CONTENTS
• Divide and Conquer: Designing the Perfect Split
• The upper body solution for ‘high intensity’ bodybuilders
• Planned vs. free style training
• Twice-a-day training: the edge or overtraining?
• The perfect split for the ‘Strong as You Look’ series
• Why can the abs be trained daily and other muscles cannot?
• Turning lemons into lemonade: overtraining for gains
• Mathematics of muscle growth
• Is varying exercise tempo worth the trouble?
• Not satisfied with your rate of progress?
Comrade, are you having a hard time deciding how many times a week should you lift and how often you should hit each lift or body part? – Not any more. The purpose of this section is to teach you how to customize your iron schedule, split or otherwise.
First, let us consider the pros and cons of full body workouts versus split routines. A full body workout is the most foolproof and harder to overtrain on – clear plusses in a beginner’s book. It is time efficient – an asset, unless you dig the gym scene and have no athletic pursuits outside the gym. Finally, a full body session can help you focus on the big bang exercises and reduce the number of flaky, non-productive moves.
On the down side, a full body workout does not allow for specialization training and prevents the trainee from doing a high volume of work. Both are advanced issues. A beginning to intermediate bodybuilder has no business specializing, unless he specializes on the squat. And a high volume of loading does not become a must until you already have some meat on your bones. Which does not imply that a full body routine is for beginners only! Guess how the drug free physical culturalists of the golden age built their strength and physiques?
If you have picked a full body routine, the only decision you have to make is the frequency of training. Here are your choices.
a) Once a week or less. Although hitting each body part once a week works well on a split routine that provides indirect daily stimulation, this frequency – or rather ‘infrequency’ – will not fly unless all you do is squat and deadlift.
b) Three times in two weeks, e.g. Mon-Fri-next Wed. An appropriate schedule if you are super busy or your lifestyle does not help quick recovery. Be prepared to be sore a lot.
c) Two times a week, e.g. Mon-Thur. Fitting if you are short on time. Also good for advanced comrades who are not good at varying their volume and intensity from workout to workout (cycling).
d) Three times a week. The Mon-Wed-Fri schedule has persevered for decades because it is the most foolproof.
e) Four times a week. One of the best setups for a serious drug free iron man or woman. As gymnastics coach Chris Sommer put it, it “allows maximum work combined with substantial rest.” Surprisingly, according to Prof. Arkady Vorobyev, the author of the Russian equivalent of Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding, Mon-Tue-Thur-Fri is superior to Mon-Wed-Fri-Sat. The reasons are outside the scope of this piece; just remember that the Party is always right.
f) Five times a week or more. Perfect if you have the discipline to follow an ultra abbreviated routine such as Power to the People! and strength is more important to you than size.
Onward and upward to split routines. There are two types of splits: by muscle group or body part, and by lift. The latter is the powerlifting approach, but it does not mean it will not work for a bodybuilder. The classic powerlifting split is Monday – the squat, Wednesday – the bench, and Friday – the deadlift with a second, light, BP session often added on Saturday. Start by working the primary lift and wrap up with exercises that would help it, regardless of the body part involved. For instance, on squat days you could do good mornings, usually known as ‘a back exercise’, to make your squats feel lighter – and presses behind the neck to stretch out your shoulders for a better bar position on your back.
Why bother with the powerlifting split? – to be as strong as you look.
Two more effective power splits. Squat on Mondays and Fridays, deadlift on Wednesdays, and bench on all three days (the great Mike Bridges’ schedule). Or lift three days a week, benching every other session and rotating squats and deads: Monday – SQ, Wednesday – BP, Friday – DL, Monday – BP, Wed – SQ, Fri – BP, etc. (Paul Kelso’s split). By the way, there is no reason you cannot dedicate your Saturdays to curls and other beach work. The best of both worlds.
If you go the traditional bodybuilding route and split your workouts by body parts, the rule of thumb is to make sure that each muscle group gets to be trained when it is maximally fresh. Pair up body parts that have a minimal negative impact on each other. Legs + arms is better than chest + triceps. Shoulders + biceps rocks and back + biceps sucks. You get the idea.
Dorian Yates’ early split teaches you how it is done. Mr. Olympia would work his legs and arms on day one, take a day off, then train his torso: chest, back, and shoulders. The fourth day was a day off. Neat: the arms get blasted once directly and then get a light day when the torso is worked. And the chest, back, and delts cannot help getting an indirect training effect on the arm day, at least if you do real exercises such as dips and cleans rather than weenie triceps kickbacks.
The story of another Mr. Olympia, Lee Haney, will drive home the point of minimal overlap even further. Haney used to follow the push/pull split, that was popular in his day. He would train for three days on, one off: Day 1 – chest, shoulders, triceps, Day 2 – legs, Day 3 – back and biceps. The gains were not great and Mr. O’s shoulders were hurting, thanks to the triple assault on this vulnerable joint on day one. As high achievers tend to be, Haney was confident enough to admit that he did not have all the answers. Someone suggested that he switched to this arrangement: Day 1 – chest, biceps, triceps (the tris were worked separate hours later), Day 2 – legs, Day 3 – shoulders and back. Instead of smoking all the ‘pushing’ muscles on one day and the ‘pulling’ ones on the other, all were getting heavy days and light days, an essential element of continuous progress. The shoulders healed, the scale needle and the exercise poundages started climbing up again…
Following are two more splits that follow the minimal overlap principle. Plug in the abs and forearms where you think it is best.
More sophisticated splits are an option for experienced bodybuilders. For instance, you could train your legs three times in two weeks, your chest twice a week, and your arms three times a week as suggested by Shawn Phillips. Dr. Fred Hatfield’s books will give you plenty of ideas if you want to go the custom split route.
And if you feel like keeping things simple, I will make the choice for you. Train your whole body on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, each time with a slightly different emphasis. For instance, on Mondays start with many sets for the chest and have an easy workout for your legs. On Wednesdays focus on the squats and do just a couple of light sets of benches. On Fridays prioritize your back and take it easy on everything else. On Saturdays just go and have fun with curls and what have you. To the point, fun, and effective.
Most importantly, keep it simple and do not obsess about getting your recovery ‘just right’. Your body is highly adaptable and your schedule needs to be good, but it does not have to be perfect. That ‘narrow overcompensation window’ you have read so much about is a fairy tale; if it was for real, only PhDs in labs could build muscle. I do not have the time to go on this tangent, so pick up a copy of Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky’s textbook and read about ‘fitness/fatigue’ if you want to know why. But first – divide and conquer!
Comrade, can you tell periodization from perestroika and Leonid Matveyev from Leonid Brezhnev? Da or nyet, it is time to incorporate this Soviet breakthrough into your training!
Why should you? – For gains superior to those possible with any other system of training! These strong words are backed up with gold. Hundreds of world champions speaking my native language are the poster children of periodization. You don’t really think that Ivan brings Olympic medals to Mother Russia, after ‘realizing his full muscular potential in a year, with HIT’, do you?
Periodization is defined as planned – according to certain principles! – variation of the training variables such as intensity and volume within a specified period of time culminating in peak performance. Although its origins can be traced to tsarist Russia, periodization did not come alive until L. P. Matveyev published his milestone The Problems of Periodization in Sports Training in 1964. Comrade Matveyev even applied this revolutionary concept to his own quest for a 100 kg, or 222 lb, clean and press. In the process ‘the father of periodization’ changed the face of athletic training as we know it.
In the West periodization has either been overdone with yawn drawing charts and alien Russian terminology or dumbed down to ‘do high reps, then switch to heavy weights’. I’ll fix it. Here it is, the real thing, no more complicated than it has to be, yet not watered down.
I am not going to repeat the mistake of charting out Dow Jones looking graphs and prescribing every exercise, sets, weights, etc. “Over-reliance on numerical computations in preparing a periodization chart is a major reason why some coaches tend to dismiss their relevance,” lament Drs. Verkhoshansky and Siff. The authors of Supertraining proposed ‘cybernetic programming’, essentially old-fashioned instinctive training plugged into a periodization master plan.
Indeed, many variables, from sunlight to your recent argument with your boss, affect your performance and it is difficult to map out a rigid twenty-week plan and follow it rep for rep. Bulgarian weightlifters, scientific as they are, use their judgment in determining the optimal training weight for every set. You should take this idea a step further. This piece is going to teach you how to strip periodization down to its fundamental principles, namely cycling, sequential development, the optimal volume/intensity relationship, and delayed adaptation, and then superimpose them into your workout free style.
Gym rats love reciting the legend of Milo of Crotona. As the story goes, this ancient Greek stud started lifting a young calf daily. Milo kept growing stronger and stronger as the animal grew into a bull. From calves to bulls, from bulls to elephants, from elephants to whales.
Sure. Dream on. According to the physiological Law of Accommodation, after a short period of time the body stops responding to a given stimulus. It takes a greater load to get it to improve again. The bummer is, you cannot increase the load indefinitely. It just does not work that way; eventually you will hit the wall.
Why can’t you train hard full time and progress till you die as the HIT Jedis claim to do in their galaxy far away? Estonian Dr. Atko Viru and other big brains from the former Soviet Union have offered many esoteric theories. It could be systemic neurological or endocrine exhaustion. Perhaps the hypothalamus, the part of the brain in charge of adaptation, just calls it quits? Or maybe the local genetic apparatus in your muscles has had it for a while? It could be some unknown regulatory mechanism that forbids continuous unidirectional adaptation … Who knows, and who cares! The point is, it happens, and you cannot hide your head in the sand if you expect to keep on getting bigger and stronger!
Russian scientists concluded that periodic gain and loss of sporting form is a law of physiology and it dictates a cyclical organization of the training process. “Human life can be considered one big wave with its climbing, peaking, and declining phase,” writes Polish immigrant coach Thomas Kurz, MS, the author of highly recommended The Science of Sports Training (stadion.com). “Several smaller waves are superimposed on our life wave. Some last years, some days, some hours, and some even less than a second. Rational athletic training should take this cyclical character of life into an account.”
Thus cycling of loads was born. This radical concept is simple: if your muscles have stopped responding to a training stimulus and rebel against a further load increase – just back off to resensitize them! ‘Soften them up’ for future gains, as English cycling crusader Stuart McRobert put it.
Like a Russian nesting doll, the cycling principle applies to your training months and weeks and repeats itself even within a workout. Multiple sets with a static weight, e.g. 200kgx5x5, are frowned upon by Russian weightlifters. They have the habit of following up a heavy triple or double with a double or a single with a weight reduced by 5-10% before making another heavy lift. Their Bulgarian colleagues follow a similar pattern that they call ‘segments’: work up to a heavy single, then back off some, then push again, etc. In addition to being more effective for obscure motor learning reasons, such a wavy workout is a lot less monotonous and more enjoyable. More important, according to Matveyev, non-stop variation of volume and intensity reduces the possibility of overtraining and enhances the performance peaks.
Many Western proponents of periodization are under the impression that the load should change ever so gradually. While this may often be true for the overall, months long, pattern, taking baby steps in workouts and microcycles, or training weeks, and playing with quarter pound Malibu Ken and Barbie plates is far from being your best choice. Explains Prof. Vorobyev: “Although not excluding the principle of gradual overload, we propose sudden changes in load – ‘jumps’ that are tailored to the given athlete’s functional abilities. This principle of organizing the training loads allows one to achieve higher results with a smaller loading volume.”
Instead of increasing your bench numbers – within one workout or in consecutive sessions – in a linear fashion, e.g. 225-230-235-240-245-250, try something wild, say 225-240-215-235-220250. The overall pattern of increasing the intensity is still observed, but irregular jumps back and forth will bring you to your goal faster than pussyfooting towards it. Do the same step gig with the volume, or the total number of reps in your muscle building session. If you are one of those sick people who like doing their taxes, apply the 60% Rule to your load planning. According to this experimentally calculated formula, the volume of the lowest load training unit (a workout, a microcycle/week, a mesocycle/month) should equal approximately 60% of the highest load unit, provided they are of the same length.
For illustration purposes let us say that you follow the popular bodybuilding split which requires that you work each muscle group once a week. Say the most total reps you ever do is 100 per muscle group. The volume is calculated by adding all the reps minus the warm-ups, e.g. military press 5x10 = 50, upright rows 5x10 =50; the workout volume for the shoulders is 50+50 =100 reps.
Every fourth week cut your volume to 60% of your peak load – which happens to be a standard practice in the Bulgarian and Chinese weightlifting teams. Your deltoid workout would chill out by 40%: (3x10) + (3x10) =60 reps. Your weekly volume distribution in one month might look like this: 90-70-100-60, 70-85-60-100, 60-80-100-65, etc. The variations are endless, just do not fall for slick sequences like 60-70-80-90 or 95-85-75-65. Dr. Matveyev states point blank: sharp changes in training volume and intensity are more effective than smooth ones!
Cycling implies that the difficulty of your training will vary greatly. Alternating hard and easy workouts used to be a standard practice in bodybuilding. According to Kurz, even ancient Greeks had a moderate load training session in their four-day training cycles. During the golden age of American iron sports many ninety-eight pound weaklings transformed themselves into he-men following the heavy-light-medium principle. Then the vocal HIT Jedis convinced the muscle heads that they have no business lifting a weight unless they go balls to the wall. The pencilneck count in the gyms across the fruited plain has been going up ever since.
Soviet research data is clear: easy workouts restore your strength and brawn much faster than channel surfing! “The best conditions for anabolic processes are when small (2-4 ton) loads with low intensity follow large loads,” stated Arkady Vorobyev, a champion, a scientist, a coach.
Another reason to have an easy workout, on days when you feel like hanging up your belt, is what Russian textbooks refer to as ‘the continuity of the training process’. Think of it this way: if you include the squat in your leg workout only once in a blue moon, your squatting gains will be non-existent. Your body does not adapt to a stimulus immediately because it does not want to go to all the trouble if the stressor is a fluke. The more often you squat – the stronger you get. Eastern European weightlifters squat daily – but rarely to their 700-800 pound limit. Constantly exposed to the deep knee bends and unable to get out of touch with their purpose, these athletes’ legs transform into super squatting machines. So do not be afraid to have easy workouts or sets here and there. They serve a greater purpose than an excuse to hang out at the gym.
While the simple approach of sticking to the same exercises and only cycling the load works for powerlifters, bodybuilders, at least advanced ones, need more variety in their training. The periodization model takes your needs into account. According to the data from the scientific experiment conducted in Moscow in by V.S. Avanesov, a complex of weight training exercises provides good results for one to one and a half months, then it should be changed. But not more often than that!
Dorian Yates warned against excessive muscle confusion. The bodybuilding legend explained that variety for variety’s sake is just a distraction from purposeful intense training. According to Y. Verkhoshansky and M. Siff, when exercises are switched more often than once every four to six weeks, the body goes into what is known as a transient accumulation process. In non-geek speak, it does not have the time to catch on to what it is supposed to adapt to and in the end hardly adapts at all! Nature does not tolerate extremes. Either changing your workout too often or never changing it is a raw deal.
The inverse relationship between the loading volume and intensity (’you can’t sprint a marathon’) is a myth. All volume/intensity combos serve their purposes.
Medium/medium workouts are the bread and butter of training.
High/high sessions push one into mild overtraining and lead to greater gains once followed by a taper.
Low/low sessions are used for active recovery or when the team is likely to go into combat. Low/highs set PRs.
High/lows build foundation for stable gains.
Then there are medium/highs, low/mediums… Every combo has its purpose. This is a good time to dispel a myth popular in the West, that the volume and intensity are inversely related – the higher the intensity, the lower the volume and vice versa. Smart men like US Armed Forces Powerlifting Champion Jack Reape and Belorussian kettlebell expert N. V. Galenchik, stress that volume and intensity must be uncoupled. “Overall load [sets, reps, proximity to failure, rest between sets, the number and order of the exercises, the degree of recovery from the last workout, the length of the session, etc.] must vary so that some days you barely leave… and others you would love to do more but can’t – the plan forbids.” (Galenchik, 1999)
I repeat: the volume and intensity are random and not dependent on each other.
Load variation is critically important to strength success, but it must follow one rigid rule: concentrate on volume and do not abuse high intensity training! Whether you interpret intensity as a percentage of one rep max (the Russian definition) or of momentary ability (the American definition), you will not build much beef if you HIT regularly! Short-lived strength gains are all you can hope for. Which is why high intensity should be a rare visitor to your regimen.
“When one is after long term adaptation and aims at significant structural, and not just functional changes” – that is muscle mass versus strength – “the volume of loading is increased first and foremost,” states Leonid Matveyev. “When, on the other hand, one aims to realize the acquired ability as a sudden increase in athletic performance, the training intensity gets top importance.” In other words, build beef with a lot of sets and reps, then get as strong as you look by occasionally pushing the pedal to the metal.
Bench a mind boggling weight once in awhile, get the whole gym talking- and immediately back off! Doggedly attempting to maintain the strength peak just dooms the iron rat to failure, something powerlifters learned the hard way three decades ago. The volatility of the gains – they can be maintained for five to ten days at best according to Dr. Arkady Vorobyev – and a higher risk of injuries and overtraining, are not the only problems of high intensity training. Russian scientists warn that attempting to maintain top condition is detrimental to future progress! Just one more reason why most of the time volume rules.
The proponents of one-set training should go back to school. Russian scientists uncompromisingly state that lasting muscle growth in elite athletes can only be achieved through high volume of loading! No wonder East German specialists recommended up to 150 total reps per muscle group in one muscle building workout. Hey, if ‘low volume/high intensity training’ was all its proponents claim it is, don’t you think there would have been a lot more muscular studs walking around?
If you have read Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky’s Science and Practice of Strength Training, you may have noticed that Russians said goodbye to the pyramid in 1964, which happens to be the year periodization was born. Coincidence? Do not be naive, Comrade.
Soviet scientists such as Y. V. Verkhoshansky observed that the athlete’s body adapts much better if it is presented with a focused and limited training objective, rather than a host of often conflicting demands – get big and strong, and fast, and run a marathon. Since different rep ranges have a specific effect on the muscles – low power reps increase the muscle density, medium reps build the contractile proteins, and high reps develop mitochondria, sarcoplasm, and capillaries -the obvious implication of this discovery on bodybuilding is not to spread your workout over a large rep range. Top strength coaches like Charles Poliquin feel strongly about it.
Just to clarify, narrow rep range pyramids like 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5, 6-4-2-2-4-6, or 12-10-8-10-12 are cool. I am not going to put my foot in my mouth and state that pyramids with a wider rep spread, say 12-10-8-6-4-2-2-4-6-8-10-12, don’t work at all. As we all know from experience, they do. Just loading schedules with a narrower focus work better.
The idea of a ‘finisher’ does not sit well with the periodization model either. The ‘finisher’ is an endurance smoker done at the end of a strength workout, for example, a farmer’s walk after deadlift singles, a sprint after squat fives, or fifty pushups after heavy benches. Unless circumstances force you to train all aspects of strength and conditioning (e.g. ‘complex PT sessions’ in the Russian military) or all muscle tissues at once, don’t. Train different goals in different cycles, or at least on different days.
Do not interpret the above as an admonition not to do back-off sets! Do them by all means, just keep them in the ballpark of the top sets. Examples of ‘Party approved’ programs with back-off sets are old powerlifting routines by Hugh Cassidy, Dr. Ken Leistner, and John Inzer. Inzer would work up to a heavy, occasionally maximal, deadlift single and chase it down with 3-5x3-10, still heavy. Cassidy might do a heavy fiver followed by three sets of ten. Dr. Ken would put up something like a heavy double followed by a hard set of six. Note that I am referring to Dr, Leistner’s powerlifting peaking routines, not his off-season high rep HIT.
So pump up your sarcoplasm, the muscle cell filler, with burning hundred rep sets in one workout (you big sissy!). Up your power and muscle density with singles, doubles, and triples in your next session for the given body part. Build the myofibrils with sets of four to twelve repetitions on your third trip to your iron pit. If you follow a four on/one off split, the whole sequence will take you fifteen days. This approach is known as sequential development in contrast with the antiquated parallel development with pyramids.
Although, unlike a track and field athlete, a bodybuilder does not need to sequence different workouts in a particular order, he should follow one rule. Namely, spend most of his training time in the four to twelve rep range. Allow me to explain.
When the Beatles were busy recording Sergeant Pepper German scientist T. Hettinger discovered that strength built quickly, is lost quickly and vice versa. Soviet scientists such as V. Platonov added that different training benefits are acquired and lost at various rates. For instance, myofibrilllar hypertrophy (4-12 reps) is developed and lost slower than sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (up to 100 reps) or pure strength (1-3 reps). That means two things. First, your hard earned beef will not shrink away if you switch your focus to power or endurance training for a session or two. Second, because gains in max strength and muscular endurance come about so quick, all you need is an occasional session or two to bring them up to a respectable level.
The bottom line. Roughly two out of three workouts should be dedicated to building mass with medium reps. Other workouts can zero in on ultra high or ultra low repetitions. Let your instinct determine the optimal order of these sessions. *
* This piece was originally meant to be the one-stop shop for any bodybuilder, including the ‘holistic’ types and other misguided characters who do higher reps. I reluctantly give recommendations for such training but I would be much happier if you stopped fooling around with pump and burn and kept your reps in the three to five range. I drive this point home in the piece titled Holistic bodybuilding’? – No! Power bodybuilding.
There is a Russian anecdote about a giraffe who laughs at a joke three times: the first time because everyone laughs, the second time when he gets it, and the third time he laughs at himself for not getting it in the first place. Every living organism is a proverbial giraffe; it responds to any stressor with a lag. For example, the once popular rotation diet did its job by reducing the calories for a day or two and then bringing them back up. A couple of pounds were conquered before the BMR had the time to downregulate.
Renegade Russian scientist Prof. Zatsiorsky explains the delayed training effect, “In general, during periods of strenuous training, athletes cannot achieve the best performance results for two main reasons. First, it takes time to adapt to the training stimulus. Second, hard training work induces fatigue that accumulates over time. So a period of relatively easy exercise is needed to realize the effect of the previous hard sessions – to reveal the delayed training effect. Adaptation occurs mainly when a retaining or detraining load is used after a stimulating load.”
The adaptation lag has a tremendous impact on strength and muscle training. Once you appreciate its power, you will be freed of the fear of overtraining, which plagues the gyms. Indeed, intelligent short term overtraining is one of the most powerful tools in the bodybuilding arsenal! While a novice or intermediate bodybuilder should allow for complete recovery between his workouts, for an advanced athlete such distributed loading is what Estonian sports science mastermind Dr. Atko Viru called ‘a waste of time’.
Concentrated loading, Prof. Verkhoshansky’s baby, is an advanced alternative. In essence, it is short term overtraining, which is followed by an unusually high supercompensation peak, if the athlete is smart enough to back off before acute overtraining sets in. “A river with a dam has more power,” as the Lithuanian saying goes. Aaron Baker, David Dearth, and other bodybuilders reported sensational gains when they gave Mike Mentzer’s workout a shot, after doing high volume training for a while. They are the poster children of concentrated loading – or ‘overreaching’ as it is usually called on this side of the late Berlin Wall – followed by a taper.
“…the more extensive and longer the exhaustion of the body’s energy resources by concentrated loading… (obviously within reasonable limits), the higher their subsequent super-restoration and the longer the new functional level is maintained,” explain Prof. Verkhoshansky and his colleague Dr. Siff. The scientists warn to keep against going overboard on training intensity when employing concentrated loading; the means are already very powerful and court excessive overtraining. I must add that you should save this thermonuclear weapon until your physique gets startled looks, instead of stupid ‘been working out?’ comments.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF FREE STYLE PERIODIZATION
1. The volume and intensity are not dependent on each other. All volume/intensity combos serve their purposes.
2. Vary your volume and intensity every workout. Make sudden jumps rather than gradual changes. If you do not mind the math, employ the 60% Rule to your volume planning.
3. Change your exercises every four to six weeks.
4. High intensity training should be employed infrequently. It is only marginally effective for hypertrophy and primarily causes short-lived strength gains. Frequent use of heavy weights and training to failure are also detrimental to future gains.
5. High volume is the key to bodybuilding success. An advanced bodybuilder’s high load workout should include up to 150 repetitions per body part.
6. Limit each workout to a narrow rep range: 1-3, 4-7, 8-12, and 12+. Do not employ pyramids.
7. Vary the intensity (both the poundage and the proximity to muscle failure) within each workout while staying in the specified rep range. For example 275x3, 300x3RM, 285x2, 250x3, 295x2, 315x1RM instead of 285x5x3.
8. 4-12 repetitions are the meat of a scientific bodybuilding regimen. No more than one out of three workouts should be dedicated to very low, 1-3, or high, 12 and over, reps.
9. Relatively easy sessions are more effective than complete rest. Active recovery workouts may be planned or taken instinctively.
10. Controlled short term volume overtraining followed by a low volume/low intensity taper is a very powerful training anabolic. You may plan for concentrated loading or simply take advantage of the accidental overtraining every ambitious trainee is prone to.
Here you have it, the blueprints of a secret Russian weapon that will bomb your competition back to the stone age! Do not even dare to think that because periodization has been around for decades and volumes have been written about it, Westerners understand it better than alien technology in Area 51! The Russkies constantly make corrections and improvements on the go, which are impossible to keep up with unless you are an insider. It is like the old Russian joke about an American spy who got hold of the blueprints of the newest Soviet missile. When a military contractor built it, it turned out to be a steam engine. The irate intelligence officer went back to his source at the Russian defense installation and confronted him. The traitor slapped himself on the forehead, “You mean I forgot to give you the nineteen volumes of upgrades?!”
Let others ride the steam engine. You have the missile plans and the upgrades. Study them. Use them. Dominate.