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....