Squat Every Day, page 4
This process of reinforcement and growth, known as long-term potentiation, is fundamental to all learning, whether picking up a language or learning how to squat. Changes in nerve activity precede changes in nerve structure.
The more you practice a skill, the better you become at that skill. Practice enough and the skill hardwires itself into your brain.
Following on this exact idea in his book Power to the People!, Pavel Tsatsouline writes that most strength-training programs are all bodybuilding in disguise, focused on building muscle bulk rather than more productive strength-building methods.8
That’s fine if bodybuilding is the goal. But Pavel says most people wind up chasing bigger muscles when they really want to lift more weight. Instead of training with that in mind, they train badly and, when the bodybuilding stops being so effective, the next step is to hop on a steroid cycle.
As Mel Siff and Yuri Verkhoshansky wrote, it would be better to use “specialized training regimes to enhance nervous system conditioning” if the goal is strength. Train the nervous system, not the muscles.
It’s easy to think of strength as a crude quality, just hoisting a weight from point A to point B. In the middle of a heavy set of squats, the word “skill” doesn’t immediately spring to mind. But that’s exactly what it is.
When you decide to move, a stream of nerve impulses flows out of your brain, through the spinal cord, and into relevant muscles, causing them to contract. That sounds simple enough, but motor control ― control over voluntary movement ― is one of the more complicated feats performed by the mammal brain.
The motor cortex sits right next door to the sensory cortex, acting as the outbox and sending those movement signals out to your muscles. When the motor cortex sends out the signal to move, another structure down by the bottom of the brain, the cerebellum, gets a copy. The cerebellum also responds to sensory feedback from your body ― how your limbs are moving, where they are in space relative to everyone else ― and works to fine-tune the signals coming out of the motor cortex.
This feedback loop is the basis of any movement. Even actions we take for granted, standing up or grabbing a cup of coffee, require an enormous amount of on the fly fine-tuning, involving vision and kinesthetic (body-awareness) senses.
You have to know where the object is, and where you are in relation to it, in order to grab it and move it around.
Every move you make is a complex balance between the signals to move ― called central motor drive ― and your sensory awareness of what’s actually happening.
It’s easy to think of skill as being the gross movement through space ― swinging a bat, shooting a three-pointer, kicking a soccer ball ― and little more. A skill is just a movement. Once you learn it, you’ve learned it.
Mel Siff noted that motor learning doesn’t quite work that way. Learning isn’t just a matter of picking up a movement one time, in the way you learned to ride a bike as a kid. According to Siff, skill development is an on-going process which “continues as the intensity and complexity of loading increases, as skill under demanding conditions is significantly different from skill under less onerous conditions”.9
Even to the trained eye, a batter’s swing will always look like a swing no matter how heavy the bat. As far as your brain is concerned, the superficial movement pattern is just the beginning. Different parts of your motor-control system light up in different ways when a movement is done quickly compared to slowly, or heavy compared to light. Speed, resistance, and range of motion are all part of that skill.10
A squat with 60% is literally a different movement from a squat at 95% of your best lift. Squatting 90 kilos in your first year of training is different from 140 in your second year and still different from 220 after eight years. You can see this for yourself. Load up a bar with 60% and do a few reps with it. Now load the bar up to 95%. The weights feel different, almost like different movements. As far as your brain knows, they are.11
Technical mastery, even in “dumb” strength movements, is continual process of learning. Each gain in strength, every extra kilo on your squat, presents a new challenge to your brain. You learn the movement-through-space, and you learn how to handle it with heavy weights.
Pavel’s groove-greasing philosophy exploits this circuit between brain and muscle, treating strength as a skill to develop through practice and repetition. As you learned to swim and ride a bike, practicing heavy lifts ― squats, bench presses, and deadlifts included ― teaches the motor-control loop how to lift heavy.
“Neural” training explains why you never forget how to ride a bike, or walk, or any motor skill that you take for granted. New, complex, and challenging movements stimulate new connections, literally wiring the new skill into your brain.12
In principle, the more practice you get with an exercise ― not just the gross movement, but the weight and technical conditions of that weight ― the better you get at it. You wouldn’t practice the violin once a week, or try to learn German with two one-hour practices. The best violinists play for hours each week. Language learning correlates with time spent speaking it.
To get good at lifting heavy things, you must practice lifting heavy things.
Widen the Base
In his book Secrets of Soviet Sports Training, Dr. Michael Yessis relates a story of how he once happened upon the Russian weightlifting team. This in itself is not so unusual, as it happened at an international competition, but what they were doing caught his eye.13
Yessis watched the Russian national team playing a pickup game of soccer the day before going on the platform. Soccer can be a demanding game, and yet, despite playing hard, the lifters were, well, making a game of it, having fun and enjoying themselves without a hint of strain.
Why would weightlifters be playing a vigorous game of soccer right before an important competition? Shouldn’t they be resting? And for that matter, why were weightlifters in shape to casually play an aerobically-inclined sport as soccer?
Russian coaches were big on general physical preparation (GPP). GPP training doesn’t don’t directly improve the sport, but does improve work capacity and break up the monotony of lifting heavy year-round. General development was especially important for young athletes, who needed a large base of conditioning to tolerate later specialization. Being “fit” in a well-rounded sense ― in good enough condition for leisurely games of soccer before a major weightlifting contest ― was essential to Russian strength-building practice.
The term “GPP” has come to mean “hard cardio” nowadays, with powerlifters dragging sleds and doing strongman medleys alongside more traditional strength workouts. The idea reached the mainstream in the West thanks to Louie Simmons, who’s long advocated the idea of being “in shape to train”. GPP methods encourage recuperation in mind and body, as well as building that crucial work capacity.
It’s hard to draw a line between too much training and just being out of shape for what you’re doing. We need to be in shape if we want to perform at a high level, and that takes more than two or three strength workouts in between force-feedings.
By “in shape”, I don’t mean extreme aerobic conditioning for any 10-minute romp or 10-mile run, but that’s certainly got something to do with it. This isn’t about that ever-elusive quality of “hardcore” with cute motivating slogans meant to show the world what an uncrackable nut you are. You can surround yourself with all the trendy mass-marketed fad-driven totems in the world and never once get close to the inner power necessary for a nosebleed deadlift, or overhead axle for maximum reps, or a triathlon.
When I say “in shape”, ignore whatever preconceived notions you have about endurance athletes. In shape means that you’re fit for every aspect of your goal. In strength training, that means being able to lift the weight, yes, but it also means developing all the other parts of your body (and mind) that give you the physical ability to be strong.
“Establishing a solid foundation of consistent, hard training and slowly expanding it is the only way to achieve a higher level of strength,” wrote strength coach Bill Starr. “It’s much like building the base of a pyramid. Once that base is sufficiently wide, you can elevate the top.”14
Starr was writing about the need to gradually increase the training volume in your strength workouts, necessary to build “strength conditioning”. The volume isn’t the end in itself, but rather the means of getting in shape in order to get stronger. A high work capacity allows you to handle the volume you need to improve.
Widening the base is about being in shape to lift. Being athletic and capable of handling whatever comes at you. Getting through your workouts without tanking 20 minutes in. It’s that old-school kind of toughness where you just get it done. No worrying about overtraining, no worrying about whether your conditioning work will kill your strength. You just go do the thing, and you’re confident that it’s no big deal because you’re doing it smart.
The more quality work you do in training, the more your whole body ― muscles, nerves, organs, everything ― experiences a demand to adapt. These adaptations lay the base for future peaks in strength. You can tolerate harder training, even as the training itself builds strength.
Volume is part of the answer but not, by itself, the goal.
A lifter training with 50,000 pounds each week can split it over two workouts for 25,000 pounds each day ― sustainable, but each of those monster sessions leaves him a wreck for several days. There’s a limit to how much you can do in a single workout, and even if you have time for two to three hours of training, long and volume-heavy workouts aren’t always ideal.
But divide that over five workouts and now he’s only handling 10,000 lbs each session. Much shorter sessions, much easier on recovery from day to day.
Training frequently lets you break up those long sessions into manageable bites, and the volume becomes a consequence of regular practice. With months and years of gradual improvements, this lifter will be handling far higher net volume ― tonnage per week ― than he ever could in one or two sessions.
More workouts mean more opportunities to practice under weights without the boredom and exhaustion of three-hour workouts. You get in shape through sheer repetition and consistency.
Strength is about skill, teaching your brain how to handle both a movement and a maximum weight, but it’s also about building your body’s capacities.
Nobody Strong Trains This Way
Right about now, the astute reader will have posed an obvious question: “Why do I need to do all this when so many of the strongest people in the world don’t train that often?” Why wouldn’t you want to do the least amount of work that you can get away with? Despite all the anecdotal evidence of lifters surviving and thriving on frequency, this is a good question.
I can give you two good answers.
We’ve already covered the first. Progressive overload and neurological adaptation tell us that, at least in principle, the more you do, the stronger you can become. Each workout promotes growth and stimulates adaptation, so the more often you can train, the more you experience those cycles of growth and adaptation stress. In principle, more frequent training should add up to more progress.
This answer won’t satisfy many people, not the least of which because there are so many examples of people getting amazingly strong without all the trouble. And, as Milo’s story demonstrates, strength doesn’t just “add together” from training every day. There has to be more to it.
You also don’t have to look far to find top strength athletes who train 2-4 days a week. Squatting and benching once a week is common, and leaving the deadlift to languish every second week or once a month or even less has become a staple.
Doesn’t this disprove the idea that you need to train more to get stronger? If so many of lifters at the top get there by Doing Less, doesn’t that mean you should follow their lead? Isn’t it likely that more training would lead to diminishing returns by dipping into your recovery? Isn’t it true that more isn’t always better, precisely because the human body can only handle so much before training beats you into paste?
To be honest about my intentions up front, the answer is no. When it comes to recovery, there are myths and unconsidered half-truths that play like a broken record in the domains of fitness and human performance, and I think most of them are next to useless. What I have come to call ‘folk recovery’, in which your freshly-certified personal trainer speaks of ‘recovery’ as if it’s some ghostly energy stored in a battery near your kidneys, is so off the mark that it’s not even wrong.
Bad theory, of course, leads to bad advice. From folk recovery we get the belief that there is some ultimate limit to how much training you can do, and, in the opposite case, that you are best served by getting more rest so as to keep your recovery magic topped up like a fresh tank of gas.
Consider the popular statement “no one needs to do that much training”. Really? How do you know what anyone needs with regards to any performance goal? It’s not clear what anyone needs to do in any instance, and we’re best staying out of arguments about necessity.
The more critical issue, implied by the question about the training of the world-class, is whether or not you benefit from the same type of strategy they do. Again, I believe the answer is no. I will make a more detailed case for this later on. For now let it suffice to say that people are not identical and even if you share the goal of “lift more weight” you might find that there are better ways to make that happen. I realize that doesn’t sound like much more than a weak “everybody’s different” justification, but there is meat to this point.
Ivan Abadjiev gets credit for “the Bulgarian training system”, but training daily with maximum weights is no Bulgarian innovation. Angel Spassov, one-time coach of the Bulgarian team, once stated that in developing their seemingly radical system they looked to the American weightlifters of previous decades.
We’ve already been introduced to Bob Peoples with his routine of daily heavy sets, but Peoples himself wasn’t exceptional for his time. Lifters like Bob Bednarski and John Davis were training heavy and often, using multiple triples and single-rep sets back in the 1940s, lifting on five- and six-day schedules. The slightest research will turn up many more names from the early to middle 20th Century, and most all of them trained heavy and often.
You might point out that many (though not all) of these examples are Olympic weightlifters. The snatch and the clean & jerk, phenomenal tests of strength and athleticism that they are, have noticeable differences from your standard squats and deadlifts and bench presses.
For one thing, these lifts are fast ― it’s not for nothing that we call them the quick lifts. As the ruckus in your average weightlifting gym will inform you, these lifts are dropped from the top position. No messy eccentric overload and all the muscular damage it causes.
The quick lifts are a far cry from the tooth-gritting effort put into a bench press or a deadlift, let alone the muscle-blasting that bodybuilders swear by. There’s a whole slew of psychological and physiological differences that must surely make a difference.
But hang on: Olympic lifters also squat. In the case of Abadjiev’s lifters, they squat the same way they practice the lifts ― heavy and unreasonably often. Leonid Taranenko, the Russian weightlifter who still holds the world record for the all-time best clean & jerk, squatted over 300kg and claimed to squat six days a week.
Ok, so that’s no help. Well, what does Olympic weightlifting have to do with powerlifting or strongman anyway? They are two different goals.
Boris Sheiko, the coach of the Russian national powerlifting team, seems to think the answer to that last question is “quite a lot”. Sheiko’s programming is notorious for its focus on volume, rather than the traditional powerlifting focus on intensity. Gone are the sets of 10. Even sets of five, the bread and butter of American strength-building, don’t get much play in Sheiko’s methods.
Instead, Sheiko focuses on lots of volume ― lots of practice ― with moderate intensities and low reps. Sets of three or less are the rule here, and intensity only rarely climbs above 85% of the lifter’s 1RM.15
As Sheiko’s lifters progress in strength, they move through a ranking scheme that qualifies them from beginners to elites competing on the world stage. Depending on their classification, Sheiko’s athletes squat anywhere from three to ten times a week. The internationally-competitive Master of Sport lifters train four to five days a week, sometimes with morning and evening sessions.
Sheiko’s methodology developed from the study of strength-building methods used by the weightlifting teams. In the Russian view, strength is strength: a weightlifter’s 300 kilo squat is no less impressive simply because it belongs to a weightlifter. Factoring in bodyweight, supportive gear, and squat style ― the Olympic lifter’s distinctive upright, close-stance, full-depth style ― the weightlifters come out ahead more often than not.
Thanks to the Russian success on the world stage, Sheiko’s frequency-centric and volume-heavy programs are currently all the rage among powerlifters competing under IPF regulations. As impressive as top powerlifters are, the image of lifters virtually mummified in supportive gear sets an expectation unreasonable ― and undesirable ― to many. The training has been adjusted to play to the equipment, rather than building an overall foundation of strength.
Do you squat in suits of triple-ply canvas with briefs under that and knee wraps as thick as your wrist?
Propaganda aside, the powerlifters that have traditionally done the best in minimal gear, at lighter body weights, and under strict judging have always had more in common with Olymplic lifters than the current popular image of powerlifters. Even in the US, it’s not hard to find powerlifters who train more than orthodoxy wants to allow. Names like Brian Siders, Mike Bridges, and Wade Hooper ― himself a recent Sheiko convert ― immediately spring to mind.
Siders trains upwards of six days a week with an intimidating volume, and while his records leave little doubt that he’s one of the genetically gifted, you can’t help but wonder which came first ― the volume or the “genes”.
