STRENGTH AND
SCIENCE: THE
MIND OF A LIFTER
Greg Nuckols
GREGNUCKOLS.COM
Read This First:
Let me start by saying “thanks” for downloading a copy of this
Ebook.
Next, let me explain what this IS, and what it ISN’T.
This is not a comprehensive training manual. You won’t find much
that looks like “do x sets of x reps of these exercises and you’ll get
big and strong.” There are plenty of books like that, and I’m
planning on writing specifically about programming in the future;
but that’s another book – not this one.
Also, this is not a book in the traditional sense of one section
building upon another. It’s a collection of articles and essays from
my blog, loosely organized around themes. Because of this, don’t
feel obligated to read it cover to cover. If a heading looks interesting
to you, dive in. If it doesn’t grab your attention, skip on over.
More than anything, I want this collection to give you a glimpse into
my mind – how I approach training, how I approach programming,
and how I approach heavy weight. There aren’t many books out
there that allow you to really get into the head of an elite lifter in a
comprehensive manner.
I’m not saying my way is the only way to go about doing things, but
it’s what has allowed me to break records and enjoy the process
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without having to resort to drugs. If nothing else, I think you’ll find
it to be a different voice and approach than most out there. I don’t
expect you to accept everything I say in this book, but I do think
you’ll benefit from reading it, and from really taking the time to
reflect.
If you like it, I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with 5-10 of your
friends who are also into lifting.
That’s all. Let’s dive in!
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Contents
Read This First: ....................................................................................... 1
Applying Science to the Training Process ............................................. 5
Science, bro-science, and real-world application ..................................... 5
Acute vs. Chronic effects – understanding what you read ..................... 16
Mindset of a lifter: ................................................................................ 20
Efficiency and excellence are contradictory goals .................................. 20
My Philosophy of Strength...................................................................... 25
An observation about priorities .............................................................. 32
Key to confidence – Knowing your worst ............................................... 34
Assessing motivation .............................................................................. 37
Some thoughts about fear ...................................................................... 39
The size of your pond .............................................................................. 42
Steroids ................................................................................................... 48
The dangers of orthodoxy ....................................................................... 53
Remove your filter .................................................................................. 56
False bravado, marketing, and masculinity ............................................ 58
Lessons Learned Through Experience ................................................ 63
What I learned on the way to benching 350 pounds.............................. 63
Peaking – AKA how to hit PRs in meets .................................................. 67
What I learned to squat 500 ................................................................... 75
What I learned on the way to deadlifting 500 pounds ........................... 80
Muscular endurance ............................................................................... 87
Implementing paused squats .................................................................. 89
Getting stronger: the evolution .............................................................. 92
A Case Study in Programming Insanity ................................................. 100
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Be Honest with Yourself. Training for Health vs. Performance ............ 104
Gaining ground: a simple method to ensure long-term progress ........ 108
My bench program................................................................................ 110
Nutrition:............................................................................................... 111
The Three Laws of Protein ................................................................. 112
Carbs at night make you lean! So does a big breakfast? ...................... 116
Healthy pumpkin apple cheesecake recipe .......................................... 125
Science-backed training tips .............................................................. 127
Increasing work capacity ....................................................................... 127
Being strong is not an excuse to be fat (and being fat is probably holding
you back) ............................................................................................... 135
Cardio and Lifting – Cardio won’t hugely impact your gains in the short
run, and may be beneficial for strength and size in the long run ......... 143
High frequency training for a bigger total – research on highly trained
Norwegian powerlifters ........................................................................ 151
Genetics – How much do they limit you, and what can you do about it?
.............................................................................................................. 163
Fixing the good-morning squat ............................................................. 172
Hamstrings – The most overrated muscle group for the squat ............ 176
Should you wear a belt or not? Study write-up .................................... 181
How hydration affects performance AND muscle ................................ 186
Do women need to train differently than men? ................................... 189
Losing weight and getting stronger ...................................................... 194
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer ......................................... 196
Some thoughts about retaining muscle as you diet ............................. 202
4
Applying Science to the Training Process
Science, bro-science, and real-world application
Of late, bashing “bro-science” has come into vogue, and I
understand why. The fitness industry has very low barriers to entry,
and for a long time the sorts of claims made with an utter paucity of
evidence by people in the industry more resembled articles of faith
than evidence-based statement from practitioners of a legitimate
profession.
Such is often still the case, but within the last several years there has
been a strong movement toward evidenced-based training and
nutrition. I think that, on the whole, the change has been a very
positive one. However, I think that it is a reactionary movement by
its very nature, and that the pendulum may have swung too far. The
old guard used to mock the “pencil-necked nerds in lab coats” who
didn’t have “in the trenches” experience – but now the same disdain
is often seen from the other side, with evidence-based coaches
mocking any claim that can’t be directly substantiated in the
scientific literature.
I do think there’s a happy middle, and I think that’s where most
people are starting to gravitate. So, what I want to do here is outline
the strengths and weaknesses of relying solely on science for
strength-related endeavors, and suggest that “bro-science” DOES
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still have a place – as long as it doesn’t try to claim too much and is
content with receding as new evidence comes to light.
Science – what is it even?
This is an important place to start. Most people have the wrong idea
when it comes to science. Science, especially in the field of exercise
physiology (and most biological sciences, for that matter), is NOT
people in a lab poring over data before exclaiming “Eureka! This is
precisely how this works!”
Rather, it’s a systematic way of asking questions, designing
experiments to answer those questions with the fewest possible
confounding factors, and assigning statistical likelihood to what’s
probably happening. It’s very rare that you can claim anything even
bordering on certainty using science. More than anything, it’s a
reliable means of determining what’s NOT true, so we can get a little
closer to approximating what actually IS true.
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So much more is involved in science than what is often portrayed by
the stereotypes floating around out there.
Science and fitness – strengths
1. Science is the best way humanity has devised so far to answer
questions objectively.
Of course there will be some subjectivity in interpretation, but the
scientific method is still the gold standard in regards to ruling out
personal bias.
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This means that if the current literature is backing up what you’re
saying, you’re probably pretty close to right, regardless of other
peoples’ opinions.
2. Science is pretty good at ruling out things that aren’t true.
When you see a p-value in a scientific study, that tells you how
likely it is that the effect seen could be attributed solely to
chance. In most exercise science studies, it’s p<0.05. That means
that you’re more than 95% sure the experimental intervention
ACTUALLY caused an effect, so conversely, there’s less than a 5%
chance that the study said something actually changed when, in fact,
it didn’t. Again, it’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best system
humanity has devised so far to be able to make claims with that high
of a degree of confidence.
3. Science is self-correcting
People may have their pet ideas that they cling to in the face of all
contrary evidence.
However, science does not “believe”
anything. Consensus is formed when quality studies support a
specific position, but it’s able to change when better evidence
becomes available. That doesn’t mean, as some have charged, that
science is just another opinion, or that it “flip-flops.” The scientific
method isn’t used to find truth – it’s used in the attempt to move
closer and closer to the actual truth. Inflexibility in the face of the
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continuous stream of new evidence would be a weakness, not a
strength
Science and fitness – drawbacks
1. People often don’t read science at all, or at least properly (or
beyond the abstract)
I won’t name names, but I can think of quite a few prominent fitness
people who will cite 40 research articles at the end of anything they
write, with the assumption that people will conclude the piece is
valid since it has so much scientific support. So, in the minds of the
readers, it’s supported by science in spite of the fact that none of
them take the time to actually chase the citations to see if those
studies do, in fact, support the claims in the piece.
For example, lots of diet articles making huge claims will cite
research on diabetic or obese subjects. If you’re a healthy person,
any claims supported by those citations probably don’t apply to you
(and the author certainly shouldn’t claim scientific support). Ditto
for rodent studies.
Then, even if you chase the citations, if you don’t have full-text
access, you’re still not sure whether the citation supports the
author’s point, because important parts of the study (subject
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characteristics, research protocol, means of data collection and
analysis, etc) often aren’t included in the abstract.
2. Lack of studies on trained athletes
There’s more and more research on trained athletes every day, but
most of the studies in the scientific literature are still done on
untrained subjects. We all know that there are “noob gains” that
happen when you start training. It’s hard to say for sure whether the
findings from a study on the general population will translate to an
athletic setting (more often than not, they don’t).
3. Many studies look at acute changes, not chronic
This is, to the best of my understanding, because of funding
difficulties. It’s a lot cheaper to train people once, draw some blood,
and check out what happened on the micro-level than it is to train
subjects and gather data for several months to observe whether
longer-term adaptations (muscle gain, strength increases, fat loss,
improved speed, decreased race times, etc.) actually manifest
themselves.
The hype about certain exercise protocols acutely increasing growth
hormone or testosterone levels are a case in point here. These acute
changes don’t necessarily mean long-term increases in lean
mass. Ditto for studies showing an acute increase in markers of
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protein synthesis with a particular dietary or training regimen – you
can’t extrapolate one session and infer progress on the scale of
weeks, month, or years.
4. Many longer term studies use protocols that are only marginally
relevant to normal training programs
If you want to know whether higher or lower volume squatting will
lead to greater strength gains, the most scientifically rigorous way
to go about answering that questions is to constrain the rest of the
participants’ lower body training so you’re sure the squatting
volume is the determining factor, not some uncontrolled training
variable (although, of course, sleep and nutrition may not be
controlled for very well either, which is obviously a huge
issue). Unless your lower body training consists only of squats, and
unless you’re at the same skill level as the study participants, you
can’t apply the results directly to your training.
An issue here is that scientific studies are asking specific
questions. “When controlling for total volume, will increasing
exercise frequency cause greater improvement in strength?” is the
type of question science tends to ask. “Will (insert specific program
here) make me jacked?” isn’t the type of question science deals
with. Results have to be relative to something. If it’s a control group
that isn’t exercising at all, then positive results for the training
group relative to the controls don’t tell you much. If it’s another
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training group doing some other protocol with an entirely different
mix of variables, then you find out one program may be better than
another in a specific context, but you don’t come away with any
broader principles that could then be applied to future research – so
it wouldn’t be of much interest to the scientific community.
5. We’re individuals, but science is dealing with averages
This is a hugely important point.
When evaluating whether
something produces significant results, you’re dealing with the
averages of a data set, and the standard deviations (how spread out
the data are). However, there will usually be outliers.
Let’s say you have a high volume program and a low volume
program. The high volume program produced, on average, 30%
better results, but one individual did horrible on the high volume
program, and one individual on the low volume program saw better
progress than anyone in the high volume group. Those values were
subsumed by the overall results of their respective groups, and the
finding of the study was that the higher volume program was
significantly better.
What, then, should you say to those two outliers? Would the former
have done even worse on the low volume program, and the latter
have done even better on the high volume program? You don’t
know.
To state a high degree of confidence in any concept,
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scientifically, you have to deal with averages, not individuals. The
best study in the world can’t negate the possibility of individual
differences.
This is not to say that scientifically validated concepts can’t be
applied to training individuals; but it does mean that you MUST
have flexibility, because not every individual will see the same
results from the same protocol.
6. Significance and relevance aren’t the same things
Most people automatically think of the day-to-day definition of
“significant” – something really important and noteworthy.
In
research, on the other hand, “significant” means that you’re 95%+
sure that there is actually a difference – but that doesn’t necessarily
mean the difference really matters.
If you had groups of 1000 people and put them on two different
weight loss protocols, and one group lost 30 pounds on
average while the other lost 31, that may very well meet the criteria
for a “significant” finding. But that doesn’t mean that it makes any
real-world difference.
Don’t be misled when people are claiming a “significant”
finding. Figure out how large the difference actually is, and ask
yourself whether that difference actually matters.
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So, when the rubber meets the road…
Read scientific studies to derive principles. They should be more of
a compass than a road map: they point you in the right general
direction; they DON’T give you step-by-step instructions.
It makes me think of the Greg Glassman quote about how no good
training program was ever based on science. Scientists aren’t sitting
around tinkering in a lab until one day they’ll exclaim, “THIS is the
perfect way to train! We’ve figured it out!” They’re figuring out
how things work, and why certain things work so in-the-trenches
coaches can know more about the principles and mechanisms in play
when writing programming and coaching athletes.
Since there won’t be studies telling you exactly how to train or coach
athletes, it’s up to you to gather, record, and analyze data on yourself
and your athletes to know whether your programs are working. You
may never write up your results and get them published, but you can
apply the same process to your day-to-day practice - remember, you
won’t find the “truth,” but you’ll find things that don’t work and
things that work a little better, and using that data you can constantly
evolve and improve. But remember, to know what’s having an
effect, only adjust one variable at a time. Completely starting over
from scratch all the time doesn’t give you much of a base to work
off of.
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Where bro-science fits in
Science doesn’t have all the answers yet.
There’s still a gulf
between common practices in the gym and what’s been studied on
highly trained subjects in the lab. Often, bro-science is running
ahead of science figuring out via trial and error WHAT works,
before science figures out WHY it works and offers evidence
suggesting how it could be further improved. I think that, when it’s
at its best, bro-science is sort of like an R&D department.
However, there should be limits. When bro-science contradicts
something that’s been well supported by good research, real science
should trump it.
When bro-science is claiming efficacy from a certain training
practice, but it is found to be ineffective when studied in a controlled
fashion, bro-science should step down and that practice should be
discarded (at least within the context that it was found to be
ineffective).
When bro-science is making claims, they should be provisional –
they should be humble. “I think this works,” or “lots of lifters have
had success doing things this way,” are alright statements. “This is
what works, I’m sure of it, and no pencil-necked geek in a labcoat
can say otherwise,” is not acceptable.
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Wrapping it all up
Science and bro-science can, and should, work together. Science,
as a fairly slow, methodical process simply cannot ask as many
questions, experiment as much, or try as many permutations of
variables as bro-science can. However, anything claimed by broscience should be posited with a strong note of uncertainty since no
claims it makes have been tested in as rigorous of a manner as true
scientific claims have been.
More than anything, an understanding of how science works
- including its strengths, its limitations, and its potential for directing
day-to-day practice - should guide and inform every fitness
professional and serious athlete.
Acute vs. Chronic effects – understanding what you read
Here’s a very common problem people have when reading training
articles or scientific studies – they don’t take the time to differentiate
between acute and chronic effects and ask to themselves which is
actually important in a particular context.
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Now, just for a tiny bit of background to set some context, acute
effects are short-term effects. Depending on what we’re talking
about, they could take place over a matter of minutes, hours, or even
up to a day. Chronic effects are long-term effects. They’re typically
the long-lasting outcome of a particular intervention, whether it be
training, dietary, etc. These take place over a matter of days, weeks,
months, or years usually.
So, when you read an article, ask yourself, “is this person describing
an acute effect or a chronic effect, and do I actually care about an
acute or chronic effect in this scenario?”
For example, studies show you lift heavy and you get a short term
spike in testosterone production. Or that if you train with short rest
periods, you get a spike in growth hormone output. So what do we
do? Do we have unbridled excitement because we just unlocked the
secret to gainz, or are we skeptical of the usefulness of these
results? If you picked “skeptical,” you’re correct! Those studies are
reporting acute changes. The chronic changes we’re interested in
are increases in muscle mass or strength. You might assume that
higher levels of testosterone or growth hormone post-workout
would mean more muscle and strength, but you can’t say that for
sure without evidence from studies looking at chronic effect taking
place over the course of weeks or months.
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Another good example is pre- and post-workout protein
consumption. Plenty of studies show that getting protein around
your workout increases protein synthesis and decreases protein
breakdown acutely, but evidence from a massive new meta-analysis
shows that protein timing doesn’t affect chronic muscle growth in
response to training very much at all – simply getting enough protein
throughout the day is sufficient for the same anabolic response.
Of course, there’s some overlap. Acute changes CAN add up to
chronic changes, but they don’t have to. This is an important
distinction to make. In both of the examples I used, looking at the
acute evidence, it would certainly be worth testing whether those
short-term changes would add up to long-term results. However, at
best, acute evidence is only good for generating hypotheses to be
answered by longer-term research.
Of course, the way research is done creates some more
problems. It’s cheap(er) to do research on acute mechanisms. You
draw some blood, put people through a workout or feed them some
food or supplement, draw some more blood a couple more times,
analyze the samples, and that’s that. Research about chronic effects,
on the other hand, requires months of commitment to a study, a lot
more sessions or meals, a lot more blood draws, a lot more data
collection and analysis, and (probably most importantly) a lot more
money. For this reason, you’ll always see people getting a little
18
TOO excited (myself included, honestly) about really compelling
studies showing acute mechanisms, by which we might surmise
some long-term outcome, because unfortunately, we may never see
the longer term study due to logistical and funding issues in the
scientific process.
Now, don’t think I’m saying acute effects are useless by any
means. Sometimes we’re not interested in the effects on adaptations
weeks or months in the future. Sometimes we’re concerned about
what will improve my performance for a competition I have
tomorrow, or even in a couple hours. This is when acute effects are
hugely important. For example, we know that glycogen re-synthesis
occurs most rapidly after exercise, and takes place relatively
quickly. So if you’re competing in a sport with multiple games in
one day, or doing something like a CrossFit competition with
multiple WODs in one day, consuming carbs directly after your first
game/event will have a substantial impact on your performance in
endeavors taking place without a matter of hours.
The takeaway is simply that you need to ask yourself what you’re
interested in when you’re reading information about the effects of
some training program or some dietary intervention or supplement
– are you interested in getting better long-term, or are you interested
in optimizing your performance here and now? And, based on your
answer, is what you’re reading addressing the proper time frame,
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whether it be acute or chronic, that you’re interested in? By asking
those two questions, you’ll avoid a lot of false starts and frustration
by putting information and studies in their proper context.
Mindset of a lifter:
Efficiency and excellence are contradictory goals
Here’s something I think more people need to understand. In a fastpaced society, busy people value efficiency. Getting the most effect
out of the smallest investment of resources (money and, more
importantly, time). This approach is all well and good, unless you
want to be truly great in any endeavor.
Greatness requires more of a Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers)
approach than a Tim Ferris (author of 4 Hour Body) approach. The
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difference between the two – one of Gladwell’s basic theses is that
to be truly elite at something, you need to be willing to invest about
10,000 hours in your craft. Ferris, on the other hand, basically
argues that you can achieve great results with a very small
investment of effort and resources.
Ultimately, both are right. You CAN achieve great results without
a ton of effort. Stick to a diet of whole foods, lift 2-3 times a week,
jog, ride a bike, swim, or play sports a few times a week, and you’ll
be able to get pretty lean, pretty strong (relative to the general
population), and quite healthy.
If you want to go a step beyond that though, your expectations about
the required effort need to shift. Refer to the 80/20 rule: you achieve
80% of the results for 20% of the input. If you have modest goals,
that means you really only need to focus on the 20% effort that gives
you the best bang for your buck. If you want to be great at anything,
though, that other 80% becomes crucial.
If you’re training for strength, that means more time in the gym,
more time working on mobility, more time smoothing out
imbalances that hinder performance, more time devoted to recovery
modalities, more time carved out of your schedule for sleep, more
time devoted to preparing the food you need to fuel the machine,
etc. If you’re training for a bodybuilding or physique stage, that
means more time working on the little muscles that will make your
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physique “flow,” a LOT more time prepping food and dialing in
your diet (because 12% bodyfat is pretty easy to achieve. 5% not so
much), more time devoted to boring pre-contest cardio, time to
practice posing, etc. If you’re an athlete, it means more time spent
honing specific skills, more time watching game film, more time
devoted to ensuring a proper mental state for competition, etc.
It’s frustrating, honestly. You’re not stupid. You know you’re
experiencing diminishing returns. But that doesn’t matter. The first
20% you invested got you 80% of the results. The last 20% may get
you 2%. But, in elite competition, 2% is a big deal. 2% of a 2000
pound total is a 40 pound swing. In a 100m sprint, 2% is about .2
second – maybe the difference between gold and missing the
podium entirely. And every hour you spend on that last 20% can
feel like a waste of time because you get so little for it.
But, at the end of the day, if you want to be great, you need to come
to peace with the fact that it’s all necessary. I think, ultimately, what
can separate the best from the second-tier competitors in any
endeavor is that the best are the people who can find that peace and
accept the cost, and who learn to love the process, not just the
outcomes.
Furthermore, we need to discuss another inherently inefficient
process: Innovation.
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By definition, when innovationg, you either don’t know for sure
where you’re going, or you don’t know for sure how to get
there. It’s finding your way from point A to point B without a road
map, or simply striking out to see if some theoretical point B even
exists. There’s no efficient way to do that.
What does this inefficiency look like? Google. At Google, there is
a policy called “20% time.” During 20% time, the employees are
one the clock and getting paid to work on things that AREN’T workrelated projects. They are forced to use 20% of the working time to
innovate. Because of that, we have Gmail, Google news, and several
other nifty Google features. If the employees would have used 5 out
of 5 hours to do work-related stuff instead of 4 out of 5, Google
wouldn’t be as successful as it is.
Keep in mind, I’m not advocating against hard work or even bouts
of extreme efficiency. On the contrary: you should do MORE work
in LESS time than everyone else (super efficient) so you can afford
to spend more time NOT being efficient. For more reading on the
subject, check out Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen
Johnson. It’s fantastic.
If all you are is efficient, your end result is merely whatever the
structure and amount of your work can bring you. If you take the
time to innovate and improve, it may take longer to reach your
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terminal position, but the structure in which you do work should
improve, leading to better long-term results.
So how can someone apply this? I’ll tackle lifting because I’m most
comfortable with it. You have your own set of weaknesses based
on the peculiarities of your bone structure. There are a million
different exercises that “work” to fix weaknesses, so take some time
to research the training great lifters with the same disadvantages as
you, and take a few weeks to experiment with what works best to
improve your specific weakness. Let’s say you have a weakness
that will not be a limiting factor for another 3 months of progress,
but at that point it will severely limit future progress. You could
either take a week or two of inefficient training to innovate and them
implement a plan to continue progressing while addressing the
weakness, or keep trucking along even though you know you have
a limiting factor that’ll eventually catch up to you.
1) 2 weeks of inefficiency+3 months of slower progress while
addressing the problem+3 more months of smooth sailing because
you’ve removed the limiting factor=6.5 months of pretty good gains
with great momentum moving forward.
2) 3 months of smooth gains until hitting a wall+1 month of
frustration as you continue trying to be “efficient”+2 weeks of
figuring out what’s wrong+2 months of improving weakness=the
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same 6.5 months, most of which were unproductive the last 3 of
which were very frustrating.
Obviously that’s a simplistic example, but I hope you see the
point. In the long run, innovation turns out to be the most efficient
way forward, even if it doesn’t seem like it in the present. Hard
work is 90% of the battle, but the other 10% is figuring out how to
put that hard work to the best use.
My Philosophy of Strength
What does it mean to be strong?
A discussion on reddit recently brought it into focus for me that my
view of strength is different from most people’s. I do not think you
should call yourself strong until you are one of the very best, until
you can drop the jaws of your competition and potentially make your
mark on history. If you’ve trained moderately hard for a few years
and can dunk 4 plates, or pull 500, you’ll amaze most. To me, that’s
meaningless. Someone’s who’s truly strong can walk into any meet
and leave their competition speechless, and leave no doubt that no
25
one in attendance had any chance of beating them that day. Think
Ed Coan in his prime, or the ease of Shane Hamman’s 900+ squats,
or Magnusson’s absurdly easy 1015 deadlift.
I don’t care if you are stronger than 90% of people in the world and
neither
should
you.
That’s
an
apples
to
oranges
comparison. Assuming 10% train for some sort of strength sport
(obviously it’s lower than that, but just to make the numbers
prettier), being stronger than 90% of the world means you’re one of
the worst at your sport. Any sort of descriptor such as “strong” is
context specific, and if you train, then apply the term in the
appropriate context. The definition of “strong” used by John-QEveryman should not be your definition of “strong” unless you’re
training more for your fragile ego and less for any sort of goal.
Take free throws as an example. 90% of the people on planet earth
can’t hit five out of ten free throws. If you play basketball and hit
50% of your free throw attempts, do you pat yourself on the back
for being better than most, or hang your head in shame for failing
miserably in the context of your sport? If it’s me, you’re getting the
latter reaction.
Well then, why not draw that 90% line to be context-specific and go
from there? Why not draw it at the top 10% of people in your
sport? I dislike this notion on the basis of camaraderie. If you’re
putting in work and striving for a goal, you are my brother or
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sister. We may have more or less experience, more or less academic
background, differing philosophies, and differing training histories,
but our comradeship is defined by our mutual journey.
When you draw lines and say “this is the standard for ‘strong’” and
set the standard at a fairly attainable level, you create
division. Some of us are strong and some aren’t. We’re defining
ourselves by our current location, not the road we’re on. I’m in this
town and you’re in that one, rather than primarily recognizing all of
us as travelers on the same road. This is the biggest reasons I detest
“standards” that anyone tries to set. So what if I’ve set a couple
records, and someone else is prepping for their very first meet? We
can both learn from each other. I’m not above him or her in some
way.
I can share my experiences, and he or she can share
perceptions and ideas that haven’t been colored by a decade of
reading and developing a particular conceptual schema and set of
assumptions. Never underestimate the insight you can get from
newbies who aren’t afraid to speak their mind. They come to lifting
with somewhat of a blank slate, which you probably don’t have at
this point. Consequently, they’ll see things you’ll miss.
One day most of us will be forgotten, especially by the sport of
powerlifting. Sure, your meet results will be buried in some internet
archive, but who’s going to stumble upon them and actually
care? The people who will remember you are the people who you
27
met while you were journeying together. I’d despise accepting any
label that says “I’ve done THIS and you’ve merely done THAT” as
if it actually matters. I’m me, you’re you, and we are not “strong”
or “weak.” We are lifters. My biggest accomplishments at my last
meet weren’t the records I took or the awards I won. They were
teaching a 10 year old how to mentally approach heavy weight and
learn from failure rather than running for it, and showing a 30+ year
veteran some foam and lacrosse ball rolling techniques to help him
with some hip problems that had been bothering him for several
months. If you think you matter in some special way because you
are stronger than most, you need to reassess your priorities.
My second qualm with most definitions of “strong” is that they
define the word in such a way that it sets people up to accept (or
even celebrate) mediocrity. When you define a word, you give it
power.
Phonetic utterances are meaningless in and of
themselves. Our own perceptions of a word’s meaning draw it’s
domain of influence. Despite my egalitarian impulses, I do think
there needs to be some definition of strong. If you’re a lifter you
want to become strong (that’s the whole point of the sport), so it
helps to know what you’re actually aiming at. I realize everyone
has their own definitions, but I essentially want to explain why I’ve
chosen mine.
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Assuming you care about getting strong, your definition of “strong”
plays a significant role is setting a (perhaps artificial) ceiling on your
potential. Worst case scenario: you define strong as something
fairly unimpressive, and become satisfied upon attaining your
classification. At this point, you’re effectively at your destination;
no longer on the journey. Your motivations are no longer my
motivations, nor are they the motivations of most people involved
in this sport. More likely scenario: you embrace the same definition
of strong that celebrates mediocrity and reach it. You still want to
get stronger, but you’re swimming in uncharted waters, and fail to
progress due to your own low expectations. This one scares me
more because it’s a common phenomenon, and helps explain why
strong people tend to flock together, and as top guys get stronger,
entire gyms get stronger. People define “strong” based on what they
see on a daily basis, and as the standard moves, everyone else can
move along with it.
If your definition is low, you could very well be ensuring you don’t
reach your full potential. I’m not saying that high expectations and
standards somehow make you stronger (this message has been
misinterpreted in the past), I’m saying that you’re placing an
artificial psychological barrier in the way of pursuing your
physiological potential. Once you’re “strong” in your own eyes,
getting significantly stronger means venturing further and further
from what you view and reasonably attainable, and you thwart
29
yourself mentally.
Rather than an argument for the power of
positive thinking, this is a warning against the detrimental influence
of negative thinking. (As an aside, this is the main reason why Ed
Coan is and will be the greatest ever. I’m sure people will break his
records eventually. However, he rolled the ball a long way. He
showed what was possible, and people will nudge the ball down the
road 5 or 10 pounds at a time as long as people are lifting. However,
I doubt anyone will ever cover as much uncharted territory as Coan
did or be as dominant against both their own competition and the
record books as Coan was. By any definition, Coan was strong).
These are the basic reasons why I define “strong” as the ability to
do something truly awe-inspiring.
To pin down something
bordering on objectivity, I’d say you’re strong if you’re setting alltime records or are at least within 5% of them. This means the
untested all-time records.
If you take exception with my
unwillingness to grant drug-free lifters some sort of immunity or
break, then I’ll address that in another post at some point.
Here’s what this definition does for you: odds are there will never
be any barriers between you and your comrades, and you’ll be much
less likely to hit mental blocks as you progress. Sure, some people
will have more to bring to the table and others, and you may hit a
mental barrier when you see a new plate on the bar, but those things
are just inherent in the nature of human interaction or pushing
30
personal frontiers.
The only way you separate yourself is by
attaining TRULY exceptional results.
This is a necessary
consequence of pinning down any sort of objective definition, but
the people set aside, in my eyes, SHOULD receive an additional
measure of respect because odds are they arrived in that position by
training harder, being smarter, and generally being on a different
level than most lifters.
Here’s what this definition does NOT do for you: it does not
massage your ego, nor does it tell you you’re a special snowflake
for being the strongest person in your commercial gym. It does not
give you any reason to think you’re better than someone because
you hold a state record in your with class in some no-name fed. If
you think this definition is elitist, I don’t particularly care. As I see
it, it’s as egalitarian as they come. It is the realization that I’m no
better than you in any meaningful way, nor are you better than
anyone else in any meaningful way. It resists assigning superlatives
to merely above-average performances. I’m not strong and neither
are you. A few people are strong. A few people are weak. The vast
majority of people are neither. We can still use “strong” to describe
something’s relationship to something else (i.e. a 500 pound squatter
is stronger than a 300 pound squatter), but using the word itself to
be the primary descriptor of something or someone should be
reserved for rare occasions that truly deserve praise.
31
People in the general population can use whatever definition they
want, as can you. However, strength is our pursuit so I think we
need to have an idea of “strong” this is more in line with that pursuit,
more likely to unify than bifurcate or stratify, and more likely to
nurture greatness than permit mediocrity.
An observation about priorities
Fact 1: the bench press is one of the most-performed exercises in
almost every gym, and the squat/deadlift/olympic lifts are some of
the least-performed exercises in almost every gym.
What does that have to do with anything?
Fact 2: the most common pains people deal with in the gym are
shoulder pain, knee pain, and back pain.
Now things should be getting a little clearer.
Fact 3:
most people love to bench press, but hate to
squat/deadlift/O-lift.
Notice something? When people want to do something, they get it
done. Knee or back pain means, “I must never squat again,” but
shoulder pain means “I must lower reps slower, bring my grip in,
32
drop the weight somewhat, or train my bench press somewhat less
frequently.” The deterrent, for most people, isn’t pain. It’s lack of
desire.
It’s somewhat inspiring how creative people can get when their pet
lift is threatened.
It’s also dismaying how quickly people will flee from something
they don’t want to do (even if it would be beneficial to them) when
they get an opportunity.
Once I got to thinking about it, I realized that this same thing
happens in life all the time. Once any adversity strikes, you learn a
lot about someone’s priorities. Regardless of the scenario, when the
poop hits the fan, the people who are self-motivated will stick
around, but the people who have some sort of external motivation
will shrivel up and slink away. If you take a job because of money
rather than passion, when you try to lose weight or get healthy
because your friends or spouse say you should rather than because
of your own motivations, etc.
However, you see the other side as well. You see it in someone like
Jerome Bettis suiting up with the Steelers year after year, knowing
the day would come that he’d be a middle-aged man who could
hardly walk, but doing it anyway because he loved the game. You
see it with a lot of foreign aid workers, knowing that they’re risking
33
their lives when they try to help a hostile culture, but doing it
anyway because of the good they expect it to bring.
Take-home 1: I’m not going to be cliche and say “ask yourself what
you would die for, etc.” However, think about this dilemma for a
moment. What do you do that you would continue to find a way to
do even if it was no longer fun and easy? What would you be willing
to pour more into than you could hope to get back from it?
Take-home 2: What do you know is good for you, that you would
still abandon at the first chance you had an excuse? Armed with that
knowledge, what will you do to ensure that you continue doing it
even when you don’t want to? Take this one seriously.
Take-home 3: Squat.
Key to confidence – Knowing your worst
If you want to set yourself up for success, you need to know your
limits – both upper and lower limits. You need to know how good
you can be at your best, but you also need to know how bad you can
be at your worst. In my opinion, the latter is more important.
People ask me all the time how I can be so relaxed all the time,
especially when it comes to lifting heavy stuff. It’s simple. I know
34
exactly how bad I can be. I know what I can do on my worst
day. Best days are fickle. We’ve all had days where it feels like the
stars are aligned and you’re capable of things you didn’t think were
even possibilities. Then, the next day you wake up and it’s back to
the grind. I don’t see any point in basing you progress and success
on those mountain top moments that come out of the blue and then
may elude you for quite some time.
Bad days happen all the time. You don’t have to worry about
whether one of them will find you in the coming weeks or months. It
will. You can bet on it. And that’s what makes it a perfect
baseline. And you know what? When your worst-case-scenario
numbers are moving up, you’re getting better. Lots of weightlifters
refer to this as a daily minimum, and it was crucial for me when I
was on a Bulgarian-inspired program. Not every day will be a PR
day, but when you’re grinding away for months at a time, show up
and the gym and your legs feel dead, your hips hurt, the bar feels
like it’s cutting into you more than normal, and you walk away
grinding out a weight that’s 50 pound under your best, only to realize
that it was your PR a matter of months ago…that’s what builds
confidence. That’s what tells you that you can bring it no matter
what. You don’t have to wait for a mountain top moment to attack
the bar, to attack life. You can do it right now, because you know
the worst case scenario, and it’s not that bad. It’s not your best, but
it’s enough.
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This tip isn’t just for lifting. It’s for everything you do in life. Why
would you be apprehensive about something unless you were afraid
it would go poorly? Before making decisions and taking action,
always be cognizant of the realistic worst case scenario. If it’s not
too bad, you can take action confidently. If it’s an unacceptable risk,
don’t take it. Then, no matter what you do and what situations
you’re in, you can act with confidence because you know nothing
unrealistically bad can come of it.
This also helps you plan for a rainy day. By knowing what you can
still do when you’re at your worst, you can become much more
productive. For example, when I have everything together and my
thoughts are clear, I write the programs for my programming clients,
I write article I plan to submit to other websites, or I tackle an indepth blog post I’ve been putting off for a good day – basically I
address the things I need to be at the top of my game for. On a soso day, I usually tackle homework, my reading list (at any given
point in time, I’ll have at least a half dozen articles pulled up I plan
on reading, and at least 2 books I’m working my way through), and
other stuff that I need to focus on, but that don’t necessarily require
intense higher-order thinking. On my worst days, I can still knock
out training posts, make lists of articles I want to write, videos I need
to make, and work on general networking.
There’s always
something I can do. I don’t need to bang my head against a wall on
a bad day working on something I put a lot of detail and attention
36
into like writing article-quality stuff or personalizing programs. I
know how I am at my worst, and I know I can still press forward in
a positive direction.
This concept is also similar to my preference for hitting PRs on days
you don’t feel great. They mean more because you know you’re
probably capable of replicating the effort the next time you’re in the
gym, instead of putting up a number you may not approach again
for a matter of weeks or months on your best day.
Anyways, I’ll wrap this up. It’s been much more ramble-y than I
intended, but I hope the concept has made it through. When you
plan based on your best, you’re always nervous because you’re
afraid you may not perform at the highest level you’re capable, and
when things don’t go your way, it throws you off. When you’re
always aware of your worst and the realistic worst case scenario,
you can attack life with confidence because you know that any
losses will be small and success is likely even with a huge margin
for error.
Assessing motivation
One quick tip for assessing someone’s motivations: Before you ask
them questions, listen to the questions they ask. Someone will only
37
ask questions based on the thoughts their mind is generating on a
given subject; from listening to their questions, you can get a pretty
good idea of what their expectations and priorities are.
Question 1: “How long will I be unable to do x?”
Question 2: “How can I work around x until I’m able to do it again?”
You see how question 2 belies a proactive mindset toward the
problem at hand, and probably indicates a stronger motivation to
continue doing the activity in question?
Question
1:
“What’s
a
pretty
good
squat
for
my
age/weight/gender/sport/etc.?”
Question 2: “What’s the most anyone’s ever squatted?”
The asker of question two has their sights set much higher than the
asker of question one (assuming this is in the context of goalsetting).
In both of these scenarios (I realize they’re pretty lame, but you see
the point I’m making I hope), if you initiated things by asking giving
them the information or asking your own question, you probably
would have missed the subtle insight that a question can give
you. What prompted this rambling was a questions I was asked
today (by the new member of our crew), “how long will it take me
38
to squat 500. Wait, no. 700?” If I just approached the situation as
merely answering his question based on my experience and
observations, instead of pausing and reflecting on what the question
revealed, I would have missed out on something important, I
think. I’m sure there are better examples of this, but the take home
is this: when trying to get a read on someone, don’t just take into
account what they do and what they tell you, but pay close attention
to the questions they ask too. They’re often the most revealing part.
Some thoughts about fear
Today I woke up to an unexpected email. Someone was asking me
about rhabdomyolysis (rhabdo). For those of you unfamiliar with
rhabdo, it’s a condition that arises from EXTREME stress on your
muscles where your muscles basically (to save a long explanation of
the mechanisms which are not too important) start degenerating
rapidly, dumping their contents into your blood stream.
It is
potentially fatal. You know you have it when your pee looks like
Coca Cola.
Here’s why the email was unexpected: it was in the context of
training people. My first thought was, “What sort of hell are these
people about to go through?” You see, rhabdo is an exceptionally
hard condition to induce. The only populations at any measurable
risk for rhabdo are those at the epicenter of huge earthquakes,
elderly people living in drought conditions, people undergoing
39
intensive electric shocks, and people doing obscene amounts of
exercise (maybe running 25+ miles) without drinking hardly
anything. Once I got to the bottom of things though, I realized that
nobody involved needed to worry about rhabdo. This person was
just a victim of scare tactics and misinformation.
Basically, they had read an article about the risks of intense exercise,
and one of the risks on that list was developing rhabdo. They didn’t
know anything about it, so they asked me. However, I’m concerned
about what happens when someone reads that article without
someone to assure them that it’s mostly poppycock.
Fear is,
unfortunately, a fantastic motivator, especially when coupled with a
lack of antagonistic motivation. One fearful idea can persuade more
than a multitude of contrary, positive ideas. Take deadlifting: there
are countless numbers of people who attest to the effectiveness and
safety of deadlifts, but it just takes that one voice warning about the
risk of back injuries, coupled with an aversion to hard work to keep
most people from ripping weights off the ground.
I guess what I’m trying to say is to examine your fears. Some are
legitimate. If you put on a blindfold and then enter a motorcycle
race, you should have a fear of potential extreme bodily harm, for
example. However, not many of our day-to-day fears fall into that
category, in my experience.
So here’s the strategy I use and
recommend:
40
1. Identify your fears by noting the activities you’re averse to
partaking it.
a. determine whether your reason is a fear (if I play basketball i may
break my ankle) or simply a preference (I don’t want to play because
I’m horrible and don’t like the sport).
b. If it’s a preference, move on to your next aversion. If it’s a fear,
proceed to step 2.
2. Determine the cause of the fear (did someone just say it in
passing, did your doctor say it, did you read it on the ever-reliable
internet, do you just feel like it’s true, etc.)
3. Research the fear in more depth to determine its legitimacy. In
the example at the beginning of the article, a more thorough
examination of rhabdo would have revealed how negligible the risks
were, and how illegitimate the fear was. (Yes, I realize that some
people have gotten rhabdo form CrossFit, but that’s not a problem
with exercise in general or CrossFit specifically. It’s a problem with
uniformed and criminally negligent coaches)
4. From your data, determine whether there is actually enough
reason
to
sideline
you.
Usually there won’t be. Just do whatever it was you wanted to do
or admit that you’re mentally weak.
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I think a great tragedy is how so many people squander their limited
time by avoiding things due to irrational fears. Make an effort to rid
yourself of fear that keeps you from doing things that you love. I
think, at the end of the day, you’ll be glad that you did.
The size of your pond
A friend of mine at the gym at school got sponsored not too long
ago. He’s a sponsored physique athlete, so we come to a discussion
with totally different paradigms. He’s helped me a lot with “feeling”
muscles that are inhibited and don’t want to fire properly, and I help
him with approaching strength-based programming.
It’s a
surprisingly productive relationship for a commercial gym.
Today he asked me simply how I handle heavy weights. For him,
he said, squatting much over 4 plates feels like he’s dealing with a
crushing amount of weight, especially in the hole, and pulling
anything more than mid-400s feels intimidating in his hands when
it breaks the ground. So he was curious about how I seem so
nonchalant when handling 500+, and how I keep progressing even
when the weights feel heavy. I gave him some basic advice about
exercise selection (partials and supermaximal holds can help
42
confidence under weight, and paused squats can make you feel
much more comfortable in the hole when you squat heavy), and then
also explained the truly important change that needed to be made.
Everyone knows the illustration of moving a goldfish to a larger and
larger bowl. Keep it in a little bowl and it will stay small. Move it
to a larger bowl and it will grow. Put it in a pond and it will grow
even more. You’re that fish, and your bowl is how wide you cast
your gaze (metaphor time!). If you want to be the strongest guy in
your gym, that’s great. Not a bad place the start, but also a pretty
lousy end goal. Unless you train at Westside, Big Iron, Lexen, Cal
Strength, Muscle Driver, in the weightroom of a college or
professional sports team, or one of maybe 3 or 4 dozen REAL gyms
in the county, being the strongest person in the gym is pretty
meaningless. You’ve simply become the biggest fish in a tiny fish
bowl.
Bench 315 in most gyms, and people will “oo” and “ah.” Squat 5
plates and people will be astounded. That’s one of the worst things
that can possibly happen. You see, you’ve cast your gaze pretty
narrowly. You’ve become the top dog. If you’re the strongest
person in the whole gym, there must be a reason everyone else isn’t
as strong as you. You must be pretty darn strong. How much
stronger can you get? It’s hard to say exactly, but probably not
much. You’re the strongest person at your gym, after all. You’re
43
even stronger than that one guy who uses prohormones (or, *gasp*
a low dose of test from time to time). It’s going to be difficult
moving forward, to further cement your place as king of the hill.
Cast your gaze wider than that. Let’s say you weigh about 180 – an
average sized dude. Men your size have squatted 710, bench 556,
and pulled 791.
So much for your amazing *cough*
lifts. Congratulations. You’ve cast yourself from a tiny fish bowl
into an ocean. You’ve gone from being the biggest fish to being a
painfully average-sized fish – which is fantastic (no sarcasm).
I honestly think noob gains are 50% physical and 50% mental. Sure,
they have a lot of untapped potential for growth, but they’re also
mentally playing “catch up” with everyone around them. Here’s an
experiment I wish they’d do: take two groups of new lifters, and put
them both on the same popular beginner’s program (SS, SL, GSLP,
or any of the others). One group trains in a commercial gym. The
other trains in a collegiate football weight room – when the team is
actually lifting – but receive no extra coaching, etc. I PROMISE
you the second group gets significantly stronger on the exact same
program. All over the internet you see people talk about finally
squatting 315 or benching 225. It happens at the gym I train at when
I’m in school. As a serious strength gym, doing either of those
things means “Congratulations. You’re a non-midget who just hit
puberty. Pretty productive for your first 2 months of training. Now
44
let’s work towards something that’s ACTUALLY worth bragging
about.”
When you broaden your gaze – throw yourself into the ocean – it
sets you up to get stronger again, very quickly. Odds are, if you’re
taking the time to read this, you probably have been training for a
while and you think of yourself as pretty strong.
You’re the
strongest (or at least one of the strongest) of your friends. You can
show up most of the people up in your gym. You’d probably beat
most of the people at a state powerlifting meet. Forget it all. How
would you do head-to-head against Ed Coan in his prime? Or Lamar
Gant? Or Donnie Thompson? Or Larry Pacifico? Until you can
honestly tell yourself that you’d be competitive – maybe not win,
but at least be mentioned in the same sentence – you’re not
strong. The sooner you can get that through your head the better.
Everyone knows about diminishing returns in the gym. The stronger
you are, the harder it is to continue getting stronger. Until you’re at
least kinda strong to begin with, though, gains come naturally. The
longer you can delay your assessment of yourself as a strong
individual, the better off you are. When people tell me I’m strong,
I usually bluntly deny it. It’s not feigned humility – a practice I have
no respect for. It’s the truth. I really don’t see myself as very
strong.
Not yet, at least.
Travis, my first coach, has gone
805/545/804 raw. Right now, that’s strong to me. Until I take down
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each of those, I’m not strong in that particular lift. Once that
happens, Coan’s records are my next target, my next standard. After
that, the all-time SHW records (but doing them at 242).
Will it happen? We’ll see. Objectively it’s quite unlikely, but I
wouldn’t keep training if I didn’t see it as a possibility. As useful as
it is to avoid hubris (the whole point of this discussion), it’s also
important to avoid doubt. So what if you widen your gaze, if doing
so makes you throw up your hands and say “I don’t have a
chance!”? No matter how crazy the goal, you have to entertain it as
a possibility. Imagine young Dorian Yates:
(Needs more Cell-Tech)
46
What if he told you his dream of becoming Mr. Olympia? You’d
laugh at him. And you’d have looked like a fool for doing so in
hindsight:
(Just a wee bit huge)
Luckily, as corny as it may sound, HE believed he could do it, and
ultimately that’s what mattered.
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People who follow my blog will recognize this as a variation on a
theme I like to bring up fairly frequently: you limit yourself by
having low expectations. To bring this full circle and to tie it back
into the metaphor of the evening: throw yourself into the biggest
ocean there is. You may never become the biggest fish, but only by
venturing there do you find out just how large of a fish you can
become.
Steroids
If you’re a zealot for drug-free competition, this post may offend
you. You were warned.
I can’t bring myself to care too much about whether or not people
use steroids or any other type of performance enhancing
substance. I really can’t. I didn’t understand the outrage about
Lance Armstrong. I don’t understand why people were aghast that
baseball players used. Most of all, I don’t understand how other
athletes
are
so
smug
and
self-righteous
in
their
condemnation. Why? Let me illustrate with a (true) statement:
I don’t use steroids or any other sort of banned substances.
Now you have two choices:
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1. Believe me without evidence
2. Think that I’m using
For those of you who think I’m using, how would you know? Drug
test me when I compete? Not a chance. There are plenty of drugs
with short half-lives I could take up to two week out from a meet
and pee clean. What about out-of-contest testing? You’re getting
closer. I wouldn’t be able to take as high of a dose, but as long as
my test ratio is in check, I’ll still be fine. Year-round testing catches
people who get too aggressive about their offseason drug use, but
plenty of people fly under the radar.
Don’t believe me? Look at Lance Armstrong. He’s getting his titles
stripped, not for failing drug tests, but because so many people
testified against him.
He peed clean hundreds of times under
stringent testing policies while continually using steroids and EPO
(another banned substance that increases your red blood cell count)
for over a decade. Testing doesn’t mean you can’t use. It just means
you have to lower you dose and not take anything that leaves
specific metabolites (for example, you’d be less likely to pop a
positive with testosterone, EPO, and hGH than something like
Deca).
Furthermore, I don’t think steroids matter that much when it comes
to success. I realize that’s not the majority opinion, but here’s why
49
I feel the way I do: Most people who would have become the best,
regardless of steroid use, have the “win at all cost” attitude. With
the drugs available today, “at all costs” includes steroids. Those
same people could have still crushed people without drugs, but they
crushed people harder with drugs. If you think for a minute that a
drug-free Coan wouldn’t have destroyed people at 181/198 in his
prime almost as effectively as he ended up crushing people at 220,
you’re kidding yourself. Look at Jesse Norris, who took both the
tested and untested records at 198 with an 1850 total at the ripe old
age of 19. Either 1) the drugs don’t make THAT much difference,
2) he’s been juicing hard throughout his teens, or 3) no good lifters
have ever competed at 198 (ahem, Pacifico, who’s wrapped total is
only 55 pounds higher than Norris’s unwrapped total). You can
believe whatever you want, but I think the first option makes the
most sense.
Steroids help you add mass. Strength is just as much about neural
efficiency as it is about mass. When you add that mass, does it cause
you to move up a weight class? If so, do you increase in strength
enough that it makes you more competitive in a higher class than
you were previously in a lower one? In a weight-class based sport,
adding mass isn’t necessarily a good thing. It may help your squat
and bench, but throw off your deadlift set-up, while also moving you
into a class with higher records and stronger competition. I’m not
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saying they don’t help at all, but I think it’s easy to over-emphasize
the advantage.
Why does it matter to you if people are using anyways?
If you’re a competitive person, then you should be aiming to take
down the best. The best includes everyone. If by “everyone” you
just mean people who don’t use a certain class of substances, maybe
you’re giving yourself built-in excuses because you fear failure.
If you’re just lifting to improve on your last total and to hit PRs, then
someone else’s choice of drug use shouldn’t matter to you at all. If
it does, maybe you’re being dishonest with yourself about your real
reasons for competing as a defense mechanism.
The next most common objection is that it sets a bad example for
kids. I think that if you’re cheating (i.e. using while in a tested fed),
you have moral issues which certainly set a bad example. I’d lump
using illegal drugs along with that. If the bad example is just the
fact that someone’s doing something which can potentially be
harmful to one’s health, then I’d like to see smoking, drinking, being
sedentary, eating sugar and trans fat, and being sleep deprived
becomes equally stigmatized.
The final common objection is that it’s not “natural.” This one
makes me laugh. Is having a concentrated protein source with
51
essentially no carbs or fat natural (other than slurping egg
whites)? Is having a concentrated source of creatine? How about
lifting belts, or shoes? Do you take vitamins that cover nutritional
deficiencies?
Well,
they’re
probably
improving
your
performance. You should stop taking them ASAP. This is where
all the self-righteous people come in and object that so-and-so may
be strong, but they used unnatural means to get there.
ridiculous and false dichotomy.
It’s a
We all do things that aren’t
“natural.” Some people just draw the line of what they’ll do for
performance enhancement before steroids, and others draw it
after. It’s a difference of degree, not substance. You’re simply
doing things to get an advantage, and they’re simply doing more
things. It’s not like you’re being handicapped while they’re taking
a magic pill that instantly makes them 50% stronger.
If you want to use, that’s fine.
If you don’t want to use, that’s also fine.
Whatever you choose to do and however you choose to compete,
just stop whining.
You’re not weak because you’re not on
drugs. You’re weak because you’re weak. So-and-so isn’t strong
because they’re on drugs. They’re strong because they train hard,
and they’re a little stronger because they’re on drugs. Abstaining
from one particular class of biomolecules does not give you license
52
to be self-righteous. Lift heavy things, try to get stronger, and leave
it at that.
The dangers of orthodoxy
One thing I truly despise is orthodoxy. When free thought is not
expected, or it is even scorned, you have a major problem.
People look at how I train, especially when I’m on a high intensity,
high frequency routine, and assure me that I’m going to hurt myself,
experience “adrenal fatigue” (hint – it’s a myth), and probably die.
So, what should I do? Pack it up and find my way back into the
main steam of the fitness industry, in spite of the fact that there are
no scientific studies or really any evidence-based arguments against
what I do? I find myself getting stronger, my joints feel good, my
motivation to train remains high – but I hear that I’m doing it wrong,
and that on one who isn’t “chemically enhanced” could handle that
style of training.
But still I can’t deny my own experience, and I keep coming across
studies that validate what I’m doing. So what should I do? Deny
my experience and the evidence I’ve found and go with the
“experts,” or trust my own capacity for reason and go against the
grain?
53
I would like to submit that skepticism is one of the greatest virtues
that anyone could possess, simply because of how insidious
orthodoxies can be.
Skepticism doesn’t mean totally counter-cultural. Certain things are
done by most people because they’re good or reasonable things to
be doing. You can be skeptical about the efficiency of America’s
infrastructure, but don’t take that to the point of testing whether it’s
a good idea to drive on the left side of the road in America, or at
least warn me before you try it out.
Skepticism DOES mean being wary of anyone who tries to sell you
on an idea without providing sufficient evidence. Ultimately, no
single person has a monopoly on truth. Orthodoxies start when
people stop being watchdogs and questioning the peddlers of shoddy
information.
Why would anyone fear skeptics?
I see no reason to fear
questioning unless you know you are wrong, or at least don’t have
sufficient evidence for your claims. Whenever someone makes an
appeal to authority, ask yourself why they feel the need to appeal to
position rather than evidence.
Skepticism also means always being open to change. Just because
you disagree with a majority opinion, you’re no better if you then
become entrenched in your belief. You’re just sewing the seeds of
54
a new orthodoxy. It may be a better approximation of the truth than
the prior one, but there’s always room for improvement.
I
understand
convenient.
the
appeal
of
orthodoxies.
They’re
They’re not dissimilar to stereotypes, except
functioning on an ideological level. Stereotypes, though wrong in
many instances, DO serve a purpose. The brain doesn’t function at
the level of being about to consciously analyze every independent
variable about a person in each independent situation, giving you the
luxury
of
engaging
someone
with
a
completely
open
mind. Stereotypes provide a “short cut” that gives you some pre-set
information to work off of, just so you won’t become overwhelmed
with the minutia of existence. Orthodoxies function in a similar
way. It nice to have a common position that everyone holds to be
true to fall back upon. Imagine the life of a doctor who had to totally
revamp his thinking on nutritional or exercise advice each time a
new study came out. That would be exhausting.
However, just as we (rightly so, I think) try to marginalize our
prejudices in our dealings with others, we should also question the
commonly-held, even “untouchable” beliefs when we have the
luxury to do so. People have reasons for believing things. They
may be rational, they may be social or emotional, or they may be out
of weight of habit. Dig for those foundations of beliefs (including,
55
or especially, your own) to discover if they should be kept, modified,
or discarded.
You’ll find some dead ends. Many things are commonly accepted
as true because they are the best approximation of the truth that
we’ve found so far based on the evidence. However, you’ll also find
some incongruencies, some slights of hand, some hardy but
unsupported traditions, and some outright lies.
Then you can
develop a better understanding, and come closer to understanding
your own body and the world we live in. That, in my opinion, is
what makes skepticism worthwhile.
Remove your filter
Start by reading about this recent study
One of our primary subconscious goals is to reconcile our beliefs
into a comprehensive, non-contradictory whole. Once ideas get
rooted in our head, they have a tendency to stay there. We then
unwittingly filter new information through our current notions. We
remember information that supports our position, and forget or
disregard information that contradicts it.
This filter serves the purpose of calming out inner voices. We don’t
like cognitive dissonance – that unsettling feeling of believing
things we know to be contradictory. Once we find a belief that can
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nestle itself in comfortably with our other beliefs, it’s uncomfortable
to question it. We don’t mind altering or discarding provisional
ideas that kind of dangle off in their own little corner of our mind,
but once things get intertwined with other notions (which is almost
unavoidable), they’re hard to dislodge.
With this knowledge about yourself, you have two options: remain
comfortable in your beliefs and ways of doing things, or
continuously reevaluate things based on new information and
evidence.
I’m of the opinion that only the latter affords the
opportunity for creativity and personal growth.
We have to stay on guard from things without and within. We have
to filter out bad or fraudulent information from outside sources,
while constantly asking ourselves whether we’re filtering the
evidence based on its own merits or our own beliefs and biases. This
is one of the reasons I keep this blog.
It’s easy to keep ideas in your head that don’t quite add up, as long
as they fit in nicely with your other beliefs, simply by not asking
yourself too many internal questions. However, when you write
down your ideas, along with your lines of reasoning and
argumentation as support for them, while knowing that other people
will read what you write and notice every gap in reasoning and every
oversight of contradictory information, it keeps your subconscious
honest.
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If I feel like I know a fair amount about something, but also feel
uncomfortable writing about it, it tells me one of two things:
1) I don’t know as much about it as I’m telling myself, and I know
my ignorance will show through.
2) I really don’t have very good reasons for my views on that
particular subject, and I know those gaps will be exposed the minute
I start writing.
These were the basic reasons why the Western tradition appreciates
the skills of a good debater. Almost anyone can sound good in a
void or an echo chamber, but a clash of ideas exposes any chinks in
one’s armor that would not have been apparent otherwise. That’s
why it’s exceedingly rare for me back down from a discussion with
anyone who disagrees with me. If I lose, so what? My pride is not
threatened by potentially being wrong about something. However,
it would be threatened by realizing that my intellectual comfort has
trumped my quest for knowledge.
Stay open to new ideas. Write. Expose yourself to criticism. Soak
it all up, get better, refine your beliefs, pick up what’s good, whittle
away what’s bad, and keep moving forward.
False bravado, marketing, and masculinity
58
I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us have been “that
guy” in the gym at some point or another. The guy who grunted or
yelled to make sure everyone saw how hardcore they were. Or
maybe the guy who was quick to tell everyone that only compound
lifts mattered, so people were pussies or had “fuckarounditis” for
wasting their time training “beach muscles”. Or maybe the guy who
thought every set should go until you blacked out or busted blood
vessels in your eye, and that skipping training session because you
were hurt made you less of a man.
Yeah, I used to be that guy. And if you never were, I’m sure you
know someone who is or was.
Now, that makes you wonder, where does this all come from? When
we enter the gym, are some of us perma-15 year olds with the need
to prove to everyone we’re so “hardcore?” Does something deep
down in our psyche tell us that this is the proper way to behave, and
the optimal way to get stronger and reach our goals? I, for one, am
hoping that such is not the case.
I think the main problem is the many e-gurus who build up cults of
personality around themselves and “sell” a certain lifestyle to sell a
product/program. Unless you’re hardcore like them, you’re not
doing it “right” and you’re selling yourself short. You’re submitting
to the shackles of modern society that try to emasculate you. You
59
need to liberate yourself, embrace the manliness inside yourself, and
unleash all your pent up rage on the weights.
Bull.
They keep you locked into the pubescent me vs. everyone mindset
by playing to the insecurities most guys have have. We need to feel
like we’ve truly become “manly men,” we need to feel a sense of
adequacy in your physical abilities, and we need to feel the approval
of our abilities from our peers (and the opposite sex).
By
insinuating that you’re “soft” and feminized by modern society, they
threaten your identity, but then they assure you that you can be a
“real man” if you buy into their “hardcore” lifestyle (which you can
learn about in their book, delve deeper into by buying their
programming and supplements, and show your newfound
masculinity by purchasing their apparel, of course).
I see it as the same ploy that companies use to market to
women. They make them feel ugly and inadequate so they’ll buy
makeup or clothes.
Quite honestly, it disgusts me. People preying on the most insecure
of individuals, often hooking them when they’re impressionable
(and doubly insecure) teenagers and warping views of masculinity
in ways that are silly, anachronistic, and often sexist and anti-social.
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Now, as if anyone cares, here’s my personal view of masculinity. If
you want to take it with a grain of salt because I’m young, so be
it. However, I think it’s a better alternative than the popular view
that often pervades the fitness industry.
1. A man takes care of his responsibilities and honors his promises
and commitments.
2. A man values well-rounded development. Physical development
should not come at the expense of mental, social, and emotional
development.
3. A man is not a jerk to people and does not feel the need to belittle
them because he realizes his value as an individual is not enhanced
by the attempt to denigrate someone else.
4. A man is aware of his abilities and his weaknesses. He works to
improve in areas where he is lacking, but is willing to ask for help
when a situation arises that he is unprepared for.
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This post would not be complete without a picture of Ron Swanson.
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Lessons Learned Through Experience
What I learned on the way to benching 350 pounds
Continuing the series that, at this rate, is set to finish up in about 15
years, here is the third installment, and currently the first of three
installments about the bench press.
Just to recap what this whole thing is about – since a lot of you
weren’t following my blog the last time I did an installment (in
January) – I’m giving an overview of the things I had to learn to hit
milestones in each lift (50 pound increments for the bench, 100
pound increments for the squat and pull), and as the series
progresses I’ll talk about how my training has evolved over time to
avoid/break plateaus and keep making progress.
So, without further ado…
1. Practice the pattern
I was a pretty good bencher the first time I tried. The main reason
was that I had always done a TON of pushups. When I started
playing football in 3rd grade, I asked my coach how I could get
stronger. He told me to do pushups. So I did. Every day for the
next 3 years. I’d do as many as I could in the morning, after school,
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and at night. When my parents got me a weight set for my birthday
in 6th grade, the first thing I did was max on bench press (I was a
bro from the start
). I got 150, which was somewhere in the
neighborhood of bodyweight. I didn’t lift weights very often at first
because I was playing sports essentially year-round (and was told
never to lift weights in season), so fast forward another 3 years of
essentially only doing pushups, and by my freshman year in high
school I was benching 275 with very little time spent under the bar.
This basically mirrored my experience with the deadlift, which was
strong from the start because of practice with the pattern from a
young age, as compared to my squat, which was an uphill battle for
a long time. I’ve seen this with essentially all my friends who have
joined the armed forces as well. In spite of sleeping very little,
running and marching all the time, and doing enough pushups and
pullups to make the most people cry “over-training,” they almost
invariably come back from basic with bigger bench presses than
they left with from doing bazillions of pushups.
This is a principle that can be applied to almost anyone, regardless
of training age. If I find myself in a rut with my squat or bench, I’ll
spend several weeks doing a few hundred bodyweight squats or
pushups a day, and the increased work capacity, combined with the
neural effect of greasing the groove, almost always pays off for me.
2. Train the triceps
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I heard bench was all about the pecs when I first started lifting. That
was the common wisdom in the YMCA weightroom and the school
gym. However, when I met Travis Mash and he told me about
Westside, I learned about how important the triceps are. Now,
looking back it seems obvious because the bench press requires you
to extend your arms, but it was pretty revolutionary to a 14 year
old. Not much more to add to this point, and in those early days I
probably took things a bit to far by over-emphasizing my triceps and
neglecting my chest (just like the shirted benchers who taught me
how to bench), but it is erroneous to think of the bench press as
purely a chest exercise.
3. Get comfortable with heavy weight in your hands
When I first started training, I used bands and chains all the time
(because I cut my teeth on westside). I’m less sold now on bands
and chains being superior to straight weight for raw lifters, but I do
think they have one big advantage: they let you feel heavier weight
in your hands and move it through a full ROM.
Everyone who’s spotted for someone benching heavy weight knows
what the “oh crap” face looks like. You lift out a weight to them for
a PR attempt, and as soon as they feel it in their hands their eyes
bulge, they look like a deer in headlights, and you know they have
no chance of completing the lift. Using bands and chains (and
nowadays things like the Mark Bell’s Slingshot or the Titan Ram)
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lets you feel supermaximal weights in your hands while still moving
the bar through a full ROM, so that when you attempt a new max,
the weight at least feels manageable in your hands and you have a
fighting chance. When I was starting out, I used bands and chains
all the time, so even when I missed lifts I found out the weight was
too much when I couldn’t grind it to lockout, not when I got a liftoff.
4. Don’t fixate on numbers.
I had a bad mental block with 315. I’d hit 310 in either a meet or in
training probably a dozen times, but when I got 3 wheels on the bar
I would literally be unable to budge it off my chest. All my other
bench press variations were going up (remember, I was training
Westside style, so I was rotating through several different bench
variations), but my plain old competition-style bench press was
staying put. My training partner at the time, Lavan, fixed this one
day by telling me I couldn’t look at the bar during my
workout. Between sets I had to sit up and face away from the bar,
and he’d load the weight for me. He made sure to use an odd
assortment of 10s and 5s so that after 2 or 3 sets, I honestly had no
idea how much weight was on the bar. I ended up benching 330 that
day before I finally missed 335. When I finally missed and was
allowed to look at the bar, I was both relieved I’d crossed that
barrier, and pissed at myself because I had obviously been capable
of doing so for quite some time.If a number is screwing with you,
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having a training partner do something like that for you might just
be the ticket to a new PR and fresh gains once you get past the
mental barrier.
5. Train with volume
I always loved benching with a TON of volume. I’d do the normal
9×3 Westside speed work one day, then work up to a max, then drop
back for a burnout set or two, then do a DB press pyramid
accumulating 80ish reps over 6-8 sets, then direct triceps work, and
8 sets of rows and 8 sets pullups or pulldowns. On my other bench
day, I’d work up to a max single or triple on some bench press
variation, then strip some weight off the bar and do 8 sets of 5,
followed by the same basic accessories from the other bench day.By
no means do I think what I just described was optimal, but for bench
I’ve always found that erring on the side of too much was better than
erring on the side of too little (ditto with squat, opposite for
deadlift). If nothing else, it builds the work capacity to help you
adapt and supercompensate when you take up a saner training
program or taper for a meet. Now, enjoy this video of a bunch of
people who all bench substantially more than I do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PuRHNpxUfU
Peaking – AKA how to hit PRs in meets
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How many times have you heard someone say something like this,
“Well, I squatted 500 in the gym a few weeks ago, but 450 felt heavy
at the meet and I missed 475.”
That’s because they peaked wrong. I’m even convinced that If you
ONLY hit your gym PRs in meets, you peaked poorly. If you’re
good at programming, meets should be PR city. And, if you’re
unfamiliar with this blog, let me assure you I’m not just a pencilnecked nerd who reads research but hasn’t ever applied these
principles in practice. Here is a breakdown of my last two meets:
August 2012
Gym PRs (under the same circumstances)* – 625 squat, 415 bench,
625 deadlift
Meet – 650 squat, 419 bench, 645 deadlift
May 2013
Gym PRs (under the same circumstances) – 725 squat, 420 bench,
675 deadlift
Meet – 750 squat, 425 bench, 710 deadlift
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*I had hit a couple bigger benches in the gym before my meets, and
before my 2013 meet I had pulled more with straps. However, I’m
a low bar squatter and squatting low bar before benching makes a
little biceps tendonitis flare up, so I listed my gym PRs after low bar
squatting to mimic meet conditions, and I listed my strapless DL
PRs.
I don’t intend for my own example to be perceived as bragging. This
is essentially what meet numbers SHOULD look like compared to
gym numbers. When you walk into a meet, you should be set for
PRs across the board.
Any other outcome, barring something
beyond your control (getting sick on meet day, sustaining some
random injury at work, no AC at the meet venue, etc.), either
indicates that your training lifts didn’t mimic meet lifts (high squats,
bounced benches, hitched DLs, etc), or your programming was
bad. Oh, you may want to chalk it up to some trite excuse like, “oh,
it was just a bad day.” Well, why was it a bad day? Because you
failed to peak properly. Simple as that.
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Matthias Steiner after a 12kg (26.5 pound) clean and jerk PR to win
Olympic gold in 2008.
So, now let’s examine the factors that influence how well your peak
goes:
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1. Training volume leading up to the meet
This is an important factor. I’ve written about this subject before
here. Peaking 101 – you’re training hard, you taper volume, your
body supercompensates, and you’re stronger on meet day. Well, if
you’re not training hard in the first place, there’s really no peaking
that can occur.
There’s no overreaching from which you can
supercompensate. And when I say “training hard,” I’m not talking
about hitting a vein-popping 1rm or 3rm. I’m talking about putting
in volume. High-intensity stimuli (heavy freaking weight) tend to
cause primarily neural adaptations which tend to occur fairly
quickly. Increasing volume, on the other hand, will have cumulative
effects that may take a few weeks to fully recover from once
overreaching occurs.
If you train a lift only once per week, and in that session you get in
less than 25 or so heavy working reps, and then you pack it up
without hammering accessory work hard, you simply haven’t been
doing enough work to warrant a taper, and if you try, there’s no
overreaching to warrant a supercompensatory response from your
body. Higher frequency helps fix this problem (because you can get
in a lot more volume over two or three sessions without having to
kill yourself in any given one of them), and if you prefer lower
frequency, make sure you focus on constantly increasing your
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training volume leading up to a meet, so when you DO pull back,
you actually benefit from the taper.
2. How long you take to taper
This is another common mistake. People either tend to overdo or
underdo tapering.
Overdoing: You either see people who read old Westside articles
about the “delayed transformation” method and trying to taper
volume over 3 or 4 weeks, only to peak a week or two before the
meet (because, keep in mind, you only peak for a short period of
time,
and
then
optimal
performance
quickly
becomes
detraining). When you’re aiming to squat 1100 and you’re cranking
out 12 training sessions a week, you may need that long to
taper. When you’re the other 99% of lifters (especially raw lifters),
one week of lowered volume followed be one week of deload is
plenty. That approach works great even for me personally. I may
take one more week to not push quite as close to failure (same
general training plan, but shave a rep or two off of everything), but
I only purposefully taper for one week before my deload. In my
experience, very few people are strong enough to warrant a taper
longer than two weeks before meet week. During this period,
maximize your schedule for sleep. Shoot for 10 hours a night, or at
least an extra hour compared to your norm.
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On the other hand, other people think “peaking” means just taking a
session or two off before a meet. They may hit their openers
Monday, skip training the rest of the week, and compete
Saturday. That’s simply not enough time off. (Warning, it’s about
to get bro-sciency, but this is a reflection of my experience and
conversations with a LOT of lifters) It’s enough time for your body
to get shifted into recovery mode and for you to lose your “edge,”
but not long enough for you to start really getting the itch to tear into
some weights.
aggression
Your physical strength and your psychological
simply don’t
have
enough
time
to
manifest
themselves. It’s like preparing for battle the next day, but then being
caught off-guard by your enemy during the night. Be willing to take
some time off. If you trained for several months to get ready for a
meet, one easy week and one off week isn’t going to make you
weak. You think strength that took that long to build is going to
leave you so quickly? Trust the work you put in, and give your body
a chance to reward you for your efforts.
3. Nutritional factors
For people cutting water weight: get the weight off as fast as
possible, and put it back on as fast as possible. Don’t spend hours
jogging in a trash bag the day before a meet. Get in a hot tub or run
a hot bath. Water has a much higher thermal conductivity constant
than air, which means more heat is imparted into your body, so you
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sweat WAY more. Get that weight off fast, then have a couple
gallons of 1/2 gatorade 1/2 water waiting for you. Then hit a
buffet. You should be heavier than you were prior to the water cut
within an hour or two of stepping off the scales. Don’t let a botched
weight cut ruin your meet.
The night before and the entire day of the meet, eat as much salt and
as many starchy foods as possible, and drink as much water as
possible. You want a huge bloat. Mass moves mass.
I recommend cutting out caffeine a few weeks before the
meet. You’ll be re-sensitized by meet day, and you can use that to
your advantage. High doses of caffeine have been shown to reliably
increase power output, but only in people how are caffeinesensitive. I’ll usually have a coffee and a monster in my system
before my first squat attempt, and drink 4 or 5 more highly
caffeinated beverages throughout the course of a day. It makes
weights feel much lighter and move much faster. And, before
anyone asks, this caffeine strategy is about maximizing weight
lifted, not about maximizing cardiovascular health. And besides,
it’s just one day, so no big deal.
So, there you go. I’m sure I glossed over some details, but contained
in this post are the basics of consistently PRing in meets. Get your
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volume in in your pre-meet training cycle, take a week or two to
taper volume and a week of deloading, make your water cut as fast
as possible (if you cut), consume massive amounts of carbs, salt, and
water, and use caffeine to your advantage.
If you don’t feel
comfortable setting up your training plan, hire a competent coach
(perhaps the author – shameless plug) or take the time to study
training logs of lifters who consistently do well in meets.
On meet day, you shouldn’t be wondering IF you’ll PR, the only
question should be, “HOW BIG those PRs will those PRs be?”
What I learned to squat 500
There are three types of strong people.
1. Lucky ones
2. Injured ones
3. Smart ones
Unless you’re simply a freak, getting stronger requires a mind that
can keep up with your body. If you’re not constantly growing in
your mental pursuits, you’ll run into some serious problems in your
training. You’ll stop getting stronger, start getting hurt, or both.
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You would be hard pressed to find an 800 pound raw squatter or
deadlifter who get that strong by accident. Knowledge precedes
strength. When you apply all the knowledge you have and finally
hit a wall, it takes more knowledge to know HOW to get
around/over/under/through that wall before you can direct your
efforts towards doing so. You may clear a few barriers by accident
and luck, but that’s not the best strategy to stake your long-term
results on.
With that in mind, I’m going to be writing an ongoing series about
the main things I learned to reach particular milestones in lifting. I’ll
start with my first 500 pound squat, then work in 100 pounds
increments. I’ll do the same with my bench, starting at 350 and
working in 50 pound increments. Deadlift will also start at 500 and
go 100 pounds at a time. My PRs are currently 650/445/655, so
hopefully I’ll have three installments per lift (up to 700/450/700)
fairly soon. So, without further ado, here’s how I squatted 500
pounds:
Lesson 1: Work hard.
This is the most important thing I’ve learned about attaining
anything in life. In some sports, talent often trumps hard work (i.e.
you can’t play center in the NBA at 5’7″ by sheer force of
will). However, I don’t think this is true for powerlifting, except in
extreme cases. I’ll illustrate with something that SHOULD be a
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death sentence for a power/strength athlete: not having true fast
twitch muscle fibers.
About 18% of the population has two
nonsense copies of the ACTN3 gene which codes for a binding
protein necessary for fast twitch muscles to “twitch fast.” Basically,
with two copies of the nonsense allele, none of your muscle fibers
truly function as fast twitch fibers.
Two different studies have linked having two working copies of the
allele to elite anaerobic performance.
One showed that elite
sprinters and power athletes are much less likely to have the
nonsense allele, and another showed that elite bodybuilders and
strength athletes are much less likely to have the nonsense
allele. None of this should be surprising as fast twitch fibers are the
ones with the most growth potential and are primarily responsible
for very high levels for force production. However, don’t let another
pair of statistics slip by you:
about 7% of ELITE
bodybuilders/strength athletes, and about 6% of ELITE sprinters
have two copies of the nonsense gene. Approximately 1 out of every
15 elite athletes lacks true fast twitch muscle fibers in sports where
force output and/or hypertrophy are ESSENTIAL. Let that sink in
for a moment.
I’d almost guarantee you, though: that 1 in 15 had to work twice as
hard to reach the same level of achievement. But if you’re willing
to put in the work, you can get there.
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While I was working towards a 500 squat, I learned to work
hard.
i.e. puked-the-first-4-workouts-straight hard.
I’ve since
learned to pick my battles (somewhat) and give my body a rest when
it needs it, but strength is only earned through hard work, pure and
simple.
Lesson 2: Form is king
You can lift light weights with bad form. If you lift heavy weights
with bad form, you will break yourself eventually. Killer tendonitis
in both knees and constant erector spinae strains taught me that
lesson the hard way. It wasn’t until I made serious strides in
technique that I reached 500. Tip of the day: fail to stand up with a
lift and let the bar roll off your back rather than losing it
forward. Never lose it forward.
Lesson 3: Nutrition basics
At the point of squatting 500, I didn’t know a ton about
nutrition. However, here’s what I did know, which worked just fine
at the time:
a) Have some meat in front of you every time you sit down at the
table
b) Never be hungry (I went from 170 to 213 in about 4.5 months,
and took my squat from 405 to 523 in the same time
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span. Additionally, I stood up with 551 but got redlighted for
depth. It was deeper than my previous 405, but a smidge higher than
523). Food is the best anabolic on the planet. Insulin spikes +
increasing mTOR1 expression + amino acids = hugeness.
c) Supplements are to supplement. I’m pretty sure the only things I
took when I first squatted 500 were a protein supplement (20g postworkout. Tasted like death) and a multivitamin. Early on I noticed
a strong correlation between the number of supplements someone
obsessed about taking and how weak they were.
Lesson 4: Atmosphere
This is a lesson that I didn’t realize I was learning at the time, but it
became painfully obvious soon after my first 500. The gym I trained
at when I first started lifting was the home of Travis Mash. He was
at his peak at the time, and I saw him deadlift and back squat in the
700s and front squat in the 600s fairly often. Additionally, Lavan,
the guy I trained with most of the time, was (and still is) slightly
wider than most doorways with a 500 pound bench and a pretty
decent squat. Also, Joey Smith and a lot of geared benchers would
come on Friday nights and all handle 700-800 on a pretty regular
basis. Throw all this together, and I’m the weakest person in the
picture BY FAR. Oh, except for Seth who was only about 150
pounds at the time and constantly just 10-20 pounds behind me in
every lift (plus he could do a 64 inch box jump, and a 48 inch body
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jump off one leg. He’s a freak). I think I got stronger just because
I saw so much room for improvement in myself. They were my
“normal,” so there was no good reason to not get a lot stronger in
short order.
Lesson 5: You’re only as strong as your stomach
I’ll be honest, this is one I’ve gotten away from (to my own
detriment). No matter what, I always ended training sessions in my
early days with absurd amounts of abdominal work. First I worked
up to situps (on a hyperextension machine) with a 165 pound
dumbbell on my chest for sets of 10. Then it was with a heavy band
around my neck for 10s. Then it was with 90 pounds behind my
head for 10s. Never will you regret getting brutally strong abs.
How I trained: Westside, mostly. Except it was Travis’s form of
westside. The main modification: DE days start as DE days (8 sets
of 2 fast with band tension for squats, 8×3 for bench), but after
you’ve hit your speed sets you just max with the band
tension. Everything else was pretty kosher. Lots of hamstring work,
upper back work, and triceps work.
What I learned on the way to deadlifting 500 pounds
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This is installment 2 in a (currently) 8 part series. The first was
“What I learned to squat 500 pounds”. I’m planning on doing one
installment for each 100 pound increment for squat and deadlift
starting at 500, and each 50 pound increment on bench starting at
350. Just as a refresher from the first installment:
“There are three types of strong people.
1. Lucky ones
2. Injured ones
3. Smart ones
Unless you’re simply a freak, getting stronger requires a mind that
can keep up with your body. If you’re not constantly growing in
your mental pursuits, you’ll run into some serious problems in your
training. You’ll stop getting stronger, start getting hurt, or both.
You would be hard pressed to find an 800 pound raw squatter or
deadlifter who get that strong by accident. Knowledge precedes
strength. When you apply all the knowledge you have and finally
hit a wall, it takes more knowledge to know HOW to get
around/over/under/through that wall before you can direct your
efforts towards doing so. You may clear a few barriers by accident
and luck, but that’s not the best strategy to stake your long-term
results on.”
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1. Grease that groove
Deadlift was a very natural movement for me the first time I tried
it. Why? Prior to deadlifting, I spent my whole childhood figuring
out the heaviest things I could pick up: rocks, logs, people, etc. On
top of that, my family burned a wood fire all winter, so I’d spend a
fair amount of time hauling logs, picking 18″ segments of trees up
to load them in a trailer, and pushing a loaded wheelbarrow. When
I first got a weight set, bending over and ripping something off the
ground was pretty second nature to me. What’s more, I found that
having the weight on a bar that I could wrap my hands around made
the whole process significantly easier. As such, when I got my first
little weight set (I was 11 or so. It was a Christmas present in 6th
grade), I could load 200 pounds on the bar (as much as it came
with. As a note, the largest plates were 25s, so it was a 2-3 inch
deficit) and pull it that Christmas morning. In about 3 months I
could do 5×10 with 200, and would do that 2-3 times per week on
top of all of the other various things I did that required picking stuff
up.
The first time I actually pulled a max deadlift with a real bar and and
45 pound plates I was 14, and got 405 clean and 425 with some
hitching. For most people, when they hear that they assume I’m just
a freak. They ignore the fact that I’d been effectively training for
deadlifts since I was 5 years old.
During childhood, neural
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development is hugely important. You’re not going to get jacked,
but you can improve muscle activation in patterns you practice. You
see youtube videos of 9 year olds in China clean and jerking 135 and
wonder how they’re so strong. Actually they probably aren’t much
stronger than your typical 9 year old. They’ve just had enough
practice to get their tiny little muscles incredibly efficient at
Olympic lifting. That’s basically what I did for deadlifts.
If you didn’t have the same type of childhood I did, you can still
benefit from greasing the groove; it’ll just take longer for your brain
to adapt. However, neural plasticity is a wonderful thing, and if you
put in the reps, really substantial neural improvements will
occur. This means using less weight for fewer reps, but picking
heavy stuff up every single day (if possible), or even multiple times
per day. The more often your nervous system is exposed to a
stimulus, the faster it will adapt to it.
When you’re a brand new lifter, you’re not gaining strength because
you’re getting so much hyoojer. You’re gaining strength primarily
because of neural adaptations, with hypertrophy coming in a distant
second in terms of importance. Hypertrophy is important on down
the road, obviously, but isn’t of primary importance early on. Doing
more reps, more often steepens the learning curve. It’ll feel boring
and counter-productive, but you’ll thank me for it in the long
run. You’ll be stronger, and since you’ll get more perfect reps in
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(remember, lighter weight), you’ll have a lower long-term chance of
injury and you won’t have to unlearn and relearn form (which can
be quite frustrating, and is a product of not taking the time to learn
it correctly the first time)
This stands in stark contrast to a few sets of 5, once a week that most
beginner programs recommend. I’d say you’re better off with 15
singles, 3-4 times per week at minimum until you can deadlift at
least 1.5x your bodyweight for all the singles with perfect form and
relative ease. The amount of reps your need decreases as you
increase in training age, but at first you need to grease the groove.
2. Commit to the pull
This is crucial no matter who you are or how long you’ve been
lifting. Deadlifts are hard freaking work. No two ways about it. On
top of that, you don’t actually get to feel the weight before you’re
expected to do something with it. You don’t walk it out like a squat,
or press it out of the pins like a bench press. It’s just sitting there
lifeless on the ground, taunting you. This is especially true for a
new 1rm attempt. You may have pulled that weight for a partial, but
you have no idea what it feels like when it breaks the ground.
As such, you can’t be a mental midget when you’re deadlifting. You
have to be 100% sure about your intention to destroy the lift, as well
as the lift’s parents, children, and extended family. Compared to the
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other lifts, not being able to get your head into deadlifting makes a
much larger difference. A 635 top squat (705 max) or a 405 top
bench (445 max) is a bad day for me; about 90% of my max. For
deadlift, there are days I’m simply unmotivated to deadlift and 545
looks up at me and says “lolz nope,” doesn’t budge, and that’s just
how it is.
For this, it helps to have a ritual. It could be Magnusson’s mini
charge, it could be Hatfield’s jump, or it could be as simple as “I’m
taking 3 breaths, and on the third, I’m pulling this sucker” (that’s
mine). Little things like that take your mind back to the place it was
when you’ve done the ritual before (hopefully that place is “ready
to destroy worlds”). Sometimes it doesn’t work, but it’s better than
just approaching the bar all willy-nilly each time. It also gets you in
the same starting position each time you pull to reinforce your
groove.
I’m a pretty chill guy, but if there’s a lift I’m going to yell, put on
loud music, and generally make a fool of myself for, it’s the
deadlift. Most people say a generally slow burning rage is the most
helpful. That’s the approach I like to take. Once the bar’s loaded,
I’ll stare at it like it’s prey that’s about to get it’s throat ripped
out. I’ll find a deep, dark place to go to (people who know me may
find that one hard to believe), put on either “Lose Yourself” by
Eminem or “Calm like a bomb” by Rage Against the Machine, take
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about 30 seconds to develop a brief but intense hatred for pretty
much all of existence, and then pull. Find something that works best
for you, but more than anything, whether you make yourself angry,
cocky, or zen, just be ready to pull.
3. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link
And by chain, I’m referring to the posterior chain, of course. When
I started, my back was fine, my glutes fired okay, but I had some
weak hamstrings. Hypers and leg curls every training day fixed that
in a hurry. I found this weakness out via a grade two hamstring
strain (sprinting) that bled enough for blood to pool all the way up
to mid-calf, so it took extra hamstring work to just get back to where
I was previously, much less build from there. Your weakness may
be different, but odds are it’s something on the back side of your
body (unless it’s grip). Just to point you in the right direction:
If your back rounds instantly (lumbar), it may just be your back is
weak, or it may be weak hips (making you need to start the lift with
your back instead of your hips)
If your lockout is weak because you can’t get your shoulders back,
your lats and traps are weak.
If your lockout is weak because you can’t get your hips through,
your glutes are weak
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If you miss around knee height, either your hamstrings are weak or
your hips are too far from the bar
If you just can’t break the weight off the ground, you are just too
weak in general
Muscular endurance
The biggest problem when people talk about muscular endurance is
that they don’t differentiate between absolute endurance and relative
endurance. What’s the difference?
Absolute endurance is how much work you can do in a specific task
with a specific load before fatiguing.
Relative endurance is how much work you can do in a specific task
with a load relative to your maximum loading capacity for that
task before fatiguing.
A concrete (and typical) example is the 225 bench for reps at the
NFL combine. Lets compare two theoretical people who do the
bench for reps test.
Person A has a max bench press of 500 pounds and does 30 reps
with 225.
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Person B has a max bench of 350 pounds and does 28 reps with 225.
In this example, Person A has better absolute endurance (30 beats
28), but Person B has better relative endurance (a similar number of
reps with 64% of his max versus 45% of Person A’s max).
In my opinion, the most important type of endurance is absolute
endurance. You want to be able to last longer and go harder than
your competition.
That may include improving your relative
endurance, but at the end of the day, the moment of reckoning is if
you can bash skulls longer than anyone else on the field, and that is
absolute endurance to a T.
How do you improve absolute endurance? My best advice is to get
stronger.
You know why “rep max” calculators work fairly
well? It’s because people stay within a fairly constant range of
relative endurance. My example above is probably inaccurate,
because in almost all cases a 150 bench increase will result in a
significant increase in absolute endurance across the board. When
you get stronger, EVERYTHING you do becomes easier because
anything you do will be less exertion relative to a theoretical
max. Stronger runners have a better “kick” at the end of a race, for
example, because to run the same speed as their competitors they’ve
been taxing their muscles less, per step (other factors play into this
as well, but strength is one of the bigger ones). For aging people
this is significant as well. If walking up the stairs or carrying
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groceries is difficult and leaves you breathing hard, the issue is not
cardiovascular endurance. The issue is strength. When your legs,
core, and upper back are weak, it simply takes more energy per step
to accomplish the necessary work. The fatigue you experience is
because your muscles are having difficulty accomplishing the task
and requiring more oxygen as a result, not because your ability to
take in and utilize oxygen is suspect (although cardiovascular fitness
if never a bad thing).
Take home: if you want to go longer, GET STRONGER!
p.s. You CAN also improve absolute endurance by improving
relative endurance by training for it (i.e. improved lactic acid
buffering and such). However, that 350 bencher will never bench
as many reps with 225 as the 500 bencher. The 350 bencher’s
capacity for improvement of absolute endurance without improving
his
1rm
further
is
also
MUCH
lower
than
the
500
bencher’s. Improving relative endurance is worthwhile in the short
term (if you have something like a combine coming up) but will lead
to diminishing returns much more quickly than just getting absurdly
strong to begin with.
Implementing paused squats
It was brought to my attention that although I’ve written about the
benefits of paused squats, several different types of paused squats,
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and commended paused squats to people in basically all the social
media networks I’m active on, I haven’t actually said anything about
HOW to implement paused squats.
Well, there are several
ways. Here’s a quick and dirty rundown:
1. Diagnostic tool.
Do you want to know what’s limiting your drive out of the bottom
of a squat? Put a light weight on the bar (135-225 works well for
most). Squat all the way down. Then bounce up and down between
full depth and your sticking point (just above parallel). Do so about
50
times.
What’s
the
first
thing
that
really
starts
burning/fatiguing? Congratulations, you’ve discovered what needs
work.
2. Building torso rigidity
Here’s where breathing paused squats shine. Instead of worrying
about weight or time, focus on your breathing. Squat all the way
down with (initially) very light weight. Tense your abs hard. Exhale
completely. Inhale completely. Repeat for 5-10 breaths. Move up
in
weight.
Again,
focus
on
inhaling
and
exhaling
COMPLETELY. As soon as the depth of your breath suffers, it’s
because you’re too weak to keep full thoracic extension without the
aid of intra-abdominal pressure (and consequently you can’t inhale
as deeply because the volume of your thoracic cavity is decreased),
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or your abdominal musculature (rectus abdominis, transverse
abdominus, obliques) isn’t strong enough to brace while you exhale
(if you find yourself unable to exhale fully). Drop back about 5%
from that point and do 2-3 sets of 5-10 breaths before you do your
heavy sets (fewer breaths and not as close to failure – using it more
as an activation drill), after your heavy sets (more breaths – make it
more challenging), or on an off day (scale the difficulty to whether
you’d doing it for extra work or active recovery). To progress,
increase breaths until you hit a goal number, then increase weight
slowly over time. Quality matters MUCH more than weight.
3. Horsepower out of the hole
I like using plain old paused squats as my primary squatting
movement for 4-8 weeks at a time (until I start to plateau). I’ll start
with a weight I can pause for a short amount of time (2-3 seconds),
and increase the time of the hold to 8-10 seconds in subsequent
workouts, then I’ll move up in weight. By increasing the duration
of the pause, you dissipate more of the stretch reflex, and fatigue
your muscle more prior to the concentric. On these, you’re NOT
exhaling since you ARE focusing on increasing in weight. For more
volume, you can do a regular squat or two (straight down and up)
after a long pause, since odds are if you can pause a rep, you can hit
it for a couple regular reps, even if you are a bit fatigued. I rarely
do more than one paused rep in a set because I don’t want rep quality
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to suffer.
If you use them as a supplemental exercise, I’d
recommend avoiding failure. Your hips will get PLENTY of time
under tension before you even have to think about missing a rep.
Getting stronger: the evolution
What’s the difference between a beginning or intermediate lifter,
and a more advanced lifter? This seems to be a question on the
minds of most people who’ve put in a little time under the bar. They
feel themselves straining with a 3-4 plate squat or a 4-5 plate
deadlift, but then watch someone the same size squat 700+ or pull
800+. It feels like, in spite of how far they’ve come, there’s an
insurmountable
gulf
separating
the
intermediate
and
the
advanced. Sure, to get stronger initially, they just had to eat more
and progressively put more weight on the bar; where do you go once
that stops working?
Well, this certainly won’t be an exhaustive list, but here are some of
the things that have changed about my training (both from the
perspective of nuts-and-bolts and my overall approach) to get me to
where I am today. Don’t interpret this to mean I think I’m one of
the best out there (or even anywhere close to it, for that matter), but
at this point I’ve opened up about a 100-200 pound gap per lift
between myself and most upper-end intermediate lifters, so
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hopefully these insights will prove useful for people who’ve hit a
wall with their current approach.
1. Increase the quantity AND the quality
Improving work capacity is of utmost importance for long-term
success. However, you can’t just indiscriminately add sets willynilly and expect results. If you want to improve your squat and your
form deteriorates past a certain point, or you fatigue to the point that
you have to drop your working weights substantially, increasing the
volume of that squat session gets your nowhere. You’re on the right
track (doing more work to build a better base), but you’d be better
served by doing more work on the areas that need it most. I’m NOT
referring to traditional weak point training (training a movement
from your weakest joint angles with boards, pins, etc.). I’m talking
about finding the specific muscles that are weak and doing more
work to make them strong.
As an example, my left glute doesn’t always fire properly, my hip
flexors are both tight and weak, and my VMOs are a joke. Instead
of just increasing squat volume, I’ve started doing tons of split
squats, pressing with a split stance or half kneeling, and glute
bridges (I don’t always log little things like that, in case you follow
my training posts). I’m improving the work capacity and strength
of those specific muscles (that are limiting factors for my squat),
which has a positive carryover to my squat performance, while also
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teaching my lagging muscles to better incorporate themselves in the
movement. Once they’re up to snuff, I can transfer that general
increase in work capacity to a specific increase in work capacity for
the squat via increased squatting volume until another problem
reveals itself, or instead focus on more general conditioning. Either
way, I’m constantly doing more work but not at the expense of
movement quality.
Just for another quick example, if you miss deadlifts at your knees,
you probably have weak hamstrings. Rather that hammer partial
deadlifts from knee height after you already tire yourself out pulling
from the floor, do some lighter, full-ROM RDLs or GMs to focus
specifically on the limiting factor in the movement.
You’re
increasing work capacity without sacrificing movement quality.
2. Keep your body feeling good
Don’t skip over this one. It seems self-explanatory, but it’s more
important than most realize. When I was weaker, I could train
excessively, beat my body up, stay achy and creaky, and still
consistently put more weight on the bar. Not so anymore. I still
believe that overtraining is just under-recovering, but the scope of
what counts as “recovery” changes. You’re not just looking for
recovery of your prime movers, but of generally how good your
body feels. If your quads feel fine but your knee or hip feels a little
wonky, then push squats back another day, and take some time
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troubleshooting the problem.
If your chest and triceps are
recovered, but a little ache in your shoulder tells you not to bench,
then push your bench day back.
In my experience, if my body generally feels good, I get stronger
just as easily as I did when I was just starting out. When I’m
constantly nursing multiple bumps and dings, I stagnate. Don’t
accept that being banged up all the time is a necessary part of getting
stronger. I have fewer aches and pains now than I did when I wasn’t
as strong. It takes some maturity to pull back and wait when you
need to, but it pays off. However, don’t use this as an excuse to be
lazy. Find a way to work hard. Always work hard. If you can’t get
a bar on your back, thrash yourself on a leg press or do some walking
lunges.
If you can’t press, then just spend a couple hours
rowing. Just make sure you’re not setting yourself back further by
pushing your body in a specific way that it doesn’t want to be
pushed.
As an adjunct to this: develop a basic knowledge of musculoskeletal
anatomy or make friends with a good PT. If something starts
becoming a recurring problem, identify the problem and fix it
immediately. Little problems with light weight can become big
problems with heavy weight very quickly.
3. Pick your battles and avoid failure
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This point is somewhat in conjunction with the last one. I still need
to improve this, but I’ve already improved vastly relative to where I
started. The key to getting stronger is still adding weight or doing
more reps with the same weight. However, you have to accept that
progress is no longer linear. Instead, you have to look for a generally
positive trend. If you haven’t PRed this week, that’s not a big
deal. If you haven’t PRed on anything this month, then maybe you
need to evaluate things. If you get frustrated and try to force every
day to be the best day ever in the gym, you’ll get nowhere. Do you
have a noticeable limiting factor for a movement (you can usually
figure this out based on where you miss)? Put in the work to
improve it, and the gains will come. Otherwise, do more work, eat
more, sleep more, and take care of the boring stuff. Travis is fond
of saying that champions become champions by first becoming
masters of the mundane. <– truer words have never been spoken.
I rarely do a true max anymore. When I was first starting out, I grew
like a weed on a Westside template. As I’ve progressed, however,
I’ve learned to rarely push past an RPE of 9. That extra 20 pounds
on the bar, or that extra rep or two will only add a day to your
recovery without providing any meaningful additional training
effect. Most experienced lifters know what I mean by this. You
were fighting for a rep PR on the squat, and when you tied your old
PR, you were pretty sure you could eek out one more. You go down
again, cut it a wee bit high, fight it for 8 seconds, and finally get
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it. The next day you feel awful, and you KNOW that if you cut the
set one rep short (and “only” tied your PR) you’d feel fine and be
able to train productively. Always leave a rep in the tank = words
to live by.
4. Redefine strong
I’ve written an entire post about this topic, so I won’t dwell on this
point. In short, however, if you aspire to greatness then make
greatness the standard by which you measure everything else
(including yourself in the present). Mentally, you’ll discover that
doing so gives you a lot more “growing room” that you didn’t realize
you had.
5. Chill out
Not every advanced lifter follows this approach, but my experience
has been that I improve most readily when I’m more relaxed in my
approach to training. I used to yell, slam bars, etc. No more. I’ll
carry on a conversation as I unrack a PR attempt squat, talk in a calm
voice in the middle of a set, and usually hum whatever song is
playing on the radio. Often I’ll do those things specifically TO chill
myself out when I find myself inadvertently getting amped at the
wrong time for the wrong thing. Arousal is for meets. You keep the
beast for when you need it, but you don’t unleash it for a freaking
training lift. With the inherent physiological stress of handling
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increasingly heavy weight, I see no reason to compound matters by
adding psychological stress as well. This approach also helps keep
you confident about your ability to PR (“I lifted THIS when I was
calm and barely even focusing, so I should be good for another 2030 pounds if I got intense, and another 40-50 pounds after a peak”).
6. Become humble and arrogant
Paradoxical, I realize. However, when you’re not under the bar, get
over yourself.
This goes hand in hand with redefining strong
(deliberately to NOT include yourself). You’ve come a long way,
but you still have a long way to go. In spite of more knowledge and
experience, you should become more coachable, more willing to
accept advice and criticism, and less enamoured of your own
abilities. Gaining strength tends to go hand in hand with gaining
knowledge, and the moment you think you know more than
everyone else and that your poop doesn’t stink, you should start
expecting reality to come and take a big dump on your doorstep in
the near future. When you’re starting out and you’re making really
fast newb gains, I can understand if you feel 10 feet tall and
bulletproof. Eventually you need to move past that, and when you
fail to do so for whatever reason (primarily insecurity) it’s both
pathetic and self-destructive.
On the other hand, as soon as you touch the bar, there should be no
doubts in your mind. “You’re the best lifter ever to draw breath, and
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time is the only thing separating you from immortalized
greatness. As long as you keep your form dialed in, you own the
weight on the bar.” Obviously you can’t let this attitude take control
when you’re loading weights, and drop it as soon as you rack the bar
or sit it back down. The moment you complete a set, you turn back
into mild-mannered Clark Kent. Along with this: never be afraid
of a weight. I like using partials or supermaximal holds to address
this problem, but whatever you do, don’t let a weight scare you. It’s
cold and lifeless, and you’re alive with conscious control. You have
the upper hand in the relationship. You may end up missing a
weight, but don’t let it be because you were afraid of it.
7. Learn as much as you can from as many sources as you can
Admission: when I was first starting out, I would read every training
article I could find, and ignore almost anything written by guys like
Alwyn Cosgrove and Mike Robertson. Big mistake. Sure, rehab
articles aren’t scintillating excitement, but it always helps to have
more tools in your toolbox in case of a rainy day. Same goes for
reading about every training methodology, including ones you
haven’t used, aren’t using, or doubt you’ll ever use. There’s a logic
to successful programs, and you can apply principles even if you
don’t jump into the entire program with both feet. Don’t disregard
someone’s information because they’re a “pencil-necked labcoat,”
or because they’re a strong but inarticulate “broscientist.” The nerd
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probably got something out of the scientific literature you can learn
from (even if he puts the kiddie gloves on for application), and the
meathead obviously knows SOMETHING to see the success he has,
even if his reasoning (and perhaps grammar) is horribly flawed.
New ideas don’t emerge from naught. They emerge by making
novel connections between old ideas.
Don’t limit yourself by
limiting the scope of your inquiry.
A Case Study in Programming Insanity
My friend Charlie is a masochist in the gym. I don’t think he would
mind me saying that. We met when we were both training in a little
hole-in-the-wall gym in the town where we both went to college. He
was on Martin Berkhan’s reverse pyramid training program at the
time, the main tenant of which is “add more weight to the bar
whenever possible.” Well, Charlie took this to heart, and I’d watch
him deadlift his warm ups and look like he was about to crap his
spine with 75% of that day’s working weight. Then, when he finally
got up to the working weight for the day, he’d grab the bar, hunch
his back like a scared cat, and pull 5 or 6 reps, each of which took
about 8 seconds to complete. After a short break, he’d strip about
20 pound off the bar and get 6 or 7 more reps. But, to Charlie, that
wasn’t crazy. That level of insanity is what you were supposed to
bring to every training session.
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Beneath this seemingly innocent face, this guy will work you into
the ground. Truth.
So, now that you know what type of lifter Charlie is, I can tell you
this little story.
He sent me a Facebook message asking if I could write him a squat
program. Although I always charge for programming, this guy’s my
best friend, so I wasn’t going to leave him hanging. If I’m being
honest, though, the friendship was only half the reason I did it Pro
Bono. The other half was his second request: “Give me your
worst.”
It’s very rare as a coach to have a request like that dropped into your
lap. It was too good to pass up. Plenty of people THINK they can
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take a lot of abuse, but I knew first hand that Charlie is the type of
guy who SEEKS and THRIVES on that type of abuse. Of course,
I’m not going to just give him a program that’s blatantly just seeking
a trip to the PT (i.e. “do a Sheiko program, but start each session
with a 1rm on each lift, and triple the volume.”), but I didn’t want to
give him something that would stretch him without making it
impossible to train his other lifts.
There was another wrinkle as well.
He trains with his wife
Chaney. She is NOT the same glutton for punishment he is. Not
only would I get to see how Charlie would respond, I’d also get to
see how Chaney (unaware of Charlie’s request that the program be
terrible) would respond.
It’s like a science experiment on the
reaches of human capacity without having to get your experiment
cleared by an ethics board. Me = as excited as a kid on Christmas.
So, here was the program:
Monday: Squat to a 10rm. This was the easy day, so it’s also when
deadlifting usually happened.
Wednesday: 90% of Monday’s 10rm 3×10.
Then drop 5%x10.
Drop 5% morex10 (so if you hit 200×10 on Monday, you’d hit 180
3×10, 170×10, 160×10 on Wednesday).
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Friday: Squat to a 5rm. Drop 10%x5. Drop 10% morex5
Looks hard, but not terrible, right? I mean, there ARE more difficult
programs out there. Except, there was one more stipulation: they
had to move up in weight each week. Sort of like Smolov, but it’s
been going for 8 weeks straight (with no end yet in sight) rather than
just 4.
The result: they’ve been PRing for 2 months straight now, and are
now hitting their old 1rms for sets of 5. They’ve both put over an
inch on their thighs. Chaney didn’t even find out until this weekend
that the program was even SUPPOSED to be hard.
Lessons learned:
1. You can probably train a LOT harder without overtraining. I also
know Charlie is meticulous about his nutrition and sleep, but if you
have your recovery ducks in a row, you can recover from, and adapt
to, a TON of work.
2.
You don’t have to live in the gym to do a program like
this. Charlie works a 40 hour a week job on his feet, and Chaney
was finishing up a vocational program where she was on her feet all
the time. This didn’t affect them negatively. You don’t have to
revolve your life around training to train like this.
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3. Mindset is everything. When Charlie tells me to write him
something terrible, it doesn’t intimidate him.
He sees it as a
challenge. Chaney, on the other hand, didn’t know that it was
SUPPOSED to be that difficult, and just aloofly dominated for 2
months straight. If you go into a program thinking it may be too
much, it can own you and crush you. If you think you can master it,
you probably can.
4. Next time someone tells me to write a hard program, I’ll know I
can write something much harder. Because, apparently, this was a
cake walk.
(Update on this: I’ve had about 2 dozen people try this program and
report back to me – to this point literally everyone has gotten
stronger. The average increment of improvement is a 5 rep max
becoming a 10 rep max in about 10 weeks)
Be Honest with Yourself. Training for Health vs. Performance
Here’s a potentially touchy question: Does your training make you
a healthier person? Do I get a resounding roar of “Yes,” or do I hear
crickets? How many bold souls will admit that honestly, no, their
training is not contributing to their health, but may in fact be
damaging it?
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I’ll be the first to admit it. My training does not, in any way,
maximize health. I think this is a point more of us need to be honest
with ourselves about before we can help other people.
Here’s what I mean.
Lets just take some general qualities of
performance and body composition: strength, size, body fat %,
flexibility, and endurance. Just throwing out some hypothetical
numbers, a person (man, for this example) training to optimize
health should reasonably be expected possess these general
abilities/qualities:
Squat 315
Bench 220
Deadlift 365
Weigh 170-180ish (for a normal sized guy) at 10-15% bodyfat
Perform adequately for most measures of flexbility/mobility (be
able to hinge forward and touch the floor, be able to touch their
hands behind the back with one arm over the shoulder and one arm
coming from beneath, etc.)
Run a 5k in 24:00
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Now, I’m sure we could quibble that some of those numbers are a
little too high or too low, but I think most of us can agree that the
person I just described is probably quite healthy.
Let us now assume that this person decides to take up competitive
powerlifting or competitive marathon running. Do you honestly
think they become more healthy by pushing their strength or
endurance to crazy levels at the expense of everything else? What
if he decided to become a contortionist and did everything possible
to drop muscle mass to be able to attain insane levels of
mobility? What if he wanted to diet down to 4% body fat for a
physique
show,
or
get
as
huge
as
possible
for
bodybuilding? Although all of these things are associated with
positive health outcomes (strength, muscle mass, cardiovascular
endurance, reasonably low body fat, and mobility), pursuing any of
them to the elite level does not intrinsically further your health, and
it could even be harmful to you depending on your goals, methods,
and potential exclusion of training for other physical characteristics
and abilities.
I know that, in my training, I’m not doing anything to improve my
health by working to improve a 700+ squat. To think otherwise is
asinine. I do my best to keep a decent body composition and
maintain decent levels of flexibility and conditioning, but I am
definitely increasing joint wear and tear which is especially
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hazardous for cartilage which has poor blood supply and does not
repair very well.
Of course, joint wear and tear is also a result of excessive
running. Cardiovascular disease can result from getting too big
(regardless of whether it’s muscle or fat, you still have miles of extra
blood vessels your heart has to pump to), dieting down to extreme
leanness can cause endocrine disruptions, and (the elephant in the
room), the level of training necessary to become truly elite in
ANYTHING typically carries with it an intrinsic social cost,
whether it be in lost time you could have spend socializing, or
stigmas associated with your lifestyle or appearance.
Sure, training solely for performance in a given discipline is more
healthy than sitting on the couch eating junk and doing nothing, but
is that REALLY a comparison that verifies the healthiness of your
pursuit?
I think it’s important to differentiate between training for health and
training for performance. I am, obviously, not against training for
extreme levels of performance by any means. Nor do I think that
training for performance in a given discipline must me unhealthy,
just that it can be.
Consider your goals. If your main reason for training is so you can
look good, feel good, and live a healthy life, then ignore all the noise
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out there telling you that you should get down to 4% body fat, run a
marathon, lift ungodly amounts of weight, etc. Your training is not
somehow less important or less productive because you’re not
training to break records. Your goals are your goals, and your
training is perfect if it serves those goals. If a trainer tries to mold
your goals to conform with his or her area of interest, give them the
boot and find someone who prioritizes your goals over their own.
Hopefully, if nothing else, this will serve as a reminder to be
cognizant of your goals (or your clients’ goals) and to not fool
yourself with false reasons for why you do what you do. If you’re
training to be healthy you’re training to be healthy.
If you’re
training to be a freak, you’re training to be a freak. I think both a
perfectly good reasons for training, and you shouldn’t need to fool
yourself about your reasons.
Gaining ground: a simple method to ensure long-term progress
The most successful method of long-term strength gains I’ve come
across: gaining ground. Here’s how it works: You get a plate &
quarter weight that you absolutely own (i.e. 95, 135, 185, 225, 275,
etc.). That’s your weight. It’s not your PR. It’s a weight you can
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hit every time you enter the gym, regardless of circumstances. As
you get stronger, you claim the next increment. Then the next. Then
the next. It’s sort of like a psychological placeholder that makes the
weight seem like they’re never getting any heavier. Your PR is
never more than 90 pounds away from “your” weight. For example,
last spring, I owned a 455 squat. My max was just north of 500, but
I knew on my worst day I could smoke 455, and I did so a minimum
of 3 times per week. You get VERY used to seeing that weight on
the bar. When I went for my first 545, it wasn’t intimidating because
it was only a plate per side away from a weight I’d done (literally)
100+ times. Plates aren’t that heavy. If I could so thoroughly
dominate 455, there was no reason I shouldn’t be able to dig out a
single at 545. When I claimed 495, PRing at 585 wasn’t a big
deal. My placeholder had moved. Now 495 was my easy weight,
which made 585 much more doable. The placeholder is physical as
much as it is psychological. Eventually 365 felt like 315 did. Then
405 feels like 365 did. PRs are never more than 90 extra pounds on
your back/in your hands.
Scary weight become boring, and unthinkable weight become
targets as you gain more ground.
There’s nothing better than
walking out a PR attempt and knowing you’re going to smoke it as
soon as you feel the weight on your back. It’s also a buffer against
bad days. You own a specific weight. So what if you don’t want to
go heavier that particular day? At least that weight is still yours. As
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long as you are consistent, progress becomes nearly unavoidable
over time. I think it’s a concept that fits into the general paradigm of
hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal-axis-governed
set
points
as
well. You establish a new set point as your base when your body’s
systems adapt to it as the new “normal.” Then you improve again.
My bench program
Since several people expressed interest, here’s the bench program I
used for the past few weeks to hit my 20 pound PR:
Week 1
Day 1 – 75% 4×3 (four sets of 3 reps)
Day 2 – 80% 3×2
Day 3 – 70% 4×4
Day 4 – 85% 3×1
Day 5 – 65% 5×5
Week 2
Add one set to each day
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Week 3
Add one rep to each set (using either week one’s number of sets or
week two’s. I used a mix and it worked fine)
Max reps or max weight on Day 4 of week 3.
Week 4
Do some pressing other than bench. Have fun.
Week 5
Week one with a new training max
I used my bench press max to figure my percentages, but did the
reps closegrip. The closegrips worked fantastically. My triceps felt
a lot stronger through my sticking point when I maxed on bench
press.
(Update – I’ve done this program two times since – it’s resulted in a
10-20 pound PR every time. Splitting it into 5 sessions helps a lot –
vs. 2-3x per week high volume programs - because no individual
session is too high in volume, so they’re really unintimidating on
paper)
Nutrition:
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The Three Laws of Protein
The purpose of this article is straightforward and simple – help you
reach your fitness or physique goals with three simple, sciencebacked tips for getting the most from your dietary protein. Protein
consumption is such a popular subject that the basics can be lost in
all the noise (and supplement company hype), so the goal here is to
simplify and get to what’s actually important.
1. Eat enough protein
How much? .82g/lb (1.8g/kg). Rounding up to 1g/lb or 2g/kg may
be easier to remember, and getting a little more certainly doesn’t
hurt, but the point here is that the crazy recommendations of 2g per
pound (or even more) are overkill. As you eat more past that point,
rates of protein synthesis and breakdown both increase at essentially
the same rate – so again, there’s no problem with erring on the high
side, but unless you’re on steroids to further elevate protein
synthesis (to make use of extra protein), you hit a point of
diminishing returns.
On the flip side, if you’re not getting in this amount regularly, you
WILL probably benefit from increasing intake. For some people,
.82g/lb may seem like a ludicrously high number. However, if
you’re currently under that level of intake, you will accrue benefits
as you eat more protein.
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As an aside, increasing protein intake above .82g/lb may have
benefits if you’re trying to lose weight. Protein is more satiating per
gram than either carbohydrate or fat, and in a caloric deficit, erring
on the high side to ensure you hold onto as much muscle as possible
is wise anyways.
2. Space your protein intake throughout the day
A recent study showed that, on average, 24 hour protein synthesis
rates are about 25% higher if you space your protein intake out
throughout the day, rather than eating the majority of it in one meal.
Obviously there are implications for intermittent fasting (personal
opinion – it can be a useful tool for cutting, but for gaining size, it’s
hard to beat eating food all day. Shocking thought), but also for
extreme post-workout nutrition protocols.
In a recent meta-analysis, Alan Aragon, Brad Schoenfeld, and James
Krieger showed that post-workout nutrition only “worked” insofar
as it increased overall protein intake for the day. Essentially, getting
enough protein in your diet is the important factor, not bombing
huge amounts of protein around your training session.
Maybe there was some wisdom in your parents’ insistence that you
eat 3 square meals a day after all (provided they all have a fair
amount of protein).
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3. Get your protein from high-quality sources
This issue is definitely not as important as the first two, but it’s still
worth mentioning.
Whey, in particular, seems to be particularly good at stimulating
muscle protein synthesis, leading to hypertrophy. It’s been shown
to be superior to both soy and casein for this purpose (and not just
acutely, but in training studies showing increased lean mass gains
from lifting).
Although all possible protein sources haven’t been compared at this
point, obviously, as a general rule of thumb animal sources are better
than plant sources for stimulating protein synthesis. When in doubt,
though there are a ton of options on the market, it’s hard to beat a
plain old whey isolate when you need some more protein and don’t
have time to make some meat.
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Pictured: gains
The takeaway:
Get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1g/lb or 2g/kg of protein per
day, space your intake out rather than concentrating it all in one
period, and prioritize protein sources like whey, meat, and eggs. It
sounds so simple, but it’s amazing how often people get sucked in
by some exciting new study or fad and forget the basics
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Want to learn more?
Check out Examine.com’s series on Schwarzenegger.com. They go
into a lot more detail than I do. This article is simply meant as a
helpful reminder to some, and a basic primer for others. It’s the type
of thing that should be shared around for people who are confused
or new to working out – the Schwarzenegger series is for people
who want to go into a little more depth
Also, if you’re scared that protein = death because of the recent
sensationalized study, I suggest you check out Examine’s in-depth
analysis of the study.
Carbs at night make you lean! So does a big breakfast?
Calories in vs. calories out “works,” but it’s very hard to apply.
People assume that “calories out” is static, or really only affected by
exercise. So, if you manipulate “calories in” via diet, weight loss
should be easy and predictable. However, this doesn’t always work
because “calories out” isn’t as static as we’d like to believe.
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The macronutrient breakdown (carbs, fats, proteins) of your diet, as
well as the timing of those nutrients, has a notable influence on how
well you lose weight at a given calorie intake.
To start with, there is the obvious example of the Thermic Effect of
Food (TEF) – the amount of energy necessary to digest and process
the macronutrients you eat.
For protein, it’s 20-25%.
For
carbohydrate, it’s about 10%. For fat, it’s 2-3%. What this means
is that if you eat 2000 extra calories from protein, you’re only
actually going to end up with 1500-1600 extra calories because of
the metabolic cost to digest, absorb, and dispose of protein. If, on
the other hand, you ate 2000 extra calories from fat, you’d end up
with about 1950 extra calories after digestion, absorption, and
disposal. That’s roughly an extra 400 calories or so that aren’t
accounted for simply by counting the calories of foods you eat.
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TEF – definitely not a negligible part of your daily energy
expenditure.
Then, there’s the example of hormonal differences. As discussed in
a previous post (here), reducing carbohydrate intake below 120g per
day decreases T3 (a thyroid hormone) levels in the body. T3 is an
important regulator of metabolic rate. More T3 means a faster
metabolism. So, eating 2000 calories including fewer than 120g of
carbohydrate should result in fewer calories burned at rest than
eating the same number of calories but swapping out some protein
or fat to reach at least 120g of carbohydrate. When you’re planning
a diet, you rarely account for swings in basal metabolism like
that. (here’s the study referenced.)
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Finally, there’s the matter of energy storage. Your body can only
store a certain amount of carbohydrate as glycogen. Past that point,
it needs to store it as fat. So how efficiently can your body do
that? Well, using this study as a reference, it’s only about 70%
efficient. In this study, limited in size though it was, men were fed
basically a crapton of carbohydrate – starting at 783g and building
to 1059g per day. They ended up storing about 150g of fat (1350
calories) per day that they had converted from about 475g of
carbohydrate (1900 calories). It’s no small deal when 550 calories
per day just go “missing.” Other studies have corroborated this
same basic idea in healthy, weight-training people – if you’re on a
short-term all-out bulk, it may be a good idea to go REALLY high
carb and low fat to gain lots of muscle quickly while minimizing fat
gain.
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Somehow you manage to lose a little bit of energy in the process. A
process with 17+ steps isn’t 100% efficient? I’m shocked.
So, all I’m getting at here is that even though “calories in vs. calories
out” may be technically correct, all the contributing factors make the
equation much thornier than most would assume to the point that, at
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the very least, being super anal about calories shouldn’t be your
number one concern.
Which leads us to to the exciting part: people losing more fat and
being more satiated with the SAME caloric intake because of
nutrient timing. Also the confusing part: the beneficial effects were
seen on almost opposite protocols!
1) Eat your carbs at night to get lean
This notion goes against the old-school conventional wisdom, but it
has been popularized by the intermittent fasting crowd and the carb
backloading crowd. Regardless of what you think about Martin
Berkhan and John Keifer, the progenitors of these two eating trends,
it’s neat to see a study (somewhat) verifying the efficacy of their
methods.
The study was done on Israeli police officers, all of whom were
obese at the start of the study. They all ate the same number of
calories, but some ate the bulk of their carbs during the day, and
some ate them at night. The result: the group that ate them at night
lost 28% more fat, had increased satiety relative to baseline (even
though they were on a calorie restricted diet!), had improved insulin
sensitivity, saw a 44% increase in adiponectin, and had decreased
inflammation – essentially outperforming in every single parameter
the group that ate their carbs early in the day.
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You must eat all of this at dinner if you ever want a 6 pack. I’m sorry.
I realize life can be really difficult sometimes.
But before you head out to buy a quart of ice cream to polish off
after dinner…
2) Eat the bulk of your calories at breakfast for more weight loss
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Ahh, verification of orthodoxy. In this study, obese women were
fed 1400 calories a day. This included a 700 calorie breakfast, 500
calorie lunch, and 200 calorie dinner, or a 200 calorie breakfast, 500
calorie lunch, and 700 calorie dinner. The group eating half their
daily calories at breakfast lost more weight and inches off their
waist, saw larger decreases in fasting blood glucose and insulin,
decreased triglyceride levels 33% (compared to a 15% increase in
the group with a large supper), and experienced less hunger and
greater satiety relative to the large supper group.
Actually, you have to eat THIS at breakfast for striated glutes.
Really, you may as well combine the protocols. Synergy, right?
So, what sort of takeaway can we see here?
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Well, for starters, don’t trust your body composition solely to
Newton.
Second, some of the discrepancy may be explained by gender
differences. Though not specified, more men than women tend to
be police officers. The second study, on the other hand, was done
exclusively on women.
Lastly, both studies were done on obese subjects. Whether these
results will have any relevance to lean, active people is questionable.
Most importantly, I think what you should take away from this is
that, if you aren’t satisfied with the results of your diet, don’t be
afraid to play around with it. The solution to weight loss plateaus
doesn’t always have to be simply dropping calories lower. Play
around with when you eat your carbs, moving the bulk of your
calories to one meal, trying carb/protein and fat/protein meals
instead of mixed meals (or vice versa), moving more calories around
your workout, running a higher surplus on training days and a larger
deficit on rest days, etc.
Don’t be afraid to troubleshoot and experiment. There are a lot of
factors in play when it comes to building an ideal diet for YOU as
an individual, not just the boring old orthodoxy of calories in vs.
calories out.
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Healthy pumpkin apple cheesecake recipe
3 eggs
4 packages of greek yogurt cream cheese
1 32oz. can of pumpkin
6 small apples (4 medium or 3 large would do the trick too)
1/4 cup of brown sugar
cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, and allspice
Directions:
Mix it all together. Soften the cream cheese or toss it in a blender
with some of the other ingredients. Toss the apples in a blender to
turn them into applesauce. Don’t throw away the apple skins,
because if you do so, the communists win.
Bake at 350 degrees for 75-90 minutes. Remove from the oven and
put it in the refrigerator for 3 hours if you’re a loser who doesn’t
want to indulge in hot gooey cheesecake.
Macros:
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115g fat
337g carbs
146g protein
52g fiber
2967 total calories. Just want to point out that it’s pretty much spoton macros and calories for an entire day of eating for a 200ish pound
active guy. Just saying…
It looks like this, but obviously mine is much better.
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Science-backed training tips
Increasing work capacity
I had another awesome question come in, and one that’s rarely
addressed:
“What would you say is a good approach on increasing work
capacity? Slowly adding more sets over time?”
First, let me just start off with a working definition of work capacity,
and an explanation of why it’s so important. Work capacity is,
essentially, the total amount of work you can perform and recover
from.
The total volume of work you expose your body to essentially
determines the magnitude of the training effect you receive from the
work. We all intuitively know this. You don’t walk into the gym,
warm up, do one easy set of 10 biceps curls, and expect to find
yourself ripping the sleeves of T-shirts any time soon. You have to
expose your muscles to more of a training stimulus.
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How do you progress then, to attain your 18 inch pythons of glory
(I’m already regretting the example I picked, but I’m to stubborn to
go back. Curl bros, savor this moment)? Well, obviously, you do
more work. You pick a more challenging weight, increase you sets
do more exercises, decrease you rest intervals, etc. It’s not rocket
science, and we all know that eventually, if you want your arms to
grow, you’ll have to do more work.
However, this concept seems foreign to most people when you apply
it to anything besides arm hypertrophy. The fitness world has
become so entranced by minimalism that we’ve forgotten that
eventually you just have to do more work. People are surprised
when they do the same program with the same sets and reps and the
same accessory work for several months, and they eventually
plateau. Then they ask about it on a message board and get a
response like, “oh, you’re doing too much so you can’t recover. Dial
back what you’re doing and you’ll keep getting stronger.”
So, lo and behold, they dial back their training volume and the gains
start coming again. Only they last for a mere 4-8 weeks. Then they
plateau even harder. Why? They weren’t getting stronger. They
were peaking. Their body was used to a certain level of work. When
they reduced the amount of work, supercompensation happened, and
they could put more weight on the bar.
However, that’s not
something that happens indefinitely. But, the fact is, it “worked” for
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a while, so this person ends up banging their head against a wall on
a super low volume routine wondering why they’re not getting any
stronger, not questioning the efficacy of their new routine because
it worked initially.
Eventually, after months of wasted time, they decide to change
things up. They start increasing their training volume, only to find
that it beats them up, their lifts start regressing, and they start losing
motivation to go to the gym. So clearly low volume was the way to
go, they’ve just hit their genetic ceiling and are in for a lifetime of
hard-fought, incremental gains. Then they weep and drown their
sorrows in cheesecake.
Let’s dissect this little (perhaps all-too-familiar) vignette:
1) The guy originally plateaued because he wasn’t increasing the
stimulus to his muscles and nervous system. Remember the SAID
principle (specific adaptations to imposed demands)? The demands
didn’t change significantly, and eventually the guy’s body had
adapted all it intended to. Sure, as he initially got stronger, the
slightly heavier weights were a slightly greater stimulus, but his
body finally reached the point that training was no longer disrupting
homeostasis enough to elicit a response.
2)
He dials back the volume and gets stronger!
It’s a
miracle! Or…it’s what happens when your body is used to adapting
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to a certain level of stress, then you dial back the stress and you body
is still used to the same magnitude of response. It would help to
look at training in the (overly simplified, but still instructive) light
of simply tearing a muscle down and building it back up. Lets say
you’re muscle mass is currently 100%, and your training breaks it
down 20%, and since you’re plateauing, you build it back up 20%
between sessions: 100 – 20 + 20 = 100. Then you dial back how
much your tearing your muscles down, but your body is used to
recovering 20% between sessions: 100 – 17 + 20 = 103 – 17 + 20 =
106. However, the fun doesn’t last forever. Your body catches on
to the game, and your recovery again aligns itself with the training
stress: 106 – 17 + 17 = 106. Viola, another plateau.
3) When he tries to add back in more volume, his body is used to
recovering from less per session. However, he’s still trying to train
at maximum intensity: 106 – 20 + 17 = 103. He perceives himself
as getting weaker, gives up on the whole enterprise, and cries manly
tears.
Work capacity, in essence, increases the amount your body is used
to recovering from. As it increases, you can increase your total
training load, therefore the stimulus to your muscles and nervous
system, therefore your results. There’s a catch, however. As you’re
increasing your work capacity, you shouldn’t expect to be a peak
performance (and certainly not PRing). PRs come when you’re
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recovery outpaces stress.
The whole point of increasing work
capacity is for stress to slightly outpace recovery until recovery
catches up to the stress. Once you’ve increased your work capacity
and allow recovery to catch up, you’re in a position where you’re
able to tolerate much more volume, which means a greater stimulus,
which means an increased potential for gains. Also, it gives you
more ability to taper and hit PRs at meets. You know those guys
who always hit their biggest lifts in training, but fail hard at
meets? Typically, they’re the ones who never trained with high
enough volume to get any significant supercompensation when they
tapered.
Basically, increasing your work capacity over time is THE ONLY
way to continually make gains. You can only say you’ve reached
your genetic ceiling when you no longer have the ability to increase
your work capacity.
So, that finally brings us back to the question: How does one
actually go about increasing their work capacity? For a full, indepth answer, I’d recommend you read Supertraining, some
Zatsiorsky, some Verkhoshansky, or some Issurin. This answer is
more based on implementation and strategies that have proven
themselves effective over time.
There are several different ways. The one in the original question
really isn’t a bad way to do it. Adding sets DOES increase work
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capacity. Let’s say you can do 3 sets of 3 with 315 on squat. What’s
easier? Trying to go 325 3×3 (assuming you’ve exhausted your
linear gains), or doing another single with 315 at the end? The
single, obviously. Then a double the next session, then a triple the
one after that. Once you could do 6-8 triples, you could drop back
to 3 sets, and probably go 335 3×3 and do it all over again. That’s
a 20 pound increase in about 2 months. Not too shabby. The key is
that adding one rep per session isn’t all that taxing on your body
over your established baseline. Then when you drop back to just 3
sets, it’s less volume than you’ve grown accustomed to, setting you
up nicely for the subsequent re-ramping of the volume.
Another version of that same idea is the Doug Hepburn
method. He’d pick a weight he could do 8 singles with, and slowly
add an extra rep to each set until he was doing 8 doubles, at which
point he’d increase the weight and start over with singles again.
A more sophisticated way is the way Sheiko waves volume week to
week, but always increases volume over time. A program for a
ranked lifter (i.e. a novice) usually starts with a week that’s the exact
“right” volume, based on where the trainee’s at. The second week
has significantly more volume (overreaching), the third week dials
back the volume a bit but raises the intensity, and the fourth week
drops
the
volume
supercompensation.
and
intensity,
allowing
for
This same pattern basically holds true for
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months as well (the second month has crazy volume, the third is
similar volume to the first but with higher intensity, and the fourth
is a taper). Then, when you’d start over, you’d dive back in with
slightly
higher
volume
to
continue
to
drive
adaptation. Unfortunately, not all of Boris Sheiko’s writings have
been translated into English, but you can see the progression from
ranked lifter routines to CMS/MS routines, to MSIC routines. The
volume increases incrementally as the lifter gets stronger until
you’re on a MSIC routine that makes you want to cry just reading
it.
Another way is to increase training density. Although this doesn’t
increase your work capacity in the strictest of terms (total volume
you can handle), it does increase your work capacity PER UNIT
TIME, allowing you to supercompensate when you spread you sets
back out.
Let’s say you’re doing 5×5 with 315, and you’ve
plateaued.
You currently rest 5 minutes between sets.
Next
workout, just knock 15 seconds off your rest periods. Continue to
do so each workout until you’re only resting 2 minutes between
sets. You could probably then jump to 335 5×5 with 5 minutes
between sets again. This method has the drawback of not increasing
your total training volume which can make peaking for meets a little
trickier, but it’s ideal for someone who doesn’t have room in their
schedule to increase their weekly gym time.
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Another way to increase work capacity is to add extra
workouts. This method was popularized by Westside, and can be
easily implemented (although what I’m about to say isn’t how they
do it). Let’s say you squat 315 5×5 twice per week, and you’ve
plateaued. Try adding in a third squat day. Start with 225 5×5. Just
the simple act of practicing the motor patter more often MAY get
your maxes moving again. However, 225 5×5 shouldn’t be enough
to mess with your recovery. If anything, it would enhance recovery
by promoting blood flow without inducing any more muscle
damage. Add weight on your third squat day until it becomes
difficult to get 315 5×5 on both of your main workouts (maybe 275295 5×5). Then drop the third workout. You should be able to
increase the working weight on your main training days. Then,
slowly build back up the weight on your third squat day again,
initially starting very light.
Finally, just something to keep in mind: over time, your total
training volume MUST increase. Most of these suggestions I’ve
written about tell you ways to effectively wave volume and benefit
from a short-term reduction in volume once you’ve acclimated to
SLIGHTLY more volume.
As you progress, BOTH the peak
volume you’re handling, and the reduced level of volume need to
increase. So if you’re working from 3×3 to 6×3 now, eventually
you’ll need to only drop back to 4×3 and increase to 7×3, then from
5×3 to 8×3, etc. If you’re adding a third workout to two 5×5 days,
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those days will need to eventually become 6×5 days, or 10×3 days,
or some other loading pattern that adds up to more overall
volume. The reason I gave examples of waving volume was that
waving helps make the overall increase in volume over time easier
to manage. If you’re plateaued doing 5×5, you can’t just start doing
8×5 and make progress forever (or at all). The way to add volume
is to make the peak volume of a wave higher, and the reduced
volume slightly more. That way you’re never overreaching too far,
you’re still giving yourself a break for supercompensation, and
you’re gradually increasing the total magnitude of stimuli your body
can handle, and therefore your potential for growth.
A longer answer than I anticipated, but a very good question that’s
not asked nearly enough, so I wanted to give it a thorough
answer. Increasing work capacity really is the “secret” if ever there
was one. The best lifters, over time, have simply developed the
ability to do more work than anyone else, so they get better results
than anyone else. Look at the Eastern Bloc PLers, successful nations
in weightlifting, pro strongmen, and practically any other group of
incredibly strong people for plentiful examples with surprisingly
few exceptions.
Being strong is not an excuse to be fat (and being fat is probably
holding you back)
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There are many things I know now that I wish I could go back and
tell teenage Greg such as “if you had a book to read along on during
loading screens in Madden 2005, you would practically be a literary
scholar at this point,” “if she says she doesn’t like beards, she’s no
good for you,” and “wearing a fedora is never acceptable.”
Also on this list – “Getting strong is no excuse for gaining a lot of
fat.”
Astoundingly, this flies in the face of a lot of nutrition advice
swirling around in the strength world, particularly as it applies to
brand new trainees. The astounding features are twofold. Firstly,
it’s astounding that anyone would think that a substantial degree of
fat gain is a good idea for any goal where sheer weight isn’t a
primary benefit (i.e. anyone other than offensive lineman and sumo
wrestlers). Secondly, it’s astounding that numerous people who
hear this obviously bad advice, regardless of the source, still take it
and run with it.
Unfortunately, while “substantial fat gain during periods of intense
strength training should be expected and even encouraged” seems
like ludicrous enough advice to dismiss out of hand, an alarming
number of people believe it. Therefore, it’s necessary to explain
exactly WHY it’s bad advice.
The explanation hinges on insulin sensitivity.
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Many of you probably know what insulin is and what it does. For
people who need a brief primer, insulin is the body’s primary
anabolic hormone. It halts almost all forms of catabolism (tissue
breakdown, including stored carbohydrate and muscle protein),
signals for glucose uptake into your body’s cells, aids in amino acid
uptake and amplifies protein synthesis, and much more. Basically,
it’s the main hormonal driver for adding mass, whether that be
muscle or fat.
Insulin sensitivity describes how well your tissues respond to
insulin. When a tissue is insulin sensitive, a little insulin goes a long
way. When it’s insensitive, more insulin is necessary to have the
same effect that was once accomplished with less insulin.
Now, I’m not going to deal with how insulin insensitivity and
hyperinsulinemia are primary risk factors for a host of chronic
diseases. I’m not an MD. That sort of stuff interests me, but it’s not
my area of expertise, and it’s not why you read my blog.
I’m talking about performance and training goals – gaining muscle,
getting stronger, and crushing your competition.
So, the problem with gaining fat while training for mass and strength
is this: gaining fat specifically reduces insulin sensitivity in skeletal
muscle.
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As you accumulate fat, blood levels of free fatty acids (FFAs)
increase. Elevated blood levels of FFAs decrease insulin sensitivity
in the muscles two different ways. Firstly, they directly decrease
insulin sensitivity, and secondly, they contribute to increased muscle
triglyceride levels, which also decrease insulin sensitivity.
However, it doesn’t stop there. As fat mass increases, the release of
adipokines (hormones from fat tissue) also increases. Of these,
some (like TNF-a) decrease insulin sensitivity and others (like
leptin) increase insulin sensitivity. However, over time, your tissues
lose sensitivity to leptin if levels are chronically elevated, so the net
effect of these adipokines is also decreased insulin sensitivity (and
the loss of the effectiveness of leptin – your body’s most powerful
hormone for countering weight gain).
Also
with
increased
fat
mass
comes
increased
inflammation. Inflammation decreases insulin sensitivity in muscle,
AND increases expression of genes that aid in fat storage and
creation of new fat cells.
I hope the picture is becoming clear by now.
The more fat you gain, the LESS anabolic insulin is for muscle, and
the easier it is to increase fat storage. It’s a positive feedback loop
where the more you eat over baseline, and the more fat you gain, the
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less it benefits strength and hypertrophy and the more it simply
increases the proportion of extra calories that go to fat storage.
Jesse Norris is one of the best PLers in the world today. However,
staying lean is obviously killing his gains. Imagine how strong he’d
be if he gained 50 pounds of fat.
Implications
Learn how to count calories.
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Seriously. Gaining mass uses the same basic principles as shedding
fat, except in reverse. Keep track of weight and waist circumference
(a good indicator of visceral fat, which is much more a culprit in this
process than subcutaneous fat). If you’re fairly lean to start with,
eat at a little above baseline with the goal of gaining a pound
every 2-3 weeks, and don’t let your waist circumference increase
by more than 1/4 inch every couple of weeks. If the numbers are
increasing too fast, bump calories down. If they’re stuck in place,
bump calories up.
You’ll still probably gain some fat. I mean, you ARE in a surplus,
and it’s much easier for your body to store extra energy in
triglycerides (relatively cheap metabolic currency) rather than
muscle protein (expensive metabolic currency). However, at the
sane rate of weight gain I proposed, fat gain shouldn’t be extreme as
long as you’re training hard. Minimizing fat gain means that your
muscles will stay more sensitive to anabolic signalling than they do
on more extreme bulking plans.
So, in essence, I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to gain a ton of
muscle with absolutely NO fat gain, but the notion of “Let’s gain 60
pounds this offseason with 5000 calories per day + GOMAD
because GAINZZZ!” is even more misguided
Also, for sports where weight matters, this approach should be
common sense. For weight-class governed sports like powerlifting,
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weightlifting, or wrestling it’s a no brainer: the more muscle you
can have with the least amount of fat possible, the greater your
potential. However, the same principle applies to almost every sport
in existence because the more force you can generate per pound of
weight, the faster and more explosive you’ll be. Additionally, the
less non-functional fat mass you have, the longer you’ll be able to
perform at a high level in any sport with an aerobic component since
you won’t be lugging around as much mass.
Short term and long term
Short term, you MAY see better results with a huge surplus. Sure,
I’ll grant that. However, it’s absolutely a case where there are
diminishing returns past a certain point. So if you are seeing better
results initially, they’ll be marginally better, NOT exponentially
better. And yes, exercise will mitigate the decreases in insulin
sensitivity, but that’s still not the same as no decrease at all. You
may have to pay the piper later, but that day will still come
eventually.
In the long run, gaining a bunch of fat is going to decrease the
effectiveness of your training for muscle and strength gains as
muscle insulin sensitivity decreases. Additionally, if you need to
cut for 16 weeks after your aggressive bulk, you’ve essentially
shortened the period of time that you could have been making
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progress by 2-3 months (assuming you’d need to cut for 4-8 weeks
if you’d managed your weight gain better).
Clarifications
By no means am I saying you can never gain any fat whatsoever, or
that you have to be 6% bodyfat year round for your training to be
effective. Nor am I saying that you plunge off the deep end and
instantly wind up obese and diabetic with moderate fat
gain. However, as I see it, there’s really no reason to ever be over
20% body fat for men, or 30% for women (although 15% and 25%
are better targets for most people).
You’re not going to get
massively better results with a 1000 calorie/day surplus than you
will a 300-500 calorie/day surplus, and if excessive fat is gained in
the process, any immediate benefit will eventually be erased by
decreased muscle insulin sensitivity.
Get lean. Gradually add size. Repeat the process.
(citations)
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/85/3/662.long
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20973164
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ajcn.nutrition.org/content/83/2/461S.full
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18094066
https://www.uoguelph.ca/hhns/grad/courses/HBNS6130W08/HBN
S6130W08Week9APSreviewcopy.pdf
Cardio and Lifting – Cardio won’t hugely impact your gains in
the short run, and may be beneficial for strength and size in the
long run
The strength and fitness worlds have, unfortunately, fallen prey to
cardio fear-mongering, and I think that’s to their detriment. At this
point, it should be indisputable that aerobic training can improve
almost every major marker of health, however, I think that it might
actually improve your strength and size gains (or, at the very least,
not hurt them) as well.
Short-Term
For starters, we don’t really have to guess about the short-term
effects of cardio on strength and size gains . I’ll give you the cliff
notes.
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1) You can still get bigger and stronger with doing strength training
and cardio simultaneously.
2) In the short term, concurrent training (strength training and cardio
together) is about 31% less effective for hypertrophy, and about
18% less effective for strength.
3) Frequency and duration of aerobic training affected strength and
hypertrophy gains – more frequency and volume of aerobic training
meant smaller strength and size improvements.
4) When looking at the data more closely, mode of exercise
mattered. Running, but not cycling, negatively impacted strength
and size gains.
So, there’s one major takeaway here – aerobic training does not
hamper strength training in and of itself.
The effect starts
materializing when it begins causing additional stress to the muscles
and soft tissues. Running, with its impact element, affected strength
and size gains especially as volume increased, whereas cycling
didn’t. I’d venture that the oldschool bodybuilding staple of incline
treadmill walking would also have minimal effects, just like cycling,
due to its minimal impact, and hence its minimal addition to training
stress.
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If your choice of cardio is 1) low impact, and 2) not overboard on
volume and intensity, you shouldn’t have to worry about it
negatively affecting your training or your results. There’s also a
strong vein of broscience suggesting that low intensity steady state
cardio may actually aid in recovery from workouts by promoting
blood flow to the muscles without causing further damage. It makes
sense intuitively (and I’ve noticed it to be true in my own training),
though there’s not any studies confirming it at this time.
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My friend Alex Viada is a poster boy for combining aerobic and
strength training as an ultra endurance athlete and an 800 pound
squatter.
Long-Term
So, short term, running for hours on end all the time may not be the
best idea, but a reasonable volume of low impact stuff is fine. But
what about long-term effects? This is where the potential benefits
come in. This part is a little more theoretical, but also a lot more
exciting.
For starters, there’s preliminary evidence that aerobic training
increases intra-muscular DHT conversion. For those of you who
clicked on the study, yes, it’s in rodents, so I realize that we can’t
put TOO much stock it in. However, the potential implications are
huge, especially for drug-free athletes. Not to mention – the training
protocol wasn’t anything crazy: 30 minutes, 5x per week.
DHT is a derivative of testosterone which binds more readily to
androgen receptors and stays bound for longer – allowing it to exert
its anabolic effects for a longer period of time. The linked study
found that aerobic exercise can increase the activity of the enzyme
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that converts testosterone to this more potent andogen, without
altering the levels of the sex hormones in the blood. Essentially, if
this finding holds true in humans, it means you can get a lot more
“bang for your buck” from the testosterone you produce
naturally. Luckily scientists have begun studies examining the
effects of exercise on DHT in healthy humans. Though there’s not
a ton of research yet, early studies ARE finding that exercise (in this
case, sprints) affects DHT in healthy young people as well, and
aerobic training can increase DHT without affecting testosterone in
middle-aged men. So, maybe cardio is a little “manlier” than you’ve
been led to believe!
Programming
To add a little context to this discussion, we also need to bring up
periodization. The effectiveness of any programming is based upon
the work capacity of the athlete – the amount of work the trainee can
perform and recover from. In all the literature on periodization and
program design, one major principle is that work capacity should be
built from general to specific. Start with a strong foundation of
generally being able to move for long periods of time, progress to
more specific movements, and finally work on movements that are
highly specific to competition.
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In these longer-term programs, building up work capacity at the
beginning of the training cycle is necessary for the volume and
intensity of training that’s necessary to hit PRs at the end of the
cycle. Aerobic work can be used to build up that base.
I’m sure someone will object and say, “well sure, people write about
that in training books, but no good strength athletes ACTUALLY
train that way.” I suppose no one told Ilya Ilin, Olympic champion
weightlifter and one of the greatest strength athletes walking the face
of the earth. Near the end of the article: “Ilya has a program that
encompassed 10 months and went from swimming and rowing to a
gradual inclusion of the lifts, to an ultimate elimination of
everything but the lifts and squats.” The Chinese weightlifting team,
whose lifters have been winning international competitions like
they’re going out of style for the past several years, also jogs or plays
aerobic-based sports regularly to improve and maintain conditioning
and work capacity. Also sprinters, who are some of the strongest
and most explosive athletes pound for pound in the world, get a large
portion of their training volume from “tempo runs,” which is
basically a fancy way of saying “jogging.”
Body Composition
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Next, aerobic training positively influences body composition. Yes,
I know, “abs are made in the kitchen.” However, the combination
of aerobic and resistance training has been shown to improve body
composition moreso than either in isolation. Resistance training
increases metabolic rate, while aerobic training decreases hunger
moreso than resistance training, which is perhaps what makes the
combination especially potent.
With improved body composition comes a host of improved
hormonal and metabolic markers.
Improved insulin and leptin
sensitivity, increased testosterone, lower estrogen (since adipose –
i.e. fat – tissue contains the aromatase enzyme which converts
testosterone to estrogen), and many more – all of which contribute
to an improved biochemical environment for muscle and strength
gains.
Counter Arguments and Context
But what about the arguments against aerobic training? All the
people crying that your muscle will shrivel up, leaving you skinny
fat?
Check their sources. Oh, in spite of a meta-analysis showing that
strength and size improvements absolutely occur with concurrent
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training, they’ll claim that it’s impossible, and cite research from
people running for hours and hours each week in a massive calorie
deficit.
Well sure, in that context, they may be onto
something. Starving yourself while putting in 100 miles of road
work every week without lifting isn’t exactly ideal for muscle
growth or metabolic health. However, in that regard, they’re less
prophets and more just stating the obvious while making huge
extrapolations.
Remember, we’re not talking about running to purposefully open up
a huge calorie deficit.
We’re talking about aerobic training,
accompanied with strength training and adequate calorie intake,
aimed at improving performance. Context is everything. As with
most things, the dose makes the poison.
Summing it all up
Hopefully, at the very least, you can walk away from this with the
assurance that the worst case scenario when combining strength
training with reasonable aerobic training is that you’ll still get bigger
and stronger, but perhaps at a slightly slower rate. However, when
programmed correctly, it can actually improve your results, and
your body composition as well!
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Share this around with your cardio-phobic friends.
Hopefully
they’ll see the light and “cardio” can stop being such a dirty word in
the strength and fitness worlds.
High frequency training for a bigger total – research on highly
trained Norwegian powerlifters
[note: edits were made and figures were removed on 2-26-2014 at
the request of the orignal study's authors]
This was a guest post from my friend Martijn Koeveots. He’s one
the top powerlifters in his weight class in the Netherlands, and
through some of his connections in the European powerlifting
world, he got his hands on a really awesome study that hasn’t gotten
much press yet, but which has obvious applications for most
peoples’ training.
How would you like to double the effectiveness of your current
training plan? No gimmicks, no extra work – just improved results.
I know it sounds like a ridiculous headline from one of the popular
fitness magazines.
But it’s not.
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It’s the result of a Norwegian powerlifting experiment by Raastad et
al[1].
In this experiment the researchers compared 2 groups of competitive
powerlifters.
The only thing that was different, was their training frequency.
What makes you so different?
Right now you are probably on either a full body routine for 3 days
a week, on a 4 day per week upper/lower split where you train the
squat, bench and deadlift 2 times a week, or you’re using a split
where you train each major lift once per week.
And why wouldn’t you?
These programs have been giving powerlifters excellent results for
decades.
However, it is common for elite Olympic weightlifters to train a
particular lift up to 6 times a week, sometimes even multiple times
a day.
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As you might know, Olympic weightlifting training methodologies
are deeply influenced by the methods used by the eastern European
countries in the 60’s to 90’s. These countries have developed an
understanding of how to train for maximal strength that will transfer
to Olympic weightlifting.
I’m sure you have heard about the Bulgarian method and the fact
they ruthlessly dominated the sport of Olympic lifting for over 2
decades.
Or about the impact that the old Russian Olympic weightlifting
manuals have on modern day powerlifting.
Sure, Olympic lifting is not powerlifting: weights are heavier and
harder to recover from.
But I feel powerlifting has more in common with Olympic lifting
than it may appear at first – and certainly more than it has with
bodybuilding, for instance.
So, in light of similarities between the sports, should powerlifters
train more like weightlifters?
The answer is hiding in Norway.
The Norwegian experiment
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Just like you, for years most Norwegian powerlifters were training
3 days a week.
And, just like you, they were training each big lift (squat, benchpress, deadlift) 1 or 2 times a week.
But around the year 2000 something surprising happened: a German
native and former Olympic weightlifter and weightlifting coach was
appointed as the new national powerlifting coach – Dietmar Wolf.
He used his knowledge and experience from his days as a member
of the Western German national Olympic weightlifter team, and
started to incorporate training methodologies that closely resembled
his weightlifting background, although he made sure to make the
necessary adjustments to match the demands of powerlifting.
To determine whether high frequency training is working better than
the typical 3 day program, the Norwegian school of sport sciences
decided to do a formal experiment.
Participants in the study had all trained continuously for competitive
powerlifting for at least 1 year. On top of that, they all competed in
national Norwegian IPF affiliate powerlifting competitions within
the last 6 months before the start of this experiment – so we’re not
dealing with brand new lifters, but rather people with at least a fair
amount of training and competition experience.
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The experiment group consisted of 16 competitive powerlifters
between 18 and 25 years old, squatting between 125kg and 205kg
(275-451lbs), bench pressing between 85kg to 165kg (187-364lbs)
and deadlifting between 155kg and 245kg (342-540 lbs).
There were 13 male and 3 female lifters in this group.
This is a group of experienced lifters, so results probably generalize
better to readers of this blog than most training studies do – that’s
what makes this so exciting!
Let’s take a look at was done in this experiment.
The results
All lifters were put on the same 15 week program (same exercise
selection, volume, and intensity) before reviewing the results by
maxing out in the squat, bench-press and deadlift. All maxing was
done without powerlifting suits.
The only difference between these 2 groups was their training
frequency:

The 1st group trained a classic 3 times a week
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
The 2nd group had 6 smaller training sessions a week.
Everything else was the exactly the same:

exact same routine

exact same exercises and

exact same total volume and intensity
This means that the 3/week group needed to twice as many sets as
the 6/week group in each session.
And these are the stunning results after 15 weeks:

The increase in the squat was 11±6% in the 6/week group vs. 5±3%
in the 3/week group

Bench-press increased 11±4% in the 6/week group vs. 6±3% in the
3/week group

In the deadlift there was no significant difference when compared in
both groups (9±6% vs. 4±6%)
This means that total weight lifted all all three lifts increased about
an average of 10% in the 6/week group, as opposed to 5% in the
3/week group.
I told you this wasn’t like the many headlines of fitness magazines,
these are real results.
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In addition to looking at the changes in 1RM of each of the lifts, the
researchers also looked for increases in muscle mass of the vastus
lateralis, and the quadriceps as a whole.
The average increase in the 6/week group was almost 10% in the
vastus lateralis and nearly 5% in the quadriceps as a whole.
In just 12 weeks that is great progress. The 3/week group did not
make significant increases in muscle mass.
So the 6/week group got bigger AND stronger, compared to the
lower frequency group!
I will try to do my best and explain these results in a minute.
But first I want to point out that it’s important that when training
high frequency, you cannot max out out every time you hit the gym.
The Norwegians recognized this, so with the new routines, both the
training frequency and the total training volume were dramatically
increased, but intensity was reduced.
In this experiment the average intensity was 72% to 74% of 1RM
for squat, bench and deadlift.
You probably can do 10 to 12 reps with that weight, but in this
experiment reps were between 3 and 8 for the big lifts (squat, bench157
press, deadlift). So the only time the lifters were grinding lifts were
when they were going for new PRs at the end of the program.
Let’s review:

This study was done on experienced powerlifters

Both groups did the exact same program. The only difference was
that 1 group divided the volume in 6 sessions instead of 3.

On average the high frequency group increased their bench and
squat by 11% vs. 5 and 6%.

For deadlifting, high or low frequency does not seem to matter much

Their total in the high frequency group increased on average by 10%
vs. 5% in the low frequency group.

Muscle mass increased more in the high frequency group
These are staggering results.
Although the experiment didn’t cover it, let’s try and see if there is
any science relating to these results. After that we will try to put
these results into practice.
How is this possible?
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We know that weight training triggers protein synthesis and muscle
building. Research done by MacDougall et al.[2] and Phillips et al[3].
shows that this peaks in the first 24h after training.
So my guess is that by training every 24h you can keep muscle
protein synthesis and muscle building peaked. In this way you
probably can build more muscle training 6 times a week compared
to training 3 times a week. More muscle means more strength
potential.
But that’s probably not the only factor.
Another important factor could be that if you can start your squats
fresh more often you can work to improve technique. It is quite hard
to perfect technique when in a fatigued state. And if you’ve ever
done a true 1RM attempt you know that your technique needs to be
perfect.
Additionally, because you feel fresh more often when you squat, it’s
probable you can produce more force on average.
There are actually studies done by Häkkinen et al.[4] and Hartman et
al.[5] that show improved neuromuscular activation when training
more frequently.
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What you should do
Today, the best lifters in Norway typical train 5-6 days a week, some
even train two times a day.
This is in stark contrast to current conventional wisdom and popular
powerlifting programs.
Admittedly, the Norwegians have only presented these findings at
conferences, but haven’t submitted them to peer-reviewed journals.
So unfortunately I don’t have any more information about the
program than I have given you in this article.
Since workout volume is important for triggering muscle growth, it
would be great to know the total volumes, for instance.
But luckily for you, I can give you a few pointers.
The typical Norwegian program has you doing some form of
squatting and bench-pressing every session. Variation mostly comes
from switching up your stance, grip and tempo.
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Deadlifts can be done about 2 times a week, alternating conventional
and sumo for instance.
Sometimes the frequency and volume of the deadlift is increased by
adding some variations like block pulls or deficit deadlifts. Or you
can add some resistance bands.
Furthermore some basic assistance like OH Presses and rows are
included. Other than that, it’s dependant on individual strengths and
weaknesses.
What now?
So there you have it.
If you want to be bigger and stronger, you should try to divide your
current training program into more but smaller sessions.
It can skyrocket your strength and size. Just make sure to keep your
intensity in check.
What do you think? Is this something you would like to try?
Let me know in the comments below.
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Note from Greg: Keep in mind that these results haven’t been
published in peer-reviewed journals (so naturally be a bit skeptical),
although the idea of increased frequency improving outcomes echos
other authors like Siff, Verkhoshansky, and Zatsiorsky.
Also, keep in mind that although the IPF allows the use of gear, this
study was done with lifters training raw.
[1] Raastad T, Kirketeig, A, Wolf, D, Paulsen G. Powerlifters
improved strength and muscular adaptations to a greater extent
when equal total training volume was divided into 6 compared to 3
training sessions per week (abstract). Book of abstracts, 17th annual
conference of the ECSS, Brugge 4-7 July, 2012.
[2] MacDougall JD, Gibala MJ, Tarnopolsky MA, MacDonald JR,
Interisano SA, Yarasheski KE. The time course for elevated muscle
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protein synthesis following heavy resistance exercise. Can J Appl
Physiol. 1995 Dec;20(4):480-6
[3] Phillips SM, Tipton KD, Aarsland A, Wolf SE, Wolfe
RR. Mixed muscle protein synthesis and breakdown after resistance
exercise in humans. Am J Physiol. 1997 Jul;273(1 Pt 1):E99-107
[4] Phillips SM, Tipton KD, Aarsland A, Wolf SE, Wolfe
RR. Mixed muscle protein synthesis and breakdown after resistance
exercise in humans. Am J Physiol. 1997 Jul;273(1 Pt 1):E99-107
[5] Hartman MJ, Clark B, Bembens DA, Kilgore JL, Bemben MG.:
Comparisons between twice-daily and once-daily training sessions
in male weight lifters. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2007
Jun;2(2):159-69.
Genetics – How much do they limit you, and what can you do
about it?
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I’ll warn you from the outset – this post is going to be a cold dose
of reality. There’s a ray of sunshine at the end, but it’ll take a while
to get there.
We’re talking about genetics. This isn’t something I like to talk
about publicly a lot, but I get asked about it in private often enough
that I think I should just put my views out in the open. It’s also
something that often doesn’t get discussed openly very often at all
by anyone in the industry, because discussions of genetics can come
across as depressing and deterministic, whereas optimism
and
promised results are what make the fitness industry go ’round.
I’ll start with this article by my friend Bret Contreras, because it
covers the science at hand pretty thoroughly while still being readable (a surprisingly difficult feat).
TL;DR, there ARE huge differences in genetic potential between
people, both for gaining muscle and for staying lean (and, though
Bret’s article didn’t deal with this literature, the same is true for
aerobic parameters such as VO2max).
I think all of us “know” these differences exist on some level, but
most people are surprised how extreme the differences actually
are. I.e. some people start resistance training and don’t even see
noob gains. Sure, they gain some strength due to motor learning,
but they don’t gain any measurable amount of muscle mass. Ditto
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for aerobic stuff – some people simply see NO increase in aerobic
performance in response to training.
So, with this in mind, it’s time to stop being a Debbie Downer and
actually talk about implications.
1) Cut it out with the *&%!@# “Fitspiration” posts.
For a sizeable percentage of the population (depending on the
protocol, 20% “nonresponders” isn’t uncommon), that look is
simply unattainable.
Lots of men can simply never get that
muscular, and lots of women will simply never get that skinny
without taking drastic measures.
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Exhibit A
Exhibit B
When value is placed on outcomes, not effort, it can be extremely
demotivational for people who weren’t dealt a good hand
genetically.
2) Coaches should guarantee coaching, NOT results.
This one infuriates me to no end. If I bundled up a program that I
promised would add 100 pounds to your powerlifting total or 10
pound of lean mass to your frame, it would sell. Every fitness
professional knows this. Look at any fitness magazine or (almost)
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any mass-marketed program. The marketing and the claims are all
very similar – achieve a lofty goal in a modest amount of time.
Problem is, no one can make those promises. Unless they know a
way to market their program ONLY to the genetic elite who aren’t
yet near their genetic potential, people putting out programs with
claims like “gain 2 inches on your arms in 6 weeks” or “blast your
bench 50 pound in 8 week” or “get six pack abs in 30 days,” are
lying to most (if not all) people, and they know it.
Instead, the guarantee SHOULD be for expert coaching and
optimization for the individual. Quite honestly, for some people,
that may not mean a ton of tangible results. The people I coach get
stronger (I can literally only think of one exception, and I refunded
him.), but over the same time span someone may put 30 pounds on
their total and someone else may put 200.
The common
demoninator, though, is that when I’m coaching someone, they get
100%. And they know that. I’d rather people come to me because
I’ve demonstrated genuine interest in helping people, and the
expertise required to do so – not because I make audacious claims
about crazy results that I often couldn’t deliver on.
3) I’m convinced that improvements are always possible
Two points here:
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a) Research has to control for as many variables as possible. That
means subjects complete the same exercise program to make sure
you know exactly what’s producing the results. Good coaches know
how to alter programming based on individual needs, and I think
that drops the “nonresponder” rate considerably. Those 20% still
aren’t going to walk across the Mr. O stage any time soon, but I’m
convinced they can improve, at least some, with the proper
motivation and individualized coaching.
I’ll admit I have no
scientific studies to support this contention, but I have yet to come
across someone who literally can’t get at least a little bigger,
stronger, or leaner.
b) Just because you were dealt a bad hand in one parameter, that
doesn’t mean there’s not something you can excel at. Growing up,
I wanted nothing more than to be a great basketball player. I was
alright, but the NBA just wasn’t in the cards for this 5’9″ white
boy. However, I was dealt a very good hand for powerlifting, so
that’s where I’ve channeled my efforts and I’ve really come to love
it. If you weren’t destined for greatness as an aerobic athlete, you
may find your calling with the iron, or vice versa. Don’t be afraid
to experiment with different modes of exercise until you really take
to something. I love lifting weights, but by no means do I think it’s
the only way to be healthy and have fun in the process. Once you
find what you’re good at, a funny thing tends to happen: you’ll often
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fall in love with the things you naturally have an aptitude for. The
old cliche applies here: “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”
4)
Someone’s personal achievements don’t make them an
expert
The fact that someone has accomplished the goals you’d like to
attain has little bearing at all on their ability to get you there. The
best athletes often don’t make the best coaches.
And yes, if you’re keeping track, this is a horribly ironic point for
me to be making.
That’s
why
I
don’t
make
a
big
deal
of
my lifting
accomplishments. Sure, I’ll use them as a foot in the door (and I
think I’d be silly not to), but not as a crutch. I think the emphasis
should be on the information someone supplies, and the
professionalism they demonstrate.
If someone’s trying to sell their coaching services/programming
services/ebook/etc. and their pitch is, in essence, “go with me
because I’m big and strong” or “I’m an expert on physique coaching
because I am shredded,” then you should instantly be skeptical. If
that’s all they’re bringing to the table, then your money would
probably be best spent elsewhere.
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Now, there’s certainly something to be said for experience. For
example,
if
someone’s
a
good
coach,
their
personal
accomplishments do add to their value, I think. But, first and
foremost should be concrete knowledge (the nuts and bolts of good
programming – research, periodization models, etc.) and practical
application (experience coaching). Experiential knowledge from
competing at an elite level is an added bonus, but the first two are
much more important.
However, I do think there is something to be said for walking the
talk. It shouldn’t be held against someone if they’re not the best, but
I’d be wary of any coach who hasn’t trained seriously for some sport
or goal.
5) Don’t judge someone for lack of results
We have in our minds that effort —-> results, and that the two scale
linearly. I think that’s a quintessential part of the American Dream
narrative.
However, like we’ve been talking about this whole time, the two
don’t necessarily equate when you’re talking about fitness
goals. Someone’s lack of results doesn’t necessarily mean they’re
lazy and not putting in as much work as you.
6) Don’t assume you got dealt the bad hand
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In one of the classic studies looking at the influence of genetics on
sports performance, they looked at the ACTN3 gene, which codes
for a binding protein necessary for fast twitch fibers to have their
full degree of power output. Essentially, without it, you can’t
produce force nearly as quickly as you could otherwise.
As you’d expect, most sprinters have two working copies of this
gene. That just makes sense – functioning binding proteins allowing
their muscles to produce force as quickly as possible.
However, about 6% of elite sprinters have two nonsense copies of
the alleles. They lack this crucial protein for power output…
The point I’m making, in a roundabout way, is that you REALLY
have no idea of what your limits are.
If you assume you’ve got bad genetics, then you’re doomed to fail
regardless of what your true potential is. If you assume you’ve got
genetics on your side, then you may be proven wrong, but you may
get farther than you originally thought possible.
The Most Important Takeaway
Going back to the idea of separating effort and results, don’t let
anything keep you from exercising. Regardless of your genetic
makeup, exercise is good for you.
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Maybe you won’t get really huge – but lifting weights is good for
coordination and bone mineral density anyways.
Maybe your aerobic endurance won’t improve – but aerobic
exercise is still good for heart health
Maybe you won’t get super lean – but maintaining a healthy weight
drops your risk of almost every chronic disease
So, ultimately, screw your genetics.
Don’t fall in love with some vague notion of an ideal body or a
certain level of strength you’d like to attain.
Fall in love with the process. Fall in love with simply being active
and exercising in some fashion.
At the end of the day, your health matters more than a six pack, a
marathon time, or a powerlifting total. And that’s something you
can ABSOLUTELY improve by exercising, regardless of what your
genetics say about the other stuff.
Fixing the good-morning squat
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This is a common problem, and one I get asked about frequently
enough that it was worth explaining what’s happening and how to
fix it in a blog post.
For those of you who don’t know, a good-morning squat is
ostensibly a squat, but when the lifter starts coming out of the hole,
their butt shoots straight up, so instead of squatting the weight up,
they end up using their hamstrings, glutes, and back primarily,
effectively taking the quads out of the movement.
A good-morning squat = when your “squats” end up looking like
this.
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When you squat like this, odds are you’re going to wind up missing
the lift when the weight rounds your back over and folds you
forward. Consequently, the common prescription is to strengthen
your back or hip extensors (glutes and hamstrings) to keep you from
getting folded forward. Makes sense, right?
Nope.
You see, your body is pretty good at optimizing movement. Do
something enough times, and your body is pretty good at finding the
most efficient way for you to accomplish the pattern, given your
strengths and weaknesses.
So, when you find yourself GM
squatting, you’re in that position in the first place BECAUSE your
back and hip extensors are strong. Strengthening them further MAY
help you lift more weight, but it only furthers the imbalance that
already exists.
Instead, you need to strengthen your quads. When your quads are
weak, your butt will shoot right up out of the hole without your
shoulders moving much - getting knee extension out of the way
without much of a change in center of gravity – taking your quads
out of the equation and shifting the load to the muscles that are
already strong, and putting you in a GM position. Strengthen your
quads, and they can pull their own weight, allowing you to stay a
little more upright so you won’t have such a tendency to round
forward with heavy weight.
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Training your quads will also increase your max more for the
amount of effort you invest into the training. If you strengthen
what’s already strong, you’ll probably be able to move more weight,
but it’s a matter of diminishing returns. If you bring up the weakest
link, you get a much much better return on investment.
Now, before anyone jumps down my throat for implying that
training the “posterior chain” isn’t the be-all-end-all of lower body
training, I do absolutely think it’s important. Most new lifters need
more work on their posterior chains, and it should be prioritized to
a point. However, once you develop a GM squat problem, that’s a
good indicator that the posterior chain is definitely up to snuff and
no longer the limiting factor of performance. Also, I understand that
mobility problems, especially poor ankle dorsiflexion, can cause this
problem is the absence of any strength imbalances; however, in my
experience, most lifters can get around that just by getting some
weightlifting shoes with a raised heel.
And, just for social proof and all that (as an aside, it’s a little funny
I feel like I need to justify a recommendation to train the
quads.
They’re big, strong muscles that need to be well
developed for powerful knee extension – which is one of the basic
tasks involved in squatting. But the strength world has been so
enamored with the “posterior chain” lately, I feel like I’m being
slightly rebellious by suggesting that people should directly train
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their quads!), consider that Dan Green shares my opinion with his
865 squat, and the study on elite powerlifters I wrote up for Bret
Contreras’s blog basically said that the hallmark of elite squatting
was *minimizing* GM-ing the squat.
So, if you end up looking like Miley Cyrus on Robin Thicke at the
VMAs every time you squat heavy weights, train your freaking
quads. Your back, and your squat numbers, will reap the benefits.
Hamstrings – The most overrated muscle group for the squat
After the huge response I got to my article on the infamous Good
Morning Squat, I realized that most peoples’ whole conceptual
schema for proper squatting is out of whack. So, I wanted to keep
building upon the same concept – a huge squat depends on strong
quads, and as a corollary, the hamstrings are vastly overrated as a
contributor to a huge squat.
Since there’s research on the subject, I think it’s best to start
there. Chris Beardsley has reviewed some relevant research on
hamstring activation in the squat, and I’d suggest you take the time
to check it out. The basic conclusion is that the hamstrings aren’t
activated very well during the squat and that, in fact, the lowly
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seated hamstring curl achieves about 3x as much hamstring
activation as the squat with equally challenging loads.
So, what are we to do with this knowledge?
Some people would say that, naturally, you should try to make the
squat more hamstring dominant. The hamstrings are powerful hip
extensors, hip extension is important for the squat, and the more
musculature you’re activating to a high degree, the more weight
you’ll move.
Nope.
I see where that point of view is coming from – advocating the low
bar squat with considerable forward-lean to engage the hamstrings
more in the squat. But I think its proponents fail to remember one
important fact about the hamstrings…
The hamstrings are two-joint muscles.
Originating on the ischial tuberosity and inserting near the top of the
tibia, the hamstrings are effective at both knee flexion (i.e.
hamstring curls) and hip extension (i.e. RDLs or good
mornings). Furthermore, when you flex the muscles, it’s not like it
can pick and choose which end it pulls on – without other muscles
activating to stabilize the joints, hamstring activation means both hip
extension and knee flexion torque.
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Hamstrings: both for extending the hips AND flexing the knees
So, what does that mean for the squat? Referring back to my article
write-up about characteristics of elite squatters:
“The three group A lifters (the best squatters in the study) exhibited
the largest extensor-dominant (i.e. quadriceps producing more
torque at the knee than the hamstrings and gastrocnemius) thigh
torques. This is not to be confused with merely having the strongest
quads. It means that throughout the movement, the group A lifters’
quads were producing more torque relative to their hamstrings and
gastrocnemii, resulting in a higher NET extensor torque.”
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In layman’s terms, what all that means is that excessive hamstring
activation
is
actually
detrimental
to
optimum
squatting
performance. The harder your hamstrings are pulling you toward
knee flexion, the harder your quads have to contract to produce the
SAME amount of net knee extension torque. That’s the exact
opposite of what you should be shooting for!
Context:
As a powerlifter, I’m primarily concerned about lifting the most
weight possible. I’m assuming that applies to many of you also. If
so, purposefully aiming for high hamstrings involvement in the
squat is counterproductive. Plain and simple.
I can somewhat understand the inclination to teach a more posteriordominant squat to new lifters, especially if they’re using one of the
many typical beginner routines which include high frequency, fairly
high volume squatting with very little deadlifting or hamstring
accessory work.
However, if that describes you, be warned: you are forming a bad
habit you’ll have to break later! I personally think you should
instead squat in a more efficient manner (either high or low bar,
trying to maintain a more upright torso and prioritizing quad
involvement), while also doing some accessory work for your
hamstrings such as GHRs, hamstring curls, or RDLs since, like
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we’ve already established, the squat is NOT a good hamstring
builder anyways!
Now, just to preempt a question I know will pop up – I am NOT
saying you shouldn’t train your hamstrings. Strong hamstrings
mean a big deadlift, healthy knees, and a potentially lower risk of
hamstring tears.
Just don’t use the squat to train your
hamstrings. Use hamstrings exercises to train your hamstrings.
Also, just so we’re clear, I’m not saying hip extension isn’t also
important for the squat. It’s just that it doesn’t need to be coming
from your hamstrings. Prioritizing glute activation is a much better
route, since the gluteus maximus is a one joint muscle – only
producing hip extension without accompanying knee flexion torque
as with the hamstrings.
The good news:
(based on my
understanding, at least) range of motion is the primary determinant
of glute activation during the squat, so as long as you’re squatting
deep, your bases are covered there!
Putting it all together:
If you want to get a massive squat you should train your quads, try
to minimize forward lean, and not concern yourself with hamstrings
involvement when squatting. Squat for a huge squat, and pull or do
direct hamstring work to turn you hamstrings into pork
cords. Purposefully trying to increase hamstring involvement in the
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squat is an exercise in futility if your goal is to move more weight
and get stronger.
Share this article with your misguided friends who preach “posterior
chain” and then wonder why their squat is stalled. When they see
the light, they’ll love you for it.
Should you wear a belt or not? Study write-up
The belt vs. beltless discussion is a common one in the strength
world, and is, in fact, one that I actually wrote about several weeks
ago. What I have for you guys today is a study write-up to cut
through the speculation and actually provide some data for the
discussion. The study is titled “The Effectiveness of Weight-Belts
During Multiple Repetitions of the Squat Exercise.”
A few notes about the study itself:
- It’s actually uses relatively strong subjects. Not world champions,
but the subjects had to meet one of two minimum criteria: either an
8rm of 125.5kg (~277 pounds) or an 8rm of at least 1.6x body
weight. So these guys at least had a little experience under the bar,
which means the results are more apt to translate to people who have
been lifting for a few years than if the study had been done on
untrained people.
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- They looked at a lot of different variables. They used a force plate
to examine force output, they used a camera system to gather
kinematic data (joint angles and how the body moved, essentially),
they measured intra-abdominal pressure, muscle activation via
EMG, and time it took to complete each phase of the lift (bottom of
the lift to 90 degree knee angle, 90 to 135 degrees knee angle, and
135 degrees to full extension). This is good because it gives us a
broad picture of how wearing a belt affected the movement as a
whole, not just one variable.
- The subjects used the same load for both sets – their beltless
8rm. This is an important thing to point out. I’ll touch on its
importance later.
What they found:
1. The “sticking point” became much more pronounced without a
belt. Although there weren’t huge differences between total time it
took to complete the eccentric and concentric portions of the lift with
or without a belt, the period of the concentric with the knee angle
between 90 and 135 degrees increased throughout the sets both with
and without a belt, but increased significantly more without a
belt. Of course, this is to be expected since the load used was the
beltless 8rm, so it would be relatively less difficult with a belt than
without.
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2. There were no significant differences between belted and beltless
with regard to kinematic and force plate data. HOWEVER, in both
groups, the amount of forward lean increased across the sets, from a
minimum of about 51 degrees to a maximum of about 46 degrees.
3. Intraabdominal pressure was 25-40% higher in the belted group,
as opposed to the beltless group.
4.
EMG data was taken for the vastus lateralis (a quadriceps
muscle), biceps femoris (a hamstrings muscle), external oblique,
and spinal erectors.
a) no significant differences were observed for the spinal erectors in
the belt vs. beltless set, and muscle activation in the eccentric and
concentric phases was actually quite similar, indicating that it takes
about the same amount of effort from the spinal erectors to keep the
spine extended during both phases of the lift.
b) no significant differences were observed for external oblique
activation either. The EO is one of the muscle used to compress the
abdomen along with the internal oblique, rectus abdominis and
transversus abdominis. Proponents of beltless training often argue
that these muscles will contract harder without a belt to product the
necessary intraabdominal pressure. Such was not the case in this
study. However, they did observe about twice as much EO activity
in the concentric as the eccentric, regardless of belt usage.
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c) the vastus lateralis showed significantly more activity during the
concentric portion with a belt than without across most time points,
and especially during the sticking point of the lift. This increased
activation of the knee extensors may help explain the smaller
increase in time spent at the sticking point with a belt than
without. Both with and without a belt, the VL showed about 50%
higher activation during the concentric than the eccentric portion of
the lift.
d) the biceps femoris showed about twice as much activity during
the concentric portion of the lift than the eccentric both with and
without a belt. The biggest difference seen with vs. without a belt
was that the increase in BF activation during the concentric portion
of the lift increased more across the set with the belt than
without. Initially the values were about the same, but activation only
increased 31.5% across the set without a belt, vs. 42.5% with a belt.
Implications:
1. In spite of the set with a belt being easier (since both sets were
performed with the beltless 8rm), it still resulted in greater quad and
hamstring activation, especially during the sticking point and as the
set progressed, respectively.
2. Wearing a belt seems to increase intraabdominal pressure (which
should reduce net shear stress on the spine) without diminishing
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abdominal activation, at least if we assume that external oblique
activation is representative of the rest of the muscles of the
abdominal wall.
3. Increased forward lean is an undesirable effect of fatigue. The
researchers found that the subjects experienced more and more
forward lean as their sets progressed. In their discussion at the end
of the article, the referenced another article (here) saying that the
more proficient someone was at the squat, the more upright they
stayed and the more they relied on knee extension rather than hip
extension. I’m working on rounding up full-text for it too to check
out the study procedure. It looks really interesting, so if I can find
it, I’ll do a write-up for it too.
4. It seems like abdominal weakness may have more to do with the
back rounding at the bottom of a squat than spinal erector
weakness. Spinal erector activation was about the same for both
phases of the squat, which means that if weak erectors caused the
back to round over, the rounding should be expected to start from
the moment you unrack the bar.
Conversely, external oblique
activation was about twice as high for the concentric as the
eccentric, indicating an increased challenge to that muscle (and
potentially the muscles of the abdominal wall in general).
5. There is a bigger difference in eccentric vs. concentric muscle
activity for the biceps femoris (hamstring muscle) than the vastus
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lateralis (quad muscle). It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions
from this factoid, but it could mean a couple things. It could mean
that people tend to excessively load the knees relative to the hips in
lowering a squat. It could also mean that loading the knees to lower
a squat is the more natural pattern (i.e. the olympic style squat vs.
the “butt back” powerlifting style squat). No definitive guidelines
can be drawn from this one study, but it’s worth keeping in the back
of your mind.
Based on the variables assessed in this study, it seems like one could
use it to argue for training with a belt. Wearing a belt allows you to
lift more weight, and even with the same training weights it
increases muscle activation in the quads and hamstrings without
decreasing abdominal activation.
However, before you take this one study and run with it, keep in
mind that it was looking at ONE training session. It could be that
activation patterns change over time, and that adaptations would
occur over 12-16 week of training with a belt/beltless that aren’t
immediately apparent from this study.
How hydration affects performance AND muscle
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Sorry for the delay between posts. I’m currently in the middle of a
*huge* project. I can’t give details about it right now, but I’m
halfway through the first of two major phases. It’s probably eating
4ish hours a day right now, so in addition to training, school
(midterm week), time with Lyndsey, and admiring my beard every
time I walk past a reflective surface, I haven’t had time to write as
much as I’d like to. Hopefully that’ll change soon, but I really do
appreciate everyone who reads my blog, so I wanted to give you
guys a heads up as to what’s been going on. Sorry I neglected to do
so on the front end.
Now that that’s out of the way, I have three pretty exciting nutrition
topics to touch on today. I’d guess all three of them affect most of
you on a daily basis.
Hydration
A recent study questions the importance of hydration for
performance. Old research suggested that even minor dehydration
could have a major negative impact on performance. However, the
researchers in this new study suggested that the old research had
some flaws: it was performed indoors without any breeze (which
would aid in thermoregulation), and the participants weren’t blinded
to their hydration status (the ones who were dehydrated knew they
were dehydrated and would therefore expect to perform
poorly). They corrected for these methodological errors by using
187
IVs to control hydration, and by having some air blowing over the
participants to mimic a breeze.
The result: mild dehydration had no effect on performance.
So, this means that we can all just forget about hydration now,
right? Not at all! If you’re worried about long-term performance
and not just short-term performance, you still definitely need to
consume your liquids. When I asked Adel Moussa, the guy who
runs the Suppversity blog, about this recent study, he sent back two
other studies showing how hydration and Angiotensin II (a hormone
your body produces to maintain blood volume and blood pressure
when you’re dehydrated) can affect protein metabolism. The less
hydrated your cells are and the more Angiotensin II you produce
(which inhibits IGF-1, the hormone that mediates most of Growth
Hormone’s effects), the less protein you synthesize and the more
you break down.
I won’t wade into the mechanisms (I think I understand them, but
I’m a coach, not an microbiologist or an endocrinologist – not my
area of expertise), but the verdict seems to be that a little dehydration
may not screw you too badly in the short term, but keeping wellhydrated is necessary for long-term optimization of health, protein
synthesis, and muscle growth.
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Do women need to train differently than men?
For those of you why don’t know, there’s an absurd amount of
misinformation in the fitness industry. In few niches is that more
true that training for women. I want to throw my opinion in the ring
in the hopes that you, my concerned readers, will share it around and
a few women will read it before buying some pink dumbbells and
wasting their time.
For starters, let me give you the TL;DR of this article – 90% of a
woman’s training should be just like a man’s. Allow me to elaborate
on the other 10% by going through the major physical differences
between men and women that affect weight training, and the impact
they should have on a woman’s training program.
1. Larger Q Angle
For those of you who don’t know what a Q angle is, here’s an
illustration:
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The average female has a steeper Q angle than the average male,
which means more valgus force on the knee during activity. In
general, this fact leads to two suggestions. First, women need to
really keep an eye on knee health if they’re doing a lot of running,
especially if they have a broader pelvis, and thus a bigger Q angle
generally (including straight running, soccer, basketball, etc.). The
same amount of running has the potential to do more damage to a
woman’s knee than a man’s. This isn’t to say women should never
run (as the recent trend on the interweb has been), they just need to
be judicious and do more corrective exercises (a great segue
into…). Number two: women should focus on VMO work and
always squatting below parallel. The VMO helps stabilize the knee
when valgus forces are placed upon it, so strong VMOs help prevent
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ACL injuries for women. Terminal knee extensions (TKEs) and
step-ups will help with this. Squatting below parallel will help
reduce shearing forces on the ACL as hamstring involvement
increases with squat depth.
So to recap: A steeper Q angle shouldn’t mean any huge changes in
training for women, it just means watching running volume, making
sure you squat to the depth you should be squatting anyways, and
building some nasty VMOs.
2. Narrower waist
Ladies, I have some bad news. Getting a ginormous squat or deadlift
usually means you won’t have the most pronounced hourglass figure
on the planet (However, you’ll acquire a world-class butt in the
process, so things still work out in your favor).
The two largest determinants of how much force a muscle can
produce are cross-sectional area and neuromuscular efficiency. In
layman’s terms, a trained woman with the same size thighs as a
trained guy (assuming the same body composition) should be able
to produce about as much force with her legs as the guy can. This
simple formula tends to work pretty well for things like leg press or
hip thrusts, but not for squats.
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What accounts for this difference? Guys have thicker torsos with
thicker abdominal musculature that can better support the pelvis and
spine. To close this gap, ladies need to focus on “core” work even
more than guys do. I’m not talking about sets of 500 crunches or
buying the latest pseudo-sexual ab gadget. I’m talking breathing
paused squats and front squats, farmers walks, waiters carries, and
other HEAVY core work that will strengthen the transverse
abdominis and thicken the obliques, allowing for better support of
the pelvis and spine under heavy loading.
3. Broader hips
This isn’t true in all cases, but it is in most. In general, women tend
to do better with a wider stance on squat and a sumo deadlift rather
than conventional. This is true both because they have the hip
mobility to get to those positions which allow them to shorten the
bar path substantially, and because a wider stance means a more
upright torso, helping to address the problem of having a narrower
waist.
4. Fewer and smaller fast twitch fibers
In general, fast twitch fibers are the ones most prone to hypertrophy
and that most contribute to maximal force output. There are two
implications here for women:
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1) You should train even heavier than a man (relative to your
max). Since you’re already working with fewer fast twitch fibers,
you need to train in such a way as to ensure you optimize the fast
twitch fibers you DO have.
2) You should do more volume than a man. Since you’re going to
be more reliant on your slow twitch fibers, you need to increase your
training volume and include some higher rep work (10-20 reps, not
100) to get everything you can out of your slow twitch fibers.
I remember reading an interview with the Chinese weightlifting
coach. When asked how he trains his female lifters, he replied that
he trains them just like the men, except with about 15% more
volume. Keep that in mind.
One more offshoot here to keep in mind is that since women tend to
have a fiber blend that is more fatigue-resistant, they shouldn’t rely
as much on rep max calculators. I’ve seen a girl squat 155×15 with
a 1rm of 185. 155×15 would project a 1rm of 235-255ish. If a man
can squat 185, he’s only going to get 6 or 7 reps with 155.
5. Hormonal factors
This is probably what people expected me to lead with. However, I
don’t think it’s really worth dwelling on since there’s not really any
proactive steps a woman can take to address it (except good ol
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vitamin S). However, it is worth noting that higher testosterone
levels are the primary reason there’s a bigger gap between the upper
body strength of men and women than lower body strength. The
muscles of the shoulder girdle have more androgen receptors than
any other muscle group. This means that testosterone’s anabolic
effects are most potent on these muscles. As an aside, that’s the
biggest reason a big chest and broad shoulders are seen as a sign of
virility in men – it’s a sign the man has higher testosterone levels
and is therefore probably more fertile than other guys.
Losing weight and getting stronger
One of the most amusing myths in the fitness industry is that you
can’t simultaneously lose weight and get stronger.
The reasoning behind this notion is based on the fact that it’s
difficult to see significant muscle hypertrophy while you lose
weight. I’m not going to contest this point (except for beginners or
seriously detrained/overweight people).
However, there’s a lot
more that goes into getting stronger than simply gaining muscle.
A much more important factor is neuromuscular efficiency. You
know who’s totally maxed out their neurological gains? It’s not you,
it’s not me, and it’s probably not anyone on this planet (except
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maybe Naim Suleymanoglu. He weighs 138 and probably clean and
jerked more than you deadlift).
Firing rate, intermuscular
coordination, intramuscular coordination, and decrease in inhibitory
signals can all be improved upon.
Neural factors are what allow grandmothers to throw cars off of their
trapped grandchildren. If you can’t lift up a car on whim, then you
haven’t reached your neurological capacity for improvement. If a
grandmother can do it when she needs to, the issue is NOT muscle
mass, so you can’t blame limited hypertrophy on lack of strength
gains.
So what can you do?
Practice. Heavy weights (75%+), low reps (fewer than 5. Less than
3 is better). Keep in mind that if you’re losing weight, muscular
recovery will be problematic. Therefore, don’t even go close to
failure. If you’re sore the next day, you did too much. Drop the
volume next time.
Also, since your main goal should be to
PRACTICE a skill (to enhance neural efficiency), high frequency is
best: 4+ times per week. If you wanted to get really good at
shooting foul shots, you’d practice every day. So if you want to get
good at benching or squatting, why not find a way to practice them
every day as well? Remember, you’re practicing a skill to improve
your firing rate and muscular coordination. That’s best done with
perfect form and frequent exposure.
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So what if you don’t get a pump the whole time? Your muscles will
not shrivel away to nothing. As long as you’re taking in adequate
protein, you shouldn’t lose much if any muscle mass at all. Once
your cut is over, you’ll be stronger and with that added strength
you’ll find it easier to build more muscle since you can place a
greater stress on your musculature by handling heavier weight.
Take home: even if you’re losing weight, you don’t have to resign
yourself to losing strength as well. Set up your training properly,
and you should be able to gain strength, if not muscle, throughout
your cut and end up a stronger, lighter you at the end.
p.s. Obviously this doesn’t apply as much for people who are
already lean. But for cutting from >15%bf to around 10-12%,
there’s no reason you can’t keep getting stronger the whole time.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
This is not an economics rant, so don’t be afraid to read on. It’s
more a continuation of yesterday’s post about how people get fat so
easily.
You may have noticed this before, but the hardest part of a diet is
the first month or so. Once you lose those first 5 or 10 pounds, you
fall into a groove and the diet hums right along.
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The opposite, I’m sure you’ve noticed, is also true. You fall off the
wagon a bit, gain 5 pounds or so, and then it’s almost as if you wake
up the next week and you’ve gained another 20.
Whichever way you go, the trick is getting some biochemical
momentum going in these two ways.
I’d imagine Sisyphus happy because he was jacked. Dieting
shouldn’t resemble the Sisyphus myth, and we all know getting fat
sure doesn’t.
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1. Testosterone and estrogen
The leaner you are, the more testosterone you’re pumping out and
the more free testosterone – the test that’s actually able to have a
biological effect – you have (it drops a little bit in a hypocaloric diet,
but a leaner you on a normal diet has more free test than a chubbier
you). Also, as you get leaner you produce less of the aromatase
enzyme, which means less testosterone gets converted to estrogen.
Essentially, the leaner you are, the better hormonal environment you
have to build more muscle and burn more fat. The fatter you are,
the better your hormonal environment is to store more fat.
And just like that, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
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He has so much testosterone because he’s so lean, obviously.
*sarcasm*
2. Inflammation
Inflammation is a HUGE subject, but for the sake of your attention
span I’ll boil it down as much as possible.
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Here’s the basics:
inflammation is essentially the biochemical
indicator that something happened your body needs to adapt
to. Homeostasis has been disturbed, and your body needs to respond
appropriately to respond to the stress and be better prepared for the
next time the stressor presents itself.
You
know
what
increases
your
body’s
levels
of
inflammation? Exercise.
Before you go, “WOAH, I should never exercise again because I
heard inflammation was bad,” cool your jets, because inflammation
= bad is a very simplistic and not overly accurate.
Ya know all those beneficial effects you’re looking for from
exercise? Well, without inflammation, your body never gets the
message that you need to adapt and improve. In the case of exercise,
an appropriate inflammatory response is exactly what you want.
You
know
what
also
increases
your
overall
levels
of
inflammation? Getting fatter. However, this is exactly NOT the
kind of inflammation you want.
This chronic inflammation
associated with obesity increases your risks of all sort of diseases
ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease to Alzheimers. It also
has an additive effect to exercise-induced inflammation, making it
harder for your body to respond and adapt appropriately to
exercise. The leaner you are and the less chronic inflammation you
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have, the easier it is for your body to respond to exercise-induced
inflammation, thus making it easier to adapt to exercise.
Chronic, obesity-induced inflammation also screws you over in
another way. Some of the genes and transcription factors that are
activated to reduce inflammation also play a key role in the
maturation of fat cells. The more fat cells your body produces as
it’s dealing with chronic inflammation, the more fat you can store
and the fatter you can become. (Not to bog you down in the
semantics, but google PPAR-gamma for more information. Also, a
lot of Type-II diabetes medications are PPAR-gamma agonists,
which mean they increase PPAR-gamma activity.
Doing so
increases insulin sensitivity and decreases inflammation, but at the
cost of new fat cell formation).
So, in essence, as you get leaner and have less inflammation, your
body stops pumping out as many new fat cells, making it
increasingly easy to lose weight. And just like that, the rich get
richer and the poor get poorer.
“But Greg, why would dieting get easier as you go? Doesn’t your
metabolism shut down from prolonged dieting?”
Just get the ball rolling, and you should experience increasingly
smoother sailing from there.
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Some thoughts about retaining muscle as you diet
I hit a new low for bodyweight a couple days ago at 234. When I
get to 231, I’ll be at the 20 pounds weight-loss mark (251 was the
highest I got before the meet). Not bad work for about 9 weeks of
dieting while still hitting PRs!
The biggest difference between this cut and ones in the past was that
I had a definite, moderate plan.
Usually my successful cuts are a bit more extreme. The only diets
I’ve really had much luck with in the past are PSMF-esque diets (not
strict PSMF, but no carb and fat probably 60g a day or so) or cyclical
keto diets. They strip the fat right off of me, but my energy levels
are horrible, and I’m borderline homicidal until I get into ketosis
(i.e. for a cyclica keto diet, if my refeed was Saturday, I’d been
foggy and irritable until probably Tuesday. Low carb fog does not
make Mondays any more fun). My workouts are a combination of
decent days and horrible days (occasionally I’ll be strong, but I can
never handle much volume), and I’ll lose some muscle. I don’t
worry about the muscle loss much because of good ol’ myonuclear
domain theory (more on that later).
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More moderate cuts I’ve attempted haven’t worked because I didn’t
have a definite plan. With cyclical keto or PSMF, you know exactly
what you can or can’t eat every day. When I tried more gradual
approaches, I never had a solid plan. It was basically just the idea
that I’d eat a little less to get the weight loss started, and eat less
from there as needed. I’d always fall off the horse somewhere and
fail because I could never get myself to actually make a plan (with
measuring my food and whatnot) and stick to it.
This time around is different because I have a definite
approach. I’ve already blogged about it, so I won’t go into a ton of
detail, but simply scheduling a refeed at every 1-2 pounds lost has
been great for me. It lets me be as extreme as I need to be to lose
that pound or two, while still allowing me to get in some good
training because the refeeds happen regularly enough. Additionally,
if I want to take my time between a 1-2 pound increment and use a
more moderate approach, I can manage a pound or two of weight
loss before falling off the horse.
Nothing revolutionary, but I just wanted to reiterate this approach
because it’s working so well for me.
Now as to why I don’t worry about losing muscle while dieting…
For starters, I’m not a bodybuilder. At the end of my diet, I don’t
need to be as big as possible. I just want to lose as much fat as
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possible. “But Greg,” I hear you crying, “you may work a year to
gain 3-5 pounds of muscle. Isn’t it so horrible to throw it all
away?” Nope, not really. Google “myonuclear domain theory” for
a more in depth explanation, but here’s a brief synopsis of why
losing some muscle while you’re dieting doesn’t really matter
(unless you’re prepping for a bodybuilding show, of course).
Your muscles are composed of muscle fibers. Each fiber is a single
cell. These cells have multiple nuclei (not just one like most cells
of your body). Each myonucleus (nucleus of a muscle fiber) can
only support a specific amount of sarcoplasm (the stuff inside a
muscle fiber) via coding for the necessary proteins etc. To make a
muscle bigger, satellite cells (cells floating around your muscle
fibers) donate their nucleus to the muscle fiber. That extra nucleus
can support a bit of extra sarcoplasm. Congratulations, your muscle
just grew.
When you gain muscle mass, you are gaining myonuclei for your
muscle fibers to support the extra sarcoplasm in each fiber. When
you restrict calories and lose muscle, the amount of myonuclei
basically remains constant (unless you’re essentially under famine
conditions). You can catabolize fibers themselves if you literally
starve yourself, but otherwise you don’t really lose myonuclei.
This makes sense, really. You DID work hard for that extra muscle
mass. Your body doesn’t want to throw it away and have to work
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just as hard to get it back (i.e. what would have happened every
winter until about 50 years ago).
Have you ever trained for a few years, taken time off, then got back
in the gym and got most of your old gains (muscle and strength)
back in a matter of months? No, it’s not because you worked THAT
hard and you’re THAT smart. It’s because you still have the vast
majority of the myonuclei you gained from when you were training
previously.
Also, you know that guy who used to be on a ton of juice, then he
came off, but he’s still huge? Yep, he still has most of the myonuclei
that fused onto his muscle fibers when he was on the sauce.
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Parting words:
Thanks for taking the time to read this book. It is, in essence, a
chronicle of the mental attributes and understandings about training
that were necessary to take me from a ground zero to record-holding
powerlifter.
If you’re thinking at this point “I feel like I’m missing something.
A lot of this information seems really basic or counterintuitive,”
then that’s a substantial realization in and of itself. There is no
magical formula for success.
Here’s the closest thing there is to a recipe for success in
powerlifting: develop the proper mental framework, understand the
training process (instead of trying to find the elusive “perfect
program” that doesn’t really exist), and work harder than the next
guy. You may never set records, but that is the only way to approach
your own genetic potential.
Just to remind you about the deal: this book was free to read. If you
benefitted from it all I ask is that you share it with your friends who
are lifters.
Lift things, learn things, eat, sleep, repeat the process. That is the
way forward.
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