total reps, or (1, 2, 3, 4) x 6.
Move up to (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) x 2. Work up to (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) x 4. By now your shoulders will be swelling with dense and powerful muscle. Take a couple of days off and test yourself on the one-arm military press. You will blow your old PR out of the water!
Question: My friend who read your Power to the People! book told me that you are against explosive lifting. Why?
I am not against explosive lifting, but its indiscriminate application.
First, it is not appropriate for beginners. Dremach (1998), from the former Soviet republic of Belarus – famous for its iron athletes of all persuasions – concluded that introducing an explosive deadlift start increased the max of the advanced lifters who participated in the study by 15% – and enabled them to lift the old 1RM for a few repetitions! However, the researcher concluded that this was only appropriate for intermediate and advanced lifters, the cutoff being around a double bodyweight deadlift. V. Dremach warns that a beginner who takes on the explosive DL is likely to get injured and/or fail to develop good technique.
One of the most crucial skills any iron athlete must develop is that of ‘staying tight’. And only the elite can stay tight while exploding like a bat out of hell. Even the Westside Barbell Club powerlifters famous for their explosive training dedicate a special day in their schedule to ‘grinding’. So forget pyrotechnic displays until you master full body tension and put up some respectable poundages.
Second, explosion may or may not be appropriate for a PR lift. Powerlifting guru Louie Simmons’ statement that if you “have so much explosion out of the hole, you do not have sticking points!” sums up the argument for being explosive when going for the max. But there is an opposing point of view. 900-pound deadlifter Mark Henry said that “what makes a good power-lifter is a slow gear.” In other words, when you need to pull a car out of a ditch you call a tow truck rather than a Ferrari. Both camps have valid points and have champions to back them up.
Third, when going for a record, even the opponents of being fast recognize the training value of explosive lifting. Legendary Russian coach S.Y. Smolov, Master of Sports advocates Power to the People! style ‘grinding’ on max lifts yet dedicates two weeks of exclusively explosive training for his famous squat cycle.
The last word on lifting explosively (it does not apply to the ‘quick lifts’: snatches, cleans, etc.). Don’t even think about exploding until you have built a respectable level of strength and learned to get and stay tight. Find out whether maxing explosively works for you through trial and error. Periodically introduce acceleration training with moderate weights into your routine. A great set of guidelines can be found in Dr. Fred Hatfield’s book Power: the Scientific Approach.
Question: Should I pause on the platform between deadlift reps or touch and go?
As a rule of thumb, pause. First, you need to develop starting strength for a big pull and you will never do that unless you pull a dead weight. FYI, in the olden days the exercise was known as ‘the dead weight lift’.
Second, to do a touch and go rep you must lower the barbell in perfect form to set yourself up for a clean next rep and to protect your back. Doing a negative in the deadlift takes experience. Otherwise it is plain dangerous; the bar tends to pull the deadlifter forward on his toes and round his back.
Even if you have succeeded in not letting the bar run forward and bend you over, do not think your troubles are over. You probably have assumed an exaggeratedly upright stance. Your knees have slipped forward and got banged up while your hamstrings have lost tension. You have got yourself into a hideous position for the next rep. Which is why I recommend quickly pushing your hips back, dropping down with the barbell after each repetition, and resetting for each rep as if it is the first one in Power to the People!
Nevertheless, experienced lifters have legit reasons to periodically do touch and go deadlifts with controlled negatives. First, it is well known that eccentric contractions are important for stimulating muscle growth. Second, touch and go reps are good for cleaning up one’s technique. Prominent Russian powerlifting coach Askold Surovetsky recommends just that. An interesting wrinkle in his program is alternating two types of deadlift workouts: heavy ones with full stops and dead weight starts, and lighter, high volume ones with touch and go reps. Pay attention: do touch and go deads only with lighter weights and make sure to practice deadlifts with full stops between reps as well! For instance, if you follow the Power to the People! program, pull the first set with dead stops and the second, lighter, set in the touch and go manner.
In order to do a safe deadlift negative for a touch and go rep the lifter must know how to keep the pressure in his abdomen, pull himself down with his hip flexors, and keep his hamstrings loaded. I have explained all three techniques elsewhere in detail; ignore them at your own risk.
A word on breathing. Breathe shallow and stay tight; letting out too much air at any time is putting your lower back in danger. Inhale on the way down into your tight stomach (it will not be easy), grunt slightly half way up. Don’t bounce the bar on the platform, just gently touch it and go up without losing tension or air.
“If done intensely and correctly,” promises drug free 800-pound deadlifter Steve Scialpi, who favors touch and go reps with thirty-five pound plates, “your lower back, glutes and hips should be extremely pumped.”
Question: I have made great gains with your deadlift program from “Power to the People!” Unfortunately, I have run out of my 300 pounds and I am afraid to buy more iron as I live in an apartment. What is a good deadlift alternative for someone in my circumstances?
Try the one legged deadlift described by Harry L. Good in his 1940 course The Keynote to Great Strength. Even if nothing prevents you from pulling conventional, you will find the one legged dead a worthwhile addition to your routine.
The one-legged deadlift is demonstrated by Brazilian Jiu Jutsu World Champion DC Maxwell of Maxercise.com.
A great exercise for men and women.
Face the bar with one foot centered and the other elevated behind you. Your shin should be an inch or so behind the bar. If you wish, you may extend the pull by standing on an elevation of up to four inches – or by using small plates. You may also do the drill with kettlebells.
Fold forward and semi-squat. Do not let your knee extend over your toes or buckle in. Stick your butt out and grab the bar with the clean or palms down grip. Take a normal breath, tighten up, and lift.
Keep your weight evenly distributed on your foot and your back reasonably straight – the one legged pull is more forgiving than the conventional DL. You will find that you have to contract the glute on the working side very intensely to maintain your balance. Flex it to break the bar off the floor and cramp it even harder at the lockout. It will not take you long to realize that you have discovered one of the most effective glute exercises in existence.
If you start losing balance catch yourself by landing your airborne foot. Carry on once you have got your equilibrium back. Unlike the regular deadlift, the one legged version enables you to lower the weight slowly safely so your neighbors will stop calling the police.
The one legged DL does a fine job of strengthening your ankles, at least if you lift barefoot. An average weak ankle tends to buckle in when the person is standing on one foot, especially with extra weight. The movement of the sole of the foot outward is called ‘eversion’. Under the circumstances it is bad news for your leg. A barefoot Good deadlift will strengthen the muscles on the inside of the lower leg responsible for inversion or drawing of the sole inward. Just grip the ground hard with your toes, keep the muscles around your ankle and on the bottom of your foot tight, and make sure that the inside of your foot does not come down to the floor.
Your 300-pound set will serve you for a while now. If you can pull a 300 regular dead, good luck in breaking 135 off the floor.
Question: I hear about ‘tendon training’ from my strongman competitor friends. What is it? Should I do it?
Although a regular Joe’ or Jane’s maximal voluntary contraction equals only around 30% of the maximal tensile strength of their tendons (Hirch, 1974), more recent studies reported by Verkhoshansky & Siff (1996) proved what old timers knew all along: increases in quality and quantity of connective tissues may improve the transmission of force from the muscles to the bones! Professor Verkhoshansky explains that a weak or not sufficiently extensive tendon sheath allows the muscle to dissipate some of its force in the wrong direction.
I am convinced that tendon training is a must for experienced iron athletes of all persuasions. Elite muscles generate such high levels of tension that they become stiffer than their tendons for the moment (Zatsiorsky, 1995). Since a muscle with its tendons can be compared to springs in series, it is obvious why tendon strength is so important. The muscles, rigor mortis hard, leave the tendons as the weak link in the chain. That not only predisposes the tendons to injury, but increases the likelihood of your muscle shaking and failing for neural reasons.
Ligament strength is up there with tendon strength on an iron man’ or woman’s list of priorities. Verkhoshansky & Siff (1996) speculate that the ‘muscle fatigue’ in exercises with heavy limb loading, often turns out to be ligament fatigue. As they say about a boxer who is due to go out to pasture, ‘he has gotten weak in the knees’. According to the Supertraining authors, even the fatigue in the legs, back and feet from standing seems to be not muscular in nature!
Spine journal reported that ligaments and spinal disks possess so-called mechanoreceptors. When overloaded, they tell the muscle to shut down. Clearly, old salts knew their stuff when they talked about ‘ligament strength’. “The best way to get strength is to support a lot of weight in certain positions,” Canadian strength pioneer George Jowett was teaching young John Grimek. “More than you can lift normally… this will strengthen your ligaments, your tendons and you’ll get more strength out of that than you would if you were just doing flexing exercises.”
Although heavy supports in the tradition of Jowett, Anderson, and Grimek are a must for a serious iron athlete, they are only half the connective tissue training equation. Full amplitude high rep work is recommended by Eastern European specialists to stimulate tendon and ligament development. Calisthenics such as the full squats from my book Super Joints fit the bill. Kurz (1994) prescribes 3x30 or 1x100-200 after your heavy iron, which should be followed by some stretches. Full stops at the top and the bottom of each rep are a good idea as they shift the load from the muscles to the connective tissues. Clarification: we are not talking about blood and guts high rep sets here; slowly build up your reps until you can handle the required volume with ease.
Question: You mention ‘high tension techniques’ in your books and articles. Do you mean ‘high intensity techniques’?
No. ‘High intensity techniques’ such as forced negatives, pre-exhaustion, etc. were devised by HIT Jedis. The idea was to maximize muscular fatigue or ‘inroad’ within one set. ‘Go beyond failure’ and similar histrionics.
I use the term ‘high-tension techniques’ to refer to any maneuvers that amplify the intensity of a muscular contraction via various reflexes and neurological phenomenona. Squeezing the barbell to irradiate extra power from the gripping muscles into the arms and shoulders – or tensing the hip adductors to facilitate a stronger contraction of the midsection musculature – are examples of high-tension techniques.
An iron rat named Cliff reported a very typical high tension technique experience on the dragondoor.com training forum: “Anyone who is doubting the effectiveness of these techniques, I can attest they work!.. I haven’t done the DL for two years… At that point my 1RM DL was a pathetic looking 455 that left my back aching for a week, despite the belt. Since using… [the high-tension techniques] FOR ONE WEEK … last night I pulled the same amount for a triple! The kicker is, besides having not touched a weight in 2 years, I’m 65 lbs. lighter, and I did it beltless… the back feels fine today!”
Where ‘high intensity techniques’ weaken you and set you up for an injury, ‘high tension techniques’ protect you and make you strong.
Question: Can the ‘high-tension techniques’ you teach be applied to sports and work – or are they strictly for the gym?
These techniques can and should be applied whenever you are exerting or absorbing high forces. Following are two unlikely examples that will show you just how versatile the HTTs are.
One of the sharpest physical training instructors in the special operations community, SSgt. Nate Morrison, RKC Sr. of the USAF Pararescue, posted a brief note titled ‘High Tension Techniques for Small Boat Ops’ on the dragondoor.com forum. “For those who have ever spent days on a Zodiac F450, you know that after about an hour of bouncing around you are slowly reduced to mush and the pain is constant. Well, I am always surprised where High-Tension Techniques (HTT) come in handy. After about three hours of pounding in heavy chop I started squeezing my glutes and pressurizing my abs every time the boat slammed into the water. Low and behold, no more pain!
Behold the power of tension in small boat ops! Photo courtesy MilitaryFitness.org.
As a result, after three days of this I am still pain free while my comrades are in a serious bit of hurt.” Behold the power of tension!
And another post by this special operator, titled ‘Jumpmaster Notes’. “For those of you who have ever spent hours in a static line parachute harness, you know the back takes a heck of a pounding. While I can’t promise you elimination of pain, you will definitely experience some relief if you squeeze your glutes and pressurize your abs. Yes, it still hurts like hell, but at least you won’t feel your lumbar and thoracic discs compressing at strange angles. Food for thought.” Make sure to read SSgt. Morrison’s excellent articles on MilitaryFitness.org.
The HTT ease the shock of the static line. Photo courtesy MilitaryFitness.org.
Question: Can you solve the age-old argument: should one focus on the target muscle or on lifting the weight?
There are two types of focus in strength training: external and internal. The external focus implies thinking of little but lifting the weight somehow, anyhow. When a teenage boy is trying to impress girls with his bench press and elevates the barbell with atrocious form – he will miss his shoulders when they are gone – he is externally focusing. No comment is necessary; you will reap only an illusion of strength and a lifetime of pain.
In a conversation with the Super Slow™ guru Ken Hutchins, his associate Keith Johnson, M.D., coined the word ‘internalization’ for concentrating on the process of lifting the weight instead of the results: “They urge you to beat the equipment, as… a competitor you must defeat. They teach you to externalize a feigned aggression. You do the opposite. You seem to advocate reaching inside your body. When exercising he [Hutchins’ subject] seems to turn off his surrounding environment and concentrate into an internalized trance. That’s the fitting word: ‘internalize’.”
Do not interpret the above as an endorsement of the Super Slow™ but do yourself a favor and learn from the above. And then go a step beyond. ‘Feeling the muscle’ traditionally implies trying to ‘isolate’ the primary working muscle while trying to maximally relax the rest of the body. A bad idea. Strength training authority Dr. Ken Leistner once quipped that a body molded with a number of isolation exercises – like leg extensions or triceps kickbacks – looked like ‘a collection of body parts’. It just lacks grace, power, and flow. A gymnast or a martial artist whose panther like moves you admire, NEVER isolates. He integrates.
Watch the amazing stunts of the acrobats of the Cirque Du Soleil. You will not see sagging bodies with ‘isolated’ muscles but long and taught entities. Expert performers use full body tension as a lens to focus their energy into the primary muscles responsible for the job. So feel all your muscles, not just one.
Question: My training partner tells me that I am wasting my time testing my bench max. He showed me a chart that is supposed to calculate it based on an all out multiple rep set. I do not believe him. Who is right?
Your training partner is right about one thing. Unless you compete in powerlifting meets, there is no convincing reason for you to do max attempts. As for the chart, it is a waste of trees. The ratio between an iron athlete’s 1RM and, say, 10RM depends on the predominant fiber type, the nervous system organization, recent training, and a host of other factors. In other words, everyone is different. Both you and your buddy might be able to bench 225x10RM, yet you could put up 300x1RM while he might stall at 275x1RM.
Do not give up hope; you might be able to figure out your own PR formula by studying your training log, something powerlifters swear by. A lifter might notice that whenever he can deadlift a certain poundage for three gut busting reps he is good for a max single with fifty pounds more a week later. Needless to say, it will take you months of training and observation to nail down your reps to max ratio. And it is likely to change over time.
Question: How should I align my head when lifting?
It depends on the exercise. The following rundown of the so-called ‘pose reflexes’ by Smirnov & Dubrovsky (2002) will help you figure it out.
Tipping your head down or forward increases the tonus of the arm flexors and leg extensors. Translation: it is good for curls and leg extensions. But don’t try it with squats! Yes, it is easier to come out of the hole with your face down and your butt up. But it is also dangerous for your back and the second half of the lift is likely to get ugly.
Tilting your melon up or back has the opposite effect. The extensors upstairs and the flexors downstairs get a strength boost. Applications. Look up at the bar when military pressing or at the floor when doing handstand pushups (but only if you have the discipline not to arch your back). Press your head down into the bench when benching, especially at the sticking point.
Russian scientists explain the curious reason for the above reflexes’ existence: improving the animal’s chances of reaching food below or above.
The second group of pose reflexes is fired off by turning the head or tilting it to one side. The extensors on the side the head is facing – and the flexors on the opposite side – get a strength boost. Both the lower and the upper body are affected. Professors Victor Smirnov and Vladimir Dubrovsky explain that these reflexes’ job is to maintain your equilibrium. When you turned your head you probably shifted your center of gravity and got off balance. Note how your right quad automatically gets loaded if you lean your head to the right.
Sample applications. Look up and to the right when doing a right arm kettlebell military press. Look down and to the left when curling with the right.
Advanced iron men and women often instinctively come up with more sophisticated ‘for professionals only’ neck maneuvers. For instance, drug free master powerlifter Fred Peterson starts his deadlift with his head down – don’t try it at home! This, as you know, boosts the quads’ strength for the start. As the nearly 700 pound barbell passes his knees, Peterson looks up. This fortifies the hamstrings and back and helps the lockout.
Question: I don’t understand what you mean when you say ‘pull yourself down into the squat’. How am I supposed to do it and what is the point?
There are two ways you can descend into the low position of the squat or any other exercise. Passively, by yielding to gravity. Which is what most people who have no poundages to brag about do. Or actively, by pulling yourself down against the resistance of your own muscles. Which is what strong people – whose barbells bend under the burden of many wheels – do, consciously or not. An active negative does three things. First, it loads elastic energy into your muscles and tendons, for a more powerful return. Second, it amplifies your strength through the Law of Successive Induction. This law states that a muscle will be stronger immediately after its antagonist’s contraction. And third, it dramatically increases your control of the iron and therefore cuts your odds of injuries. Imagine two opposing pulleys controlling a crane, rather than one.
Armed Forces Powerlifting Champion, Jack Reape suggested an excellent drill to teach you how to pull yourself into the squat on the dragondoor.com forum: ‘the reverse squat’. “Hold a pulldown rope around the back of your neck, then squat down and bend over. Good for your abs and great for your stabilizers.”
The same drill works for the deadlift. For the bench press try the reverse bench row. Set up a barbell for benching, then lie down on the bench with your head facing away from the bar. Scoot under the bar until it is over your sternum and your hips are hanging off the edge of the bench. Grip the bar with your usual BP grip. Force your chest out, and pull it towards the bar in a rowing motion. Try to follow the exact groove of your bench press, hence ‘the reverse bench’. Note what it feels like and try to recreate the same pulling sensation when you are lowering your benches.
The ‘reverse bench press’ row.
Question: Is it true that fat helps you lift more?
Yes, any tissue, including fat, helps by providing elastic rebound, sort of like powerlifting knee wraps and suit. Watch a super heavyweight lifter squat: his gut gets squished against his knees and his monstrous thighs push against the thick calves.
Of course, gaining fat to get stronger is not a wise choice for anyone but a SHW Pler, but you can fake some of the big guy’s leverage and come out with bigger and safer lifts.
The two exercises that lend themselves well to this ‘virtual size’ leverage are military presses and rock bottom Olympic squats. Watch a big dude military press. His torso and arms are so thick with muscles and fat that his tris get propped up on a cushion and the lift starts almost at the ear level. A skinny guy or gal has to start way down, below the collarbones, because thin arms naturally tuck into the sides.
The bottom-up kettlebell press makes the lat shelf obvious.
Try flaring your lats when you are about to start the press.
Press from a ‘lat shelf’ and be amazed at how much stronger you are – and how much easier the new technique is on your shoulder joints.
Try flaring your lats when you are about to start the press. Literally spread them, as if you are trying to impress the gym with your V-shape. A special, partial lateral raise will help you to get the hang of this move. Grab a couple of dumbbells that are way too heavy for lateral raises. Now, without shrugging your shoulders, try to lift them an inch or so, just by tensing your squished lats. The latissimus will flare and push up on your upper arms. Try to recreate the same feeling at the beginning of a military press. Press from a ‘lat shelf’ and be amazed at how much stronger you are – and how much easier the new technique is on your shoulder joints. But remember to resist the temptation to shrug your shoulders!
When you have mastered the lat shelf for your military presses you can start practicing to apply it to your benches, something record-breaking powerlifters swear by. It is not easy to master but well worth it.
Now apply the ‘virtual tissue leverage’ technique to rock bottom back or front squats. Start by going rock bottom without any weight and practice getting up an inch or so just by ‘thickening’ your hamstrings. Once you have it down pat, try it with a weight.
Do it! The ‘virtual tissue leverage’ technique is not just a gimmick that artificially raises your poundage; it is an effective way to protect your joints.
Question: Is it true that there are dozens of shrug variations? Are they of any use?
Yes and yes. Your shoulder girdle has many degrees of freedom and it stands to reason that working it through many planes will fire up some new muscles and fibers and slap a few pounds on your frame. Besides, according to the shrug expert Paul Kelso, they will make your shoulders more resistant to injuries and up your poundages in other lifts. Here is one such shrug from the highly recommended Kelso’s Shrug Book. It will boost your ego lift – the bench press.
Stand inside a cable crossover machine – at last, a hardcore application for this sissified contraption! – and stretch your arms out to grab the handles of the high pulleys. Lean back slightly as if you are lying down to bench. If you are not using enough weight to counterbalance yourself, a spot from behind is a good idea.
Inhale and retract your straight arms into the shoulder sockets while forcing your chest out and pinching your shoulder blades together. “There is an odd result with wide grips,” comments Paul Kelso, “the direction of pull is not back or up… There is a triangulation from the hands to the focal point of contraction.” As if you are sucking your straight arms in your body. Pause in the retracted position for a few seconds, and release the stacks slowly. Do three sets of eight reps with pauses, either after your bench workout or on your back day.
Paul Kelso has turned shrugging into a science.
Remember this feeling and try to recreate it when you are benching. Follow another gold nugget from Kelso’s book: ‘pull the bar apart’ as you are lowering it to your chest. “The tension created is translated through the arms to the upper back and provides… stored “extra energy”…” This subtle championship tip will make your bench go up. Guaranteed.
The only exercise that justifies the cable crossover machine’s existence.
Question: Could you give me a program to improve my dumbbell bench press? I can do a pair of 90s.
You bet. On Monday work up to a comfortably heavy triple, e.g. 50sx3, 60sx3, 65sx3, 70sx3, 75sx3, 80sx3. On Tuesday do many sets of five with little rest, e.g. 60sx5x10. On Thursday work up to a heavy five of incline bench dumbbell presses, then declines. You might be able to do 45x5, 50x5, 55x5, 60x5, 65x5 on inclines and 65x5, 70x5, 75x5, 80x5 on declines. Understand that these are just examples. The idea is to start light and work up to comfortably heavy, while keeping the reps the same.
Keep your rest between sets brief on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. On Saturday do many triples with plenty of rest, e.g. 70s-75sx3x8-12. Do the above program for three weeks. Peak in week four. Work up to a comfortable triple, perhaps 85sx3 by now, on Monday. A double, probably 90sx2, on Tuesday. It should be heavy but do not kill yourself. Do a very easy low rep workout on Thursday just to grease your groove, e.g. 70sx3x3. Test your max on Saturday. Your test might look like this. 50sx3, 60sx3, 70sx2, 80sx1, 90sx1, 95sx1, 100sx1. Feel free to apply this pattern to other exercises.
Question: I have bad knees and I cannot squat regularly. Is there a way for me to build up my squat without squatting? And to replace the muscle building benefits of this king of exercises?
If your doctor is cool with you squatting at least once in a blue moon, there is a solution. Do what 1959 Mr. Universe Bruce Randall did. A young Marine, Randall wanted to play football for the base team and started lifting and eating. But as his size and strength grew, he lost interest in the ball game and focused on the iron. Bruce had one problem: he had suffered seven leg fractures in a bicycle accident and squatting was very hard on him. He got buried by 190, the first time he tried it!
But the jarhead did not give up. He eventually worked up to a 680-pound squat – without practicing it! But in case you got excited in anticipation of a secret routine that will mix leg presses, extensions, and other easy moves into a big squat, you have another thing coming. Mr. Universe’s substitute was at least as hard as the squat; some people would say it is even harder. It was the good morning, the exercise I am yet to see done in an average gym. Because the good morning is so similar to the power squat, the former automatically pushes up the latter.
Now run over to the squat rack before you get cold feet and give this tough exercise a shot. With the bar low on your back set up in your usual squat stance. Take a breath into your stomach, tighten up, and push your hips back. This is very important: don’t lean forward but stick your butt out as far as possible. The latter intent is much safer for your back and enables you to put up much heavier weights.
Keep your stomach braced at all times and don’t lose your air! You can breathe, but shallow – ‘sip’ air as the late Dr. Siff would put it –– and without losing tension in your abs. Look straight ahead at all times and keep your spine straight (not to be confused with ‘vertical’). Keep your weight on your heels, your knees slightly bent, and your shins vertical, something your knees will appreciate. Keep folding until your torso is parallel to the deck or you cannot go any deeper without rounding your back. Press your feet into the floor and your traps up into the bar, and steadily straighten out.
The good morning.
Press your feet into the floor and your traps up into the bar.
Keep your weight on your heels, your knees slightly bent, and your shins vertical, something your knees will appreciate.
The bad morning.
Bruce Randall used to do three sets. He would pick a weight he could do for sets of five and gradually work them into eights. Then he would add ten to fifteen pounds and start over with sets of five. Do this twice a week and try a comfortably heavy squat once a month. Unlike other squat avoidance schemes, this one will work.
Question: I saw a big dude in my gym squatting from the bottom up from the power rack pins. What is the purpose of this type of training?
I will start with the benefits of ‘dead squatting’. First and foremost, it keeps you honest. While you can get cute in the traditional back squat by cutting your depth for instance, the dead weight sitting welded to the pins will accept nothing less than real strength. Second, it is a very safe way to squat. And fun too. The dead squat is the ultimate in muscle tension.
The drawbacks. First, because it de-emphasizes the negative, the dead squat does not build as much muscle as the down-and-up squat. It can be an advantage though, if you are satisfied with your thigh size and just want to get stronger. Second, the dead squat does not teach you to ‘store tension’ on the way down. It means that you will not improve your regular up-and-down SQ without specific practice in addition to your power rack squats.
Set a light barbell inside a power rack at a level that places your thighs at parallel once you crawl under the bar. Get under – quickly, before your cramp! – take a breath, tighten up, and stand up.
De-emphasize the negative. Do singles. Add small amounts of weight until you work up to a near max, then take off some weight and do one or two back-off sets of five to ten reps. Let the bar rest completely on the pins between each rep. The whole workout might look like this: 185x1, 225x1, 275x1, 295x1, 305x1, 310x1, 225x10. Ease into it as you are likely to get very sore, especially in your hip flexors.
Bud Jeffries dead squatting 900 pounds! His PR is a grand!
Photos courtesy Strongerman.com
Follow the above routine one to three times a week. You will not need any other hip and thigh work. A few years ago I put two friends of mine, everyday guys in their forties, on this program. They kept improving at least five pounds a week for almost a year without back cycling of any sort.
The definitive text on the dead squat is How to Squat 900lbs Without Drugs, Powersuits, or Knee Wraps by Bud Jeffries (Strongerman.com). In the know people consider Jeffries the successor of Anderson. The man parallel dead squatted a grand!
The dead squat is the ultimate in muscle tension.
A few years ago I put two friends of mine, everyday guys in their forties, on this program. They kept improving at least five pounds a week for almost a year without back cycling of any sort.
Question: Should I Power Breathe when I squat and deadlift?
When your spine is compressed by a heavy poundage you cannot afford losing any air, for it protects your back like a pneumatic cushion. So instead of forcefully expelling your breath just pretend that you are – a technique I call ‘Virtual Power Breathing’. Obviously, it is not for comrades with heart or blood pressure issues.
Practice a couple of regular Power Breaths as I described elsewhere. Then do the same – but ‘catch your breath’ in your stomach instead of letting it escape. You will experience comfortable tightness in your waist as your abdomen gets pressurized. Your belly should not stick out or suck in; it will just get rock hard and you will feel very solid inside. Make sure not to flex your spine, try to maintain its normal curve.
Here is how to apply the ‘virtual belt’ to your powerlifts. Take three quarters of your maximal breath and pressurize your abdomen – as explained before – pulling your dead off the platform. Hold it as the bar is inching up. Power Breathe a little air out at the lockout and park the weight without losing your tightness. Follow a slightly different sequence in the squat: inhale and pressurize at the top, go down and come up while holding your breath, release some air at the top.
Do not forget to employ this technique when you are hauling heavy stuff outside the gym and remember to religiously practice plain vanilla or water Power Breathing to hone your skill of pressurizing your abdomen.
The effects of Virtual Power Breathing are nothing short of miraculous. The usually heavy weight will feel whimsically light and your back is not likely to feel a thing.
Question: Why are you so fundamentalist in your training philosophy? ‘Never do more than five reps’, ‘never go to failure’, etc. There are people who got big and strong without following them, aren’t there?
I will restate my ‘iron communist’ views:
1. You must lift heavy.
2. You must limit your reps to five.
3. You must avoid muscle failure.
4. You must cycle your loads.
5. You must stay tight. Tension is power.
6. You must treat your strength as a skill and ‘practice’ with iron rather than ‘work out’.
7. You must strive to do fewer things better.
My ‘fundamentalism’ is meant to give you the safest and most foolproof path to your goals-size and strength. Why overcomplicate your life with multiple choices if you can get the job done simply?
At a recent RKC seminar one of my senior instructors Rob Lawrence made an excellent point that all training ‘laws’ are reversible under the right circumstances. Take ‘the law of staying tight’ as an example. Extreme full body tension is an absolute must for one-rep strength that impresses; I dare you to find a good powerlifter who does not practice it! Yet gireviks, athletes who compete in kettlebell lifting, stay as loose as they can when pressing. Tension accelerates fatigue, which is unacceptable in the brutal Russian strength-endurance sport.
All training laws and guidelines are reversible in the right context. The caveat: it takes knowledge and experience to reverse them properly and sometimes you must be willing to pay the price. Until you have been in the iron game for a decade and accomplished something, break these ‘laws’ at your risk.
Rob Lawrence, RKC Sr. breaking ‘the law of staying tight’ to get more reps in the kettlebell snatch. Photos courtesy Philadelphia KettlebellClub.net
Question: Many old-timers combined weight lifting, gymnastics, and strongman training. Is that necessary today?
Dr. Ken Leistner, one very strong hombre and an influential name in the iron game, once quipped that bodies built with isolation exercises looked like ‘a collection of body parts’. That never happens to those who apply their muscles to a variety of natural tasks: lifting awkward objects, acrobatics, heavy manual labor, etc.
One way of combining such training with traditional bodybuilding is starting every workout with the former and wrapping up with the latter. Another approach, more fitting for someone who trains at a public gym, but keeps his logs and tires in the garage, is to emulate Russian strength icon Valentin Dikul. This sixty some year old juggles 180-pound kettlebells and squats a grand! He lifts daily, alternating powerlifting/kettlebell/strongman days and bodybuilding days. Note that although Dikul does isolation exercises like straight-arm pulldowns, he always goes heavy, typically five sets of six.
Question: How could old-timers train each muscle daily and why can’t we?
Our great-grandfathers treated their iron time as a practice rather than a workout. They lifted heavy and often but never to failure or exhaustion. According to The Strong Men of Old by Bob Hoffman, Arthur Saxon “would do each stunt only a few times and alternate with brief periods of rest so as to prevent himself from tiring.” That explains how Saxon could train daily.
Although frequent, heavy, and non-exhaustive training builds unreal strength, it is not a good full time method for a bodybuilder. Saxon was a strong man but not a muscle man. In 1879 William Blaikie explained in How to Get Strong and How to Stay So that “… occasional heavy lifting tends rather to harden the muscle than to rapidly increase its size, protracted effort at lighter but good-sized weights doing the latter to better advantage.” An occasional six to eight week gig of daily pure power training will do you a world of good though. Greater strength later applied to high volume bodybuilding will deliver tremendous mass gains.
Question: Are there any “lost” retro exercises that should be resurrected?
Plenty of them. The bent press gets my first vote. This drill is not really a press but a unique flexibility and support feat. Get a weight to your shoulder: a barbell, dumbbell, or kettlebell. Set up so your elbow is resting on your pelvic bone, on the side and even slightly behind you. This calls for some serious shoulder flexibility; chances are it will take you months of partial reps to work into a full bent press.
Slowly lean to the side away from the weight and slightly forward – never back! Keep your eye on the bell at all times and be ready to drop it. Your elbow must rest against your side at all times and your forearm must remain vertical, absolute necessities with heavy weights. The all time record is Arthur Saxon’s 370 pounds!
Eventually you will end up in a semi-squat, your arm finally locked out. Slowly stand up with your arm straight overhead.
The bent press rocks.
Some tips. Practice where you will have no fear of dropping the weight. Occasionally bent press after your triceps are fried, to discourage you from pressing the bell. At other times practice when your lats are pumped; flaring the lat really helps.
Getting even a marginally passable bent press will take months. Why bother? – Because it is a great lat workout (you would never guess, would you?). Because it develops spectacular shoulder flexibility that will go a long way towards shoulder health. Because it is one of the best moves to work all your core muscles and to make your back injury resistant.
Eugene Sandow, the father of bodybuilding, was a bent press expert and his physique is yet to be topped. There are plenty of bigger guys nowadays but no one comes close to Sandow’s total package of superstrength – one-finger pullups, anyone? – muscle density, and symmetry.
Practice where you will have no fear of dropping the weight. Occasionally bent press after your triceps are fried, to discourage you from pressing the bell.
Question: Why didn’t the bodybuilders of the golden age bench and squat?
On the bench press count, it would not occur to our able bodied grandfathers to exercise and test their strength lying down. Besides, in those days ‘chest development’ meant a huge ribcage, not breast like pecs. The floor pullover was the chest exercise of choice. And yes, contrary to what some modern trainers say, it is possible to expand an adult bodybuilder’s rib box. As for the squat, logistics was the problem. Squat stands and power racks did not exist; squat pioneers had to rock a barbell onto their shoulders, a feat in itself.
Is BP and SQ free training worth emulating? – It depends on the look you are after. You will not get truly huge without them. On the other hand, you will not have droopy pecs and chafing thighs either. The retro emphasis on a variety of lifts from the ground and overhead, forge physiques along the lines of antique statues: broad shoulders with just a hint of pecs, back muscles standing out in bold relief, wiry arms, rugged forearms, a cut-up midsection, and strong yet trim legs.
Question: What did the old timers do for cardio and staying lean?
Dig into your family album or go to the library and look up photos of people who lived in the first half of the twentieth century or earlier. I dare you to find an obese person. The lost secret of leanness is simple: hard physical labor every day. Here is some grandfatherly advice: get off your stern and go to work. Real man or woman work, not fifteen minutes on an elliptical trainer every other day. Get a part time job as a mover. Sell your John Deere and get an old-fashioned push mower. Volunteer to clean up a highway. Andrey Dolgov, a Latvian boxing and kickboxing coach extraordinaire, raised a school of fearsome champions whose S&C is old-fashioned labor. These hard and ripped to the bone fighters volunteer to cut and stack firewood for old ladies.
Even an occasional day or two of hard physical work or exercise will do wonders for your body comp. My students always leave a weekend kettlebell course leaner and more muscular. Martial arts seminars are great; recently I took an excellent two and a half day course from Tim Larkin of tftgroup.com and walked away noticeably leaner.
My wife once observed, if you work out for an hour a day and spend twenty-three hours sitting or lying down, do you think your looks will reflect the one hour or the twenty three hours?
Question: What lost bodybuilding secrets can we use today?
There are many – but one stands out: do not train to failure and have patience. Famous Russian strongman Pyotr ‘the Kettlebell King’ Kryloff said, “The training of amateurs I have been meeting… is driven by records. It is a wrong system and an unhealthy one to top it off… Thanks to my extremely careful and restrained system of training I have kept my strength and muscles, even though, being an old school circus athlete, I had to perform very difficult stunts and sometimes perform shows with very heavy weights a few times a day.” As the ancient wisdom goes, “He who understands life does not rush.”
Last week I taught a seminar out of town and hit a gym near my hotel for a workout. What a depressing landscape, Comrades! A dude was doing what he apparently perceived as plyometrics on a Hack squat machine and I almost had to dodge a rocketing kneecap. An intellectual was performing some exotic combo of an internal shoulder rotation and a cable crunch. A lady who could whip both guys was getting a glazed look as she was approaching a trance like state after a hundred crunches…
I cannot fix the whole bodybuilding scene in one day, but putting together an ‘A’ and a ‘Z’ list of exercises will be a good start.
It Drools: the Crunch
I have no clue how such a pathetic exercise has come to dominate the scene. I guess some simple mind came up with a bright idea that not coming up all the way would isolate the abs from the psoas. It does not. But if you have not read my book Bullet-Proof Abs you will never know why.
It Rules: the Janda Situp
The crunch brigade is stuck in the industrial age. They treat the body as a simplistic mechanism of pulleys and levers and fail to recognize the vital role of the nervous system in protecting the back – and in making rock hard abs happen.. The Janda situp, a state of the art exercise developed by a top Eastern European back rehab specialist, drags ab fitness into the information age. It ‘hacks’ into your ‘muscle software’ to dramatically amplify the intensity of the abdominal contraction while shutting off the potentially back damaging hip flexor muscles.
It Drools: the Situp with a Twist
You will miss your back when it is gone.
A broomstick twist is just as dumb as the twisting situp, but gratefully it has been put to rest by all bodybuilders other than those who have been pumping away in bomb shelters hiding from Soviet ICBMs.
It Rules: the One-Arm Suitcase Style Deadlift
There are a few more goodies on my obliques ‘A’ list but I chose this one because it will hurt the most, heh-heh. Deadlift a barbell – a dumbbell could be bad news to your toes – as a suitcase. Do not do a side bend; your body should come up evenly as if you have another bar of the same weight in your other hand. Stay tight. You will get a lesson in anatomy the morning after: “I didn’t know I had muscles there!”
It Drools: the Fire Hydrant and Anything Else that Happens in a ‘Muscle Sculpting’ Class
What a pathetic, demeaning exercise. Get off your knees, you are not a dog. Besides, the glutes are very powerful. It takes a lot more than repetitive butt squeezes to get them to shape up.
It Rules: the Hip Pull-through
The hip pull-through. It rules.
Keeping your arms straight take a step forward to load your muscles.
You will get your deadlift moving, both the start and the lockout.
Louie Simmons’ famous powerlifting club swears by this exercise.
Facing away from a cable machine, stick your arms between your legs and grab a triceps pushdown rope attached to the low cable. Keeping your arms straight take a step forward to load your muscles. Now squeeze your glutes and drive your hips forward while locking out your knees. If your knees stay bent, the drill will not work. In addition to a hard butt you will get your deadlift moving, both the start and the lockout. Louie Simmons’ famous powerlifting club swears by this exercise.
It Drools: the Sissy Deadlift
You have heard of a sissy squat but not a sissy deadlift? – You have seen it, Comrade, trust me. This grotesque deadlift mutation calls for a weight lighter than your top curl and demands that you lock your knees and twist your neck to check out your butt in the mirror. This exercise in vanity will get you nothing but back, neck, and knee problems; your spinal erectors will remain flatter than a road kill.
It Rules: the Deadlift Lockout
Be generous with plates and pull a barbell from your knee level or slightly above. Use a staggered powerlifting grip or straps. Keep your whole body, especially your stomach and butt, tight. Frank Zane digs the partial deadlift for a reason. What reason? –– Do the drill and you will not have to ask.
It Drools: Any Machine Exercise
Just say no to machines when it comes to leg training! If you cannot, get help. Leg extensions are worthless and can be tough on the knees – as the latter are vulnerable without the backup of contracting hamstrings. Ditto for the Hack squat machine, not to mention additional problems from knee hyperflexion. And the leg press is nothing but an ego lift. Sure, you can impress someone who has never touched a weight with a 1,000 pound leg press. People in the know would be more impressed with a squat with one third of that poundage.
It Rules: the Squat
Nobody does it better. You may opt for any reasonable variation of the squat – the Olympic squat, the powerlifting squat, the front squat, the one-legged squat, the duck style deadlift or the trap bar deadlift – as long as you squat.
It Drools: the Leg Curl
The most likely ‘gain’ that you are going to report from this exercise impostor is back pain from trying too hard and getting your hip flexors in the action. Working the hammies as knee flexors just is not productive (unless you are using Dr. Yessis’ GHG machine). Treat them as hip extensors and you might eventually come to the gym wearing shorts.
It Rules: the Good Morning
My friend Marty Gallagher, a former coach of the Powerlifting Team USA, laments, “Why does such a manly drill have such a ‘hearts and flowers’ name?”
I have no idea. But I know that your hamstrings will fill out like a pair of footballs once you put good mornings in your regimen. Make sure to keep your back arched and do not go any deeper than parallel. Do not think of leaning forward, rather keep sticking your butt out while looking straight ahead until you reach the right depth. As a bonus, good mornings will boost your squats into orbit, which is why they are a favorite with most top Russian powerlifters.
It Drools: the Standing Machine Calf Raise
When young Arnold trained with Reg Park, the latter used 1,000 pounds for his calf raises, twice Schwarzenegger’s training weight. Park explained to the future legend of bodybuilding that the 500 pounds he was toying with “were not making an impression” on his calves at all, because these are very strong muscles (or at least ones with good leverage). Arnold proceeded to work up to a grand. The rest is history.
Superheavy calf training is a must. But great weghts on your shoulders combined with high volume translate into some serious spinal compression, especially if you are not skilled in protecting your back with diaphragmatic pressure against your viscera and your midsection is weak. Regardless of the standing calf raise’s effectiveness, you had better ditch it once you work up to big poundages.
It Rules: the Negative Accentuated Foot Extension in a Leg Press Machine
Your calves get worked daily and it takes some unusual stress to spur them into growth. This is where the leg press machine comes in (the only thing it is good for). The sled will enable you to blast your calves with monster weights without back stress – as long as you do not let your butt curl up – and easily lends itself to intense negative accentuated training. Lift the load with two feet, lower it with one. Feel the pain.
It Drools: the Pulldown Behind the Neck
If you have exceptional active flexibility of the shoulder girdle, can keep your elbows way back and can pull the bar to the nape of your neck without leaning forward and sticking your head out like a chicken about to be beheaded–go ahead and pull behind the neck. Since I do not know anyone except for Olympic weightlifters and gymnasts who can do that, you might as well forget it! The chicken style pulldown behind the neck does little but screw up necks and shoulders.
It Rules: the Pullup/Chinup on Gymnastic Rings
The debate regarding the ‘best’ pullup grip is as hot as it was half a century ago. Is wide better than narrow? Is the supinated grip better than the pronated one? I have good news for you: you can have it all, just do your pullups or chinups on gymnastic rings. What a stretch! What a contraction! If you do not have the luxury of living next door to the old Santa Monica Muscle Beach go to ringtraining.com and get a set.
It Drools: the Smith Machine Shrug
I have never seen a set of big traps inside a Smith machine. You cannot pull your shoulders back at the top of the movement and your traps will miss all the good stuff. Besides, the machine locks your shoulder girdle in a set track and that could lead to joint problems.
It Rules: the Barbell Shrug with a Hip Thrust
The traps of Soviet weightlifting legend David Rigert stood out like a foreign object, an alien parasite. You can bet that the champion did not get there with uncertain shrugs with little weights. The traps best respond to explosive barbell shrugs assisted by a hip thrust: violently contract your glutes and throw your hips forward as you shrug up and back. Do not bend your arms; it helps to keep your triceps flexed, at least on the bottom of the movement. You may hold the contraction on the last rep for a few seconds followed up by a slow negative. Do not relax under the weight! Breathe shallow.
It Drools: the Cable Cross-Over
The pec was designed for power and teasing it with this silly move is a waste of your time. If you want to bring out the ‘cuts’ you will be much better off etching them in with some old-fashioned iron bending. Go to IronMind.com for nails and instructions. Take a seminar with Senior RKC Brett Jones of BreakingStrength.com. Brett is the eleventh person to bend Iron Mind’s famous Red Nail™, the second fellow under two hundred pounds.
It Rules: the Legal Powerlifting Bench Press
No need to reinvent the wheel here. You will not find a better chest builder than the barbell bench press. However, to get the most out, of it you had better lose some of your bad bodybuilding habits – such as putting your feet up on the bench and bouncing the bar off your chest. Drive your feet into the floor and pause on your chest for a second without relaxing, as you would in a power meet.
It Drools: the Seated Barbell Military Press
Do this one long enough and heavy enough and you can kiss your back goodbye. Get off your butt, you big sissy!
It Rules: the Arnold Press
Let’s face it, the big guy knew what he was doing. Even though there are other shoulder drills at least as effective as this one, say the clean-and-press, the Arnold press is a lot more user friendly.
Press two dumbbells from your chest starting with a curl grip. Not straight up though, but back and to the sides in an arc. It helps to bring your elbows as low as possible between reps; you will get a greater deltoid stretch and your shoulder joints will appreciate it.
It Drools: the Zottman Curl
The Z curl calls for curling a dumbbell with a regular palm up grip, then pronating the wrist and doing a reverse curl negative. Unless you are very in tune with your body your smaller flexors on the top of the forearm will be a hurting units for weeks; those negatives creep up without warning.
It Rules: the One-Arm Dumbbell Curl
It is hard to beat this classic provided you curl strict and slow and employ every high-tension technique in the book.
It Drools: the Triceps Kickback
The long and the lateral heads of the triceps–that is two out of three – just refuse to work until you are handling a respectable weight. Kickbacks? – Forget about ‘em!
It Rules: the Close Grip Bench Press
Nothing fancy, but it sure gets the job done. Do not get your hands too close together, almost touching the smooth part of the bar with your index finger is just right.
It Drools: the Wrist Curl with a Weenie Weight
Most of my arm-wrestling buddies have no trouble slamming a #2 Captains of Crush™ gripper that takes almost 200 pounds to shut. And they have the forearms to show for it. You will never get a spinach endorsement contract, Comrade, if you train your forearms with Malibu Ken and Barbie weights.
It Rules: the Suitcase Barbell Wrist Flexion
Pick up a long bar from the power rack pins set at your hip level, as you would pick up a suitcase. Squeeze the bar and gooseneck your wrist as if you are trying to roll up your fist toward the inside of your elbow. Your elbow will flex somewhat; that is OK. Keep your lat tight and do not shrug your shoulder. It helps to think that you are trying to pull yourself down to the bar.
The suitcase wrist flexion.
Harder than it looks.
This little known exercise will pack a lot of meat on your forearms.
This little known exercise will pack a lot of meat on your forearms. Still, do not limit your forearm training to wrist flexion. Work other degrees of wrist freedom: extension, abduction, adduction, pronation, and supination. And do not forget your fingers, at least flexion and extension.
Naturally, my ‘A’ and ‘Z’ lists are far from being exhaustive. There are many more fine bodybuilding exercises and even more exercises that suck. But it is a start. If I got you to turn your back on a leg curl machine and load up an Olympic bar for good mornings, if you start treating the cable cross-over stack like you would a drug pusher near your kid’s school, and if do not let your friends use the leg press machine, except for heavy calf work, I got something accomplished. Now, if I could only get that health club’s management to shut off their mall tunes and crank up some AC/DC, I might even go back next time I am in town.
Question: You indiscriminately push free weights on anyone, including raw beginners like me. Don’t you get it that your barbells and kettlebells are very hard to balance and it would be a lot safer to get someone started on machines?
I shall respond with a quote from the authors of Supertraining Prof. Verkhoshansky and Dr. Siff. “Contrary to common belief, the novice must be taught from a base of mobility to progress to stability, just as an infant learns to stand by first moving, staggering and exploring the environment.”
Would you like to be ‘staggering and exploring’ while you are still relatively weak or later, when you have more strength to hurt yourself? I rest my case.
Question: I am planning to set up a home gym. I have a bare bones budget and very limited space. What should I get?
A barbell set plus a homemade platform. You could get a cheap set made with child labor in the Far East. Or you could spend a few bucks more and get a quality product proudly made in the US, for instance one by the legendary York Barbell Company, YorkBarbell.com.
Throw a 3/4 inch thick sheet of rubber on the floor and you are all set. If you deadlift heavy or drop your overhead lifts you will need a platform. The following home made design that I had learned from former Powerlifting Team USA coach, Marty Gallagher served me well. Cover six old tires of the same size arranged in two tight rows of three with a thick sheet of plywood. Nail a couple of 2x4s on the edges of the platform to prevent the barbell from rolling off. Top off the contraption with a thin sheet of rubber and you are in business.
A US spec ops gym in Iraq: kettlebells and a T.A.P.S. unit.
Photo courtesy militaryfitness.org
Where is the exercise bench, you might ask? Isn’t it the staple of bodybuilder’s arsenal?! – No. Until a few decades ago you could not even find one in any gym. Even in this age of obsession with pecs you can do without one. Do floor presses; it is the same movement as the BP except you are lying on the floor. What about the legs? – Deadlifts, Jefferson, and Hack squats will take care of them. Figure out the rest.
If you have a few bucks left get a power rack. Avoid cages with all the fancy attachments, although a pullup bar would be great.
A kettlebell. This classic iron tool available from RussianKettlebell.com enables you to do everything you could do with a dumbbell plus many things you could not: repetition quick lifts, various presses, Turkish get-ups, overhead squats, armwrestling curls… And, what is important when you are on a budget or tight on space, the traditional kettlebell training protocol does not require multiple weights, one or two bells are just dandy.
A pullup bar or a set of gymnastic rings. Or, better yet, both. If you have imagination you can build a powerful upper body with your bodyweight alone. Floor exercises take care of themselves; all you need is something to pull yourself up on. Ideally install your bar or rings high enough for you to hang with your legs straight without touching the floor. The Tactical Athlete Pullup System by Jeff Martone, RKC Sr. is an awesome pullup rig. Get one from TacticalAthlete.com. Get your rings from RingTraining.com. You can hook them up to your T.A.P.S. and do a ton of cool stuff, including dips.
Senior RKC Jeff Martone in his home gym: a T.A.P.S. unit + kettlebells + Power Rings.
Photo courtesy TacticalAthlete.com
Question: It seems that everyone praises squats and other compound exercises these days. Do isolation exercises have any future?
Canadian researcher Digby Sale discovered that individual muscles within muscle groups and even motor units within individual muscles have activation patterns that are highly movement specific. In other words, you will not be using the same part of your quads during squats and leg extensions. Depending on your goals, it can mean different things to you. If you are an athlete or a power bodybuilder, forget exercises like leg extensions that do not resemble any sport or real life efforts! “It would be most efficient to induce hypertrophy only in the muscle fibers of the motor units that are activated in the sports movement,” explains Sale. “Hypertrophy of irrelevant muscles and motor units might even be counterproductive, particularly in sports which require a high strength to body mass ratio.”
At first glance it appears that single joint exercises are a waste of time to anyone but purely cosmetic bodybuilders a.k.a. the Big Sissies. But wait! What if there is a way to circumvent the ‘Sale Law’ and activate the ‘leg extension muscles’ during squats?!
Here is the theory based on a long lost secret of Paul Anderson. ‘The Wonder of Nature’, as the Russians nicknamed him, used to perform his powerlifts and assistance exercises in a circuit. He would do a few squats, rest a bit, do a set of good mornings, then more squats… Big Paul did this to ‘coordinate’ the strength built with the assistance exercise, with the powerlift. Today we understand what he did and why it worked. The neurons which regularly fire close together tend to get cross-wired and become a part of a single neural network. As a result, the good morning muscles and fibers previously unused in the squat become integrated into it! It might work with single joint exercises too.
On many occasions Paul Anderson devised a training technique decades ahead of his time without knowing neurons from nylons. Russians call this technique complex training. It is common among T&F top dogs but somehow failed to catch on with strength athletes. A high jumper may do a heavy triple in the squat followed by some depth jumps, an intense form of plyometrics, and wrap up with a competition style high jump. The result: a transfer of the strength gain in assistance exercises to the primary skill of the sport. So it is conceivable that heavy sets of triceps extensions alternated with benches would strengthen the latter lift. The single-joint exercise would build and neurally strengthen some new fibers – and alternating it with the target compound lift would integrate these fibers into the lift.
If you choose to test this theory, train your ‘isolation’ exercises as you would the powerlifts – with the high-tension techniques, heavy, and for low reps. Pat Casey, the first man to bench 600 pounds (in a wife beater, not a bench shirt) did insanely heavy one-arm laterals. Try alternating 3x6 of the single joint assistance exercise with 3x3 of the power lift or some other pet lift of yours. It is not clear what rest periods you should use. Start with 2-3 min. No one knows whether uneven intervals, e.g. resting only 1 min after the flies and 3 after the benches, would be of any help. Experiment and drop me a line on the dragondoor.com forum with your results.
Even single joint exercises must be practiced with the high-tension techniques, heavy, and for low reps.
