People on the Internet generally recommend powerlifters use whatever gear they use in competition when performing the Smolov program. As even greenhorns know the SAID principal (specific adaption to imposed demands), this makes a good deal of sense, but looking at the matrix, the four-day-a-week mesocycle (preliminary part of the program) requires ten sets of three reps on the fourth day. Since the average powerlifter uses knee wraps in competition, which take several minutes to put on, I estimated a ten-set workout to take around an hour and a half, which was a little longer than I wanted to spend in the gym. So, I went at it raw, which I measured my max at 210, which was 30kgs lower than my full-gear max, in case anyone is interested.
The first day called for 4 sets of 9 @ 147kgs (323lbs). First observations: (1) Program is hard, but doable
(2) Holding a heavy barbell on your shoulders is really hard on your wrists, wear wrist wraps.
(3) Clocking rest periods is important, and when in doubt err on the side of too much rest time, because it is the most important variable to prevent failure.
(4) The volume recommended by Westside seems ridiculously low in comparison.
(5) There is a great deal of satisfaction in doing high volume programs, but don't be seduced by this feeling. Powerlifters train for success in competition and would do well not do distract themselves with such considerations.
(6) Had I cooked up this program on my own, I would have been terrified of injuring myself with it.
(7) Four heavy workouts per week means that recovery isn't possible. Active rest exercises are probably necessary to prevent injury even for young athletes.
The next workout was two days later was 160 (352) x 5 sets x 7 reps. Again, hard but doable. I did a couple of sets of moderately heavy good mornings on this day to train by back, but at no time was I so foolish as to try deadlifts during this mesocycle. My bench press training proceeded pretty much as normal.
Two days later, I did 168 (370) x 7 sets of 5 reps. I noticed at this point that every training session, the athlete is required to perform between 30-36 work reps, regardless of the intensity of the lift (% of max).
On the fourth day of the week was 179 (394) x 10 sets of 3 reps. Not possible without a four minutes of rest. Multiply that by nine times you have to rest between sets and you have 36 minutes. Figure it takes one minute to do one set and you have 10 minutes + 36 minutes = 46 minutes. Figure fifteen minutes for a warmup, and you have a workout that takes almost exactly an hour. Doing this made me glad I wasn't wrapping my knees between sets.
In the second week, I decided the program was hard enough that I should take creatine after my workouts. Up to that point, all I had taken was whey protein. I recently heard that taking whey protein before or during training is better, but that's another story. Up to that time, I had never had any problems with creatine, but during the Smolov program, the stuff made my stomach hurt and made it difficult to eat proper meals. The stomach aches weren't that bad, however, and I chalked the slight indigestion I had to the intense training I was doing. It wasn't until the program was over and I went off of the creatine that I realized that it was the source of the problem.
In the second week, the program is identical to the first week, except the athlete is required to add 10 kgs (22lbs) to the weights handled in the first week. I was surprised to find that I could do it provided rest between sets was amply long.
However, an unforeseen problem cropped up toward the end of the second week. I started to have fairly intense heart palpitations. Mostly when I was at work, after lunch for two or three hours my heart would thump very hard several times, miss a beat, and then pound a single beat that was like a sledgehammer in my chest. There is no history of heart disease in my family, and I was pretty sure that it was just the result of overtraining, but it was difficult to ignore. But ignore it I did for a day or two. On Sunday night--a time I am generally a bit anxious about the long week ahead of me--after I went to bed, I was trying to coax myself into sleep, but the pounding in my heart would not stop. I checked on the Internet about heart palpitations and found two recurring opinions from doctors: (1) they're usually not a problem, and (2) don't ignore it, because if your heart stops, you die.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
Westside becomes a bit monotonous
With Westside, gains are slow and steady and seem to mirror increases to body weight to the point that you can pretty closely guess how much your squat, BP, and DL will go up for every pound of weight gain. Also, I have always been skinny, but Westside has changed that, and now I have a powerlifter gut. It's not fat and every time someone says it is, I challenge them to touch it, at which point, they are surprised how hard my stomach is. That being said, my physique is more lumberjack than bodybuilder.
About a year and a half of training squat/DL and BP for 3-7 reps @ 90% max and 20-25 reps @ 50%-65% for speed once a week each, it became a bit monotonous. I also felt that this volume of the three big lifts was not enough to really feel comfortable with the motions, which seemed like a real weakness to the system. Baseball players, golfers, boxers, and other athletes all practice their basic motions pretty religiously, whereas Westside seemed bent on keeping its athletes from doing the lifts they'd be competing in hardly at all.
I heard about the Smolov squat routine requiring fairly heavy squatting four times/week for a pretty high volume of around 30 work reps for each workout. The program was introduced to the US via an article by Pavel Tsatsouline in Powerlifting USA around 2000. I didn't take a look at it until several years after that, but I was familiar with Pavel. He peddles really overpriced books with wide margins, huge fonts, lotsa pictures, little information, and further pads his books with several pages of advertising for his other books. I have Power to the People, which the combined total information is on par with an ordinary magazine article. It prescribes training several times a week with two lifts, the deadlift and an old school strongman move called the side press, gradually working heavier and heavier, then when it gets too hard, taking a few days off and repeating the program from a slightly heavier starting point. The book promises to teach how to develop strength without developing muscle, but when you buy the book, the big secret is just to minimize the negative portion of the lift. This "secret" is such common knowledge among powerlifters, I would make an analogy of a famous chef writing a cookbook promising to teach how to make the best coffee in the world, and then the book just saying to put milk and sugar in it.
In short, this book was very damaging to my view of Pavel, although I have noticed that he seems to have advocates that I feel very comfortable describing as zealots. Also, some of the big names in the Westside crowd pay him lip service. I am still basically convinced the man is a scheister. I have seen hoards of them in the martial arts: yo-yos with delusions of grandeur who claim to masters of some esoteric system that there is little evidence that it actually exists (check out the George Dillman videos on youtube). Now, such charlatans have penetrated the strength training world too. The fanaticism that his defenders seem to embrace this man with is also disturbing. Still, why people in Westside, who consistently diss training routines resembling the ones he hawks, would speak of him with respect is perplexing.
Still, a fair number of people have blogged and posted that Smolov really raised their max, and I particularly thought that the high-volume training would help my CNS adapt to perform the squat more efficiently, while at the same time making my muscles overtrained so that I wouldn't gain weight, hence strength without the commensurate muscle gain I was seeing with Westside. I learned from the martial arts that a lot of instructors will give you advice on what you're doing wrong. However, such analysis is pretty difficult and most instructors can't do it very well regardless how many years they have been training and teaching. In my years of experience as a fighter, I wasn't remarkably good at doing it either, but I learned to distinguish when the instructor was giving me good advice and when he was talking out of his boomski. The Smolov routine was just like this: it made sense as a routine. Irrespective of my distrust of Pavel, the reasoning was sound enough and enough successful trainees had come forward to believe that it might work. It also helped that Pavel did not take credit for this program, but said that a Russian trainer invented it. That being said, this Smolov fellow remains a black box and nobody seems to have met him or know anything about him.
About a year and a half of training squat/DL and BP for 3-7 reps @ 90% max and 20-25 reps @ 50%-65% for speed once a week each, it became a bit monotonous. I also felt that this volume of the three big lifts was not enough to really feel comfortable with the motions, which seemed like a real weakness to the system. Baseball players, golfers, boxers, and other athletes all practice their basic motions pretty religiously, whereas Westside seemed bent on keeping its athletes from doing the lifts they'd be competing in hardly at all.
I heard about the Smolov squat routine requiring fairly heavy squatting four times/week for a pretty high volume of around 30 work reps for each workout. The program was introduced to the US via an article by Pavel Tsatsouline in Powerlifting USA around 2000. I didn't take a look at it until several years after that, but I was familiar with Pavel. He peddles really overpriced books with wide margins, huge fonts, lotsa pictures, little information, and further pads his books with several pages of advertising for his other books. I have Power to the People, which the combined total information is on par with an ordinary magazine article. It prescribes training several times a week with two lifts, the deadlift and an old school strongman move called the side press, gradually working heavier and heavier, then when it gets too hard, taking a few days off and repeating the program from a slightly heavier starting point. The book promises to teach how to develop strength without developing muscle, but when you buy the book, the big secret is just to minimize the negative portion of the lift. This "secret" is such common knowledge among powerlifters, I would make an analogy of a famous chef writing a cookbook promising to teach how to make the best coffee in the world, and then the book just saying to put milk and sugar in it.
In short, this book was very damaging to my view of Pavel, although I have noticed that he seems to have advocates that I feel very comfortable describing as zealots. Also, some of the big names in the Westside crowd pay him lip service. I am still basically convinced the man is a scheister. I have seen hoards of them in the martial arts: yo-yos with delusions of grandeur who claim to masters of some esoteric system that there is little evidence that it actually exists (check out the George Dillman videos on youtube). Now, such charlatans have penetrated the strength training world too. The fanaticism that his defenders seem to embrace this man with is also disturbing. Still, why people in Westside, who consistently diss training routines resembling the ones he hawks, would speak of him with respect is perplexing.
Still, a fair number of people have blogged and posted that Smolov really raised their max, and I particularly thought that the high-volume training would help my CNS adapt to perform the squat more efficiently, while at the same time making my muscles overtrained so that I wouldn't gain weight, hence strength without the commensurate muscle gain I was seeing with Westside. I learned from the martial arts that a lot of instructors will give you advice on what you're doing wrong. However, such analysis is pretty difficult and most instructors can't do it very well regardless how many years they have been training and teaching. In my years of experience as a fighter, I wasn't remarkably good at doing it either, but I learned to distinguish when the instructor was giving me good advice and when he was talking out of his boomski. The Smolov routine was just like this: it made sense as a routine. Irrespective of my distrust of Pavel, the reasoning was sound enough and enough successful trainees had come forward to believe that it might work. It also helped that Pavel did not take credit for this program, but said that a Russian trainer invented it. That being said, this Smolov fellow remains a black box and nobody seems to have met him or know anything about him.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Road to Westside
As I mentioned before, I was a little bit concerned about the effects of my body weight on my health. If I had not taken up weightlifting and instead done another sport like swimming, I would probably weigh around 170lbs, rather than 240, which is where I'm at now. Of course, I am a lean 240, but still, I assume that nature created me with internal organs designed to support a 170lb man, and the extra 70lbs would place a strain on my organs regardless of whether it was fat or lean.
I have been training with weights for over 20 years. I started when I was 17 and weighed about 150. By the time I was 19, I had gone up to around 170-180, despite very intense weight training in college. I read many of the bodybuilding magazines, which recommended stripping, supersets, giant sets, double-split routines, forced reps, negatives, and other common bodybuilding tactics of the late 80s that are still more or less around. Unfortunately, none of them really worked all that well, or rather, should I say at all, because despite pushing myself to the wall in every workout (remember, "no pain, no gain"), all I got was pain, without the gain. This eventually became dull and I moved more into martial arts and ring fighting, lifting weights enough to prevent loss of strength, but really making strength training a secondary priority. Twelve years later, I was burned out on the martial arts: I didn't like the other athletes with their tough guy attitudes and having boxed and kickboxing very seriously for several years, I wasn't getting any better at it. Progress I knew could come from getting stronger, faster, having better endurance, or being more coordinated. In short, I had felt I had learned what there was to learn and it was no longer interesting. On top of that ring fighting can lead to brain damage over the long haul, and although I hadn't been KOed a huge number of times, the risk of senility later in life should not be ignored. So, I had my last kickboxing match at age 34. I won by points.
I returned to just being a gym rat for a year or two. I looked at being a powerlifter, but I wasn't all that strong. I dabbled in power contraction training, which is a special isometric program focusing on holding extremely heavy weights, also I tried high-intensity training (HIT), which is one set to complete failure for each body part, only training about once every four days. Static contraction training worked well for squat and in about eight weeks I was able to support over 700lbs on the top position of my squat for around a minute. That being said my full-range squat didn't go up a gram, staying at around 330lbs.
I cannot overstate the impact that the Internet has had on strength training. Until the Internet came around, gym rats basically had Weider's magazines, which frequently gave training advice that was really counterproductive, along with Iron Man, which wasn't great, but had workouts that were interesting, even though they never worked for me. Powerlifting USA and Hardgainer were available by subscription, but they weren't on the magazine rack. They were both all right, but they seem like the dark ages compared to the information circulating now. Maybe the guys at leading strength training gyms in LA and New York might have figured out superior training methods, but for regular gym rats training on their own, after the first couple of years, gains tapered and continued gains seemed to be reserved for the genetically gifted and those using anabolic steroids.
I started dabbling in Olympic weightlifting. I figured I had been lifting weights long enough that I should at least learn how to do the two lifts, the clean and jerk and the snatch, with the idea that even if I couldn't be a great strength athlete, I could have a well-rounded iron education. The two lifts are VERY difficult technically. Particularly, the clean was hard to learn, especially since I was training by myself and trying to learn from books. Eventually, I found a guy in SF who was peddling a videotape on Olympic weightlifting. I bought it, and like every weight training video I've ever bought, it's really poorly made and overpriced, but at the same time, really quite helpful. I found Olympic lifting to be a pretty fascinating sport, and I think I could have fallen in love with it.
However, it was not to be. It was around this time that I started working as a translator, which is significant, because it meant that I started sitting in front of a computer all day moving text from Japanese to English. It requires a lot of concentration to do, so when my brain get tired, I surf the net for a few minutes as a break. This gave me the opportunity to read quite a bit about strength training, and to discover that common wisdom had taken a 180 and now forced reps were no longer productive and in fact, actually impede progress. After so many years of using training methods predicated on pushing to and past failure, internalizing that training should stop short of failure was indeed a leap of faith. It seemed like such a training method would be ridiculously easy. That being said, I gradually eased into it, and discovered that for the first time in around twelve years my bench press was moving up and I could do 225lbs--something I had never done before. This shattered my assumption that my body was simply not designed to exceed a bench of 205, a squat of 330, or a deadlift of 405. With this, my Olympic training went out the window. I wanted to compete and competing in Olympic weightlifting without a coach seemed much harder than powerlifting. Also, most gyms in Tokyo do not have bumper plates, which are necessary for Olympic lifting, nor do they have adequate space for Olympic weightlifting, since the athlete needs enough space in front and behind him to fall forward or back without hitting anything.
After awhile, a friend tipped me off to the Westside system of training. I read up on it, and although there was a huge amount of material for free on the Net, it seemed to raise more questions than it answered. The guru of Westside is Louie Simmons, who had a huge number of DVDs he had produced, but they were around fifty bucks a piece and there were so many of them and learning the system seemed to entail buying all of them, and so I solved that problem by not buying any of them at first (I have a couple now). Complicated by the fact that the system stresses exercises that require equipment costing over $1,000 and produced only by Louie didn't help. Still, at the core, the system isn't that complicated, it's just that the leading advocates don't really explain what it is very well. That being said, the time spent learning it was well worth it, because it is about the only training method that I have found that works at all. Basically, it involves doing a heavy exercise for either squat or deadlift once a week, a heavy bench press-related exercise once a week, then a speed exercise for squat or deadlift once a week, and a speed exercise for bench press once a week. Aside from that, it is crucial to do assistance work to address specific weaknesses in your lift. If you think about any given lift, when you go above your 1RM and fail, there is a specific reason for it. The athlete has to then figure out that reason and select exercises that will correct the problem. This is of course, easier said than done because the reason for failing is seldom obvious.
Still, even with these challenges, the Westside system works well; at the last meet my squat was 528, my bench was 330, and my deadlift was 572 (IPF rules). Not elite class, but respectable. That being said my body weight is around 240. I can't climb more than about four flights of stairs without stopping to catch my wind, which at a body weight of 180 I used to run up 10 flights of stairs. So, my gripe with Westside has come to be that while it has worked to make me a competitive powerlifter, it has also made me bigger than I want to be. Unrelated, but worth noting, it has become really difficult to buy pants in this country.
To be continued...
I have been training with weights for over 20 years. I started when I was 17 and weighed about 150. By the time I was 19, I had gone up to around 170-180, despite very intense weight training in college. I read many of the bodybuilding magazines, which recommended stripping, supersets, giant sets, double-split routines, forced reps, negatives, and other common bodybuilding tactics of the late 80s that are still more or less around. Unfortunately, none of them really worked all that well, or rather, should I say at all, because despite pushing myself to the wall in every workout (remember, "no pain, no gain"), all I got was pain, without the gain. This eventually became dull and I moved more into martial arts and ring fighting, lifting weights enough to prevent loss of strength, but really making strength training a secondary priority. Twelve years later, I was burned out on the martial arts: I didn't like the other athletes with their tough guy attitudes and having boxed and kickboxing very seriously for several years, I wasn't getting any better at it. Progress I knew could come from getting stronger, faster, having better endurance, or being more coordinated. In short, I had felt I had learned what there was to learn and it was no longer interesting. On top of that ring fighting can lead to brain damage over the long haul, and although I hadn't been KOed a huge number of times, the risk of senility later in life should not be ignored. So, I had my last kickboxing match at age 34. I won by points.
I returned to just being a gym rat for a year or two. I looked at being a powerlifter, but I wasn't all that strong. I dabbled in power contraction training, which is a special isometric program focusing on holding extremely heavy weights, also I tried high-intensity training (HIT), which is one set to complete failure for each body part, only training about once every four days. Static contraction training worked well for squat and in about eight weeks I was able to support over 700lbs on the top position of my squat for around a minute. That being said my full-range squat didn't go up a gram, staying at around 330lbs.
I cannot overstate the impact that the Internet has had on strength training. Until the Internet came around, gym rats basically had Weider's magazines, which frequently gave training advice that was really counterproductive, along with Iron Man, which wasn't great, but had workouts that were interesting, even though they never worked for me. Powerlifting USA and Hardgainer were available by subscription, but they weren't on the magazine rack. They were both all right, but they seem like the dark ages compared to the information circulating now. Maybe the guys at leading strength training gyms in LA and New York might have figured out superior training methods, but for regular gym rats training on their own, after the first couple of years, gains tapered and continued gains seemed to be reserved for the genetically gifted and those using anabolic steroids.
I started dabbling in Olympic weightlifting. I figured I had been lifting weights long enough that I should at least learn how to do the two lifts, the clean and jerk and the snatch, with the idea that even if I couldn't be a great strength athlete, I could have a well-rounded iron education. The two lifts are VERY difficult technically. Particularly, the clean was hard to learn, especially since I was training by myself and trying to learn from books. Eventually, I found a guy in SF who was peddling a videotape on Olympic weightlifting. I bought it, and like every weight training video I've ever bought, it's really poorly made and overpriced, but at the same time, really quite helpful. I found Olympic lifting to be a pretty fascinating sport, and I think I could have fallen in love with it.
However, it was not to be. It was around this time that I started working as a translator, which is significant, because it meant that I started sitting in front of a computer all day moving text from Japanese to English. It requires a lot of concentration to do, so when my brain get tired, I surf the net for a few minutes as a break. This gave me the opportunity to read quite a bit about strength training, and to discover that common wisdom had taken a 180 and now forced reps were no longer productive and in fact, actually impede progress. After so many years of using training methods predicated on pushing to and past failure, internalizing that training should stop short of failure was indeed a leap of faith. It seemed like such a training method would be ridiculously easy. That being said, I gradually eased into it, and discovered that for the first time in around twelve years my bench press was moving up and I could do 225lbs--something I had never done before. This shattered my assumption that my body was simply not designed to exceed a bench of 205, a squat of 330, or a deadlift of 405. With this, my Olympic training went out the window. I wanted to compete and competing in Olympic weightlifting without a coach seemed much harder than powerlifting. Also, most gyms in Tokyo do not have bumper plates, which are necessary for Olympic lifting, nor do they have adequate space for Olympic weightlifting, since the athlete needs enough space in front and behind him to fall forward or back without hitting anything.
After awhile, a friend tipped me off to the Westside system of training. I read up on it, and although there was a huge amount of material for free on the Net, it seemed to raise more questions than it answered. The guru of Westside is Louie Simmons, who had a huge number of DVDs he had produced, but they were around fifty bucks a piece and there were so many of them and learning the system seemed to entail buying all of them, and so I solved that problem by not buying any of them at first (I have a couple now). Complicated by the fact that the system stresses exercises that require equipment costing over $1,000 and produced only by Louie didn't help. Still, at the core, the system isn't that complicated, it's just that the leading advocates don't really explain what it is very well. That being said, the time spent learning it was well worth it, because it is about the only training method that I have found that works at all. Basically, it involves doing a heavy exercise for either squat or deadlift once a week, a heavy bench press-related exercise once a week, then a speed exercise for squat or deadlift once a week, and a speed exercise for bench press once a week. Aside from that, it is crucial to do assistance work to address specific weaknesses in your lift. If you think about any given lift, when you go above your 1RM and fail, there is a specific reason for it. The athlete has to then figure out that reason and select exercises that will correct the problem. This is of course, easier said than done because the reason for failing is seldom obvious.
Still, even with these challenges, the Westside system works well; at the last meet my squat was 528, my bench was 330, and my deadlift was 572 (IPF rules). Not elite class, but respectable. That being said my body weight is around 240. I can't climb more than about four flights of stairs without stopping to catch my wind, which at a body weight of 180 I used to run up 10 flights of stairs. So, my gripe with Westside has come to be that while it has worked to make me a competitive powerlifter, it has also made me bigger than I want to be. Unrelated, but worth noting, it has become really difficult to buy pants in this country.
To be continued...
Sunday, June 17, 2007
The Value of Smolov
The Smolov training program only contains instructions for squatting. No other exercises are prescribed. The routine was originally devised for Olympic weightlifters whose clean & jerk and snatch are limited by a weak squat. The Westside guys frequently comment that if your squat goes up, so will your Olympic lifts, but that the reverse is not necessarily true. While many strength gurus peg the squat as THE definitive strength exercise, I did stumble across an interesting article by an Olympic weightlifter arguing that one's snatch and clean & jerk are not simply a function of one's squat, and there have been many successful Olympic weightlifters with a relatively weak squat and many strong squatters with less than remarkable Olympic lifts. See link here: http://www.dynamic-eleiko.com/sportivny/library/farticles004.html. This article doesn't mention Smolov by name and might be discussing a different, albeit similar,Russian squat program. The article importantly notes that a squat routine by itself is not adequate training for a powerlifter: it is only one-third of the sport he competes in. For this reason, the individual athlete has to come up with a program for the other two lifts that will not interfere with the rigorous squatting. For benchpress this is easy since there is little crossover between the two lifts, but the deadlift uses many of the same muscle groups (quads, hams, glutes, lumbars) that you need to squat, and trying to deadlift while doing the Smolov programs sounds like a good way to get injured or to simply not be able to complete the program. I avoided this problem by doing a moderate good morning workout (up to 10@70%), which seemed like just enough to prevent losing pulling strength in my lower back. I made other aspects of my workout abbreviated as well, given my time constraints.
Cutting back on assistance exercises is always useful to help the athlete rethink the exercises he incorporates into his training regimen. Most athletes discover in the course of training that not all exercises are created equal, and every once in a while athletes come across one that just seems perfect for developing a specific muscle or practicing a specific motion. That exercise is then performed once or twice a week for possibly YEARS--despite the fact that it only really provided strength gains for the first five or six weeks--simply because the athlete is unable to find another exercise that fills the same purpose and works as well. So, having to streamline your workouts during a particularly gruelling program gives you a chance to reevaluate the exercises you do regularly with fresh eyes.
Cutting back on assistance exercises is always useful to help the athlete rethink the exercises he incorporates into his training regimen. Most athletes discover in the course of training that not all exercises are created equal, and every once in a while athletes come across one that just seems perfect for developing a specific muscle or practicing a specific motion. That exercise is then performed once or twice a week for possibly YEARS--despite the fact that it only really provided strength gains for the first five or six weeks--simply because the athlete is unable to find another exercise that fills the same purpose and works as well. So, having to streamline your workouts during a particularly gruelling program gives you a chance to reevaluate the exercises you do regularly with fresh eyes.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Smolov at 38
Having been an amateur athlete for the last twenty years, I have always said that while exercise is good for your health, competitive athletics is most usually bad--even at the amateur level. Even though most powerlifters tend to voice their worries about the risk of knee and shoulder injuries, my worries regarding the heart increased after I started the Smolov squat routine three weeks ago.
For the uninitiated, the Smolov squat routine is an extremely challenging, 4-time a week squat program squat program put together by some Russian named Smolov and introduced to this country by trainer Pavel Tsatsouline. The link to the original article as it appeared in PL USA a few years back can be found here:
http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode3/80/
The program is appealing for four reasons: (1) it's super hard, (2) it's very different from the Westside template, (3) it promises a 100-pound increase in your squat, and (4) the Westside program tends to really make you heavy, and I thought this program might not.
I often suspect that programs like this one do a disservice to lifters in their late teens and early twenties, who tend to be very eager to train hard and lack the discipline not to overtrain. For young strength athletes, the maxim, "no pain, no gain" is many times interpreted as "gain is a function of pain," or even worse "pain...gooood" (spoken in gravelly caveman voice). Smolov's squat program is high-intensity AND high volume, and it must be understood from the outset that this program should only be performed knowing that it leads to the kind of severe overtraining that the body can only tolerate because the program is short, and that moreover, afterward a layoff of a few weeks from intense lower body training needs to be incorporated into one's program. Unfortunately, I fear that young lifters may mistake the Smolov program for the standard of how hard you should train, which it most definitely is not.
After 20 years of training, I have come to realize the importance of rest and recovery without regarding it as a sign of laziness, but still find myself overtraining more than I should. It is also important to note that even in powerlifting, training and exercise need to be distinguished from one another. That is to say, a powerlifter might be able to enhance his strength on the benchpress by doing four heavy singles once a week, but this will not keep him in shape. Therefore, depending on your program, your training will have to be supplemented by workouts intended to keep your fitness level high, which will allow your body to better adapt to your strength training and prevent injuries.
However, the Smolov program is so intense that it doesn't require so much additional training: the squat workouts have enough volume with enough weight that it alone will more or less keep you in shape, which is also appealing to most strength athletes who want to stay in shape, but also know that cardio workouts are counterproductive to strength gains, and therefore struggle to come up with supplementary workouts to keep them in a trained state but are not simply additional sets of mainstay resistance exercises that will inevitably lead to overtraining.
To be continued....
For the uninitiated, the Smolov squat routine is an extremely challenging, 4-time a week squat program squat program put together by some Russian named Smolov and introduced to this country by trainer Pavel Tsatsouline. The link to the original article as it appeared in PL USA a few years back can be found here:
http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/mode3/80/
The program is appealing for four reasons: (1) it's super hard, (2) it's very different from the Westside template, (3) it promises a 100-pound increase in your squat, and (4) the Westside program tends to really make you heavy, and I thought this program might not.
I often suspect that programs like this one do a disservice to lifters in their late teens and early twenties, who tend to be very eager to train hard and lack the discipline not to overtrain. For young strength athletes, the maxim, "no pain, no gain" is many times interpreted as "gain is a function of pain," or even worse "pain...gooood" (spoken in gravelly caveman voice). Smolov's squat program is high-intensity AND high volume, and it must be understood from the outset that this program should only be performed knowing that it leads to the kind of severe overtraining that the body can only tolerate because the program is short, and that moreover, afterward a layoff of a few weeks from intense lower body training needs to be incorporated into one's program. Unfortunately, I fear that young lifters may mistake the Smolov program for the standard of how hard you should train, which it most definitely is not.
After 20 years of training, I have come to realize the importance of rest and recovery without regarding it as a sign of laziness, but still find myself overtraining more than I should. It is also important to note that even in powerlifting, training and exercise need to be distinguished from one another. That is to say, a powerlifter might be able to enhance his strength on the benchpress by doing four heavy singles once a week, but this will not keep him in shape. Therefore, depending on your program, your training will have to be supplemented by workouts intended to keep your fitness level high, which will allow your body to better adapt to your strength training and prevent injuries.
However, the Smolov program is so intense that it doesn't require so much additional training: the squat workouts have enough volume with enough weight that it alone will more or less keep you in shape, which is also appealing to most strength athletes who want to stay in shape, but also know that cardio workouts are counterproductive to strength gains, and therefore struggle to come up with supplementary workouts to keep them in a trained state but are not simply additional sets of mainstay resistance exercises that will inevitably lead to overtraining.
To be continued....
Friday, June 15, 2007
Introduction
I decided to start this blog to record training methods and observations about my powerlifting training. This seemed important because writing forces deeper thinking about the topic at hand, and is therefore a form of learning in and of itself. I hope it will provide good reference for other powerlifters and give me the opportunity to get feedback from other powerlifters who have struggled with similar problems.
Just the facts:
Sex: Male
Age: 38
Occupation: translator (most sedentary job imaginable)
Training age: About twenty, although for ten years in the middle I was more focused on the martial arts.
Meet experience: three IPF meets
Best meet lifts: 240kg squat, 150kg bench, 270kg deadlift
Bodyweight: 108kg
I have been training Westside-style for the last two years, my bodyweight has gone up around 17 kg (37lbs) in that time, which was mostly muscle. You hear a lot in the news about the dangers of obesity, but I have never heard anything about unnatural amounts of muscle being a strain on your body. That being said, despite my impressive strength (compared to the first time I walked into the gym, not Magnus Samuelsson), I have extremely poor endurance and can only walk up around three or four flights of stairs before I have to catch my breath. For this reason, I suspect that even though I am fairly lean, the muscle itself is probably a strain on my body overall and my heart in particular, which has to pump blood to support all of my muscle tissue.
I had my last kickboxing match when I was 34, and I wanted the next sport I did to (1) not require a teacher, coach, or training partner (2) not require more than an hour of training a day given my work schedule, and (3) be something that I could compete in regardless of my age. Powerlifting seemed to fit the bill perfectly because, although the training method is complicated, the most necessary information can be gleaned from books, the net, and videos. In addition, most of the world class powerlifters are in their thirties, and there are many strong guys in their forties and fifties as well. However, had I never lifted a weight in my life, but kept fit through a more well-rounded exercise system of training, such as tennis or basketball, my bodyweight would probably be around 155-165, instead of around 237, where its at now. Now I am starting to wonder whether the extra 78lbs of weight my body is maintaining is not putting undue strain on my body, that if I continue to be so heavy over a period of decades, will not shave years off of my life or increase the chances of me being bed-ridden in my golden years.
To be continued later....
Just the facts:
Sex: Male
Age: 38
Occupation: translator (most sedentary job imaginable)
Training age: About twenty, although for ten years in the middle I was more focused on the martial arts.
Meet experience: three IPF meets
Best meet lifts: 240kg squat, 150kg bench, 270kg deadlift
Bodyweight: 108kg
I have been training Westside-style for the last two years, my bodyweight has gone up around 17 kg (37lbs) in that time, which was mostly muscle. You hear a lot in the news about the dangers of obesity, but I have never heard anything about unnatural amounts of muscle being a strain on your body. That being said, despite my impressive strength (compared to the first time I walked into the gym, not Magnus Samuelsson), I have extremely poor endurance and can only walk up around three or four flights of stairs before I have to catch my breath. For this reason, I suspect that even though I am fairly lean, the muscle itself is probably a strain on my body overall and my heart in particular, which has to pump blood to support all of my muscle tissue.
I had my last kickboxing match when I was 34, and I wanted the next sport I did to (1) not require a teacher, coach, or training partner (2) not require more than an hour of training a day given my work schedule, and (3) be something that I could compete in regardless of my age. Powerlifting seemed to fit the bill perfectly because, although the training method is complicated, the most necessary information can be gleaned from books, the net, and videos. In addition, most of the world class powerlifters are in their thirties, and there are many strong guys in their forties and fifties as well. However, had I never lifted a weight in my life, but kept fit through a more well-rounded exercise system of training, such as tennis or basketball, my bodyweight would probably be around 155-165, instead of around 237, where its at now. Now I am starting to wonder whether the extra 78lbs of weight my body is maintaining is not putting undue strain on my body, that if I continue to be so heavy over a period of decades, will not shave years off of my life or increase the chances of me being bed-ridden in my golden years.
To be continued later....
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