Dave Was Right
The only occasion on which my high school weight lifting Coach and I butted heads was over the advice of another coach. I was in college and training with the famous Joe Mills of Central Falls, Rhode Island, who advocated technique work exclusively, snatches and clean and jerks drilled to perfection. His belief was that, as with a baseball pitcher, expertise and speed made for optimal training.
To my first Coach, this was madness. I’d drop into my high school weight room when I was home on breaks, where to my great surprise the topic of training with the man responsible for World Champions Bob Bednarski and Mark Cameron became a point of contention. I’m not sure which surprised Coach more, Mills’ neglect of strength training in a strength sport, or the willingness of a kid who worked his way from scrawniness to a 460 pound squat to cast that all aside. ‘Tommy, this guy is not God,’ he said at one point.
Yeah, but he was about as close as someone could get, I thought. On the world stage through the 1960’s, Mills’ protege Bednarski defeated the Soviet Leonid Zhabotinsky time and time again. During this time, a young Vasily Alexeev would set up cameras to capture Bednarski in action, after which he’d pore over the films to study his technique. In the 70’s, Alexeev became weightlifting’s greatest international superstar. He knew all too well who Joe Mills was - and Joe played upon this, taunting him backstage at the 1970 World Championships in Columbus Ohio, ‘You copied my boy Bednarski.’
Alexeev tried to pretend he didn’t understand English, but he was rattled to the point that before his first snatch attempt, he angrily tore down a set of television lights that were shining in his eyes.
I was running in faster company with a different set of rules, Coach failed to see.
The story is too long and miserable to re-live, but it turned out that Coach - capital ‘C’ Coach - from high school was right all along. This was on two levels: (1.) do not invest all your faith in one person, and (2.) some of the technical approaches to training in which he dabbled decades ago are being validated by recent research.
Years passed. Having figured that my strength career ran its course, I pursued other interests, namely running, swimming, and martial arts. It was CrossFit that brought me, along with millions (or probably hundreds of thousands) of other ordinary fitness enthusiasts, back to barbell training. CrossFit deserves recognition for its transformative role in both the fitness industry and internet culture. It became a hub, the focus of a dozen other websites for people getting in on the act of this exciting new and outlaw fitness trend. CrossFit’s costliest mistake was the result of one of its best intentions, educating athletes on the various disciplines it embraced, running, powerlifting, gymnastics, and so on. People loved what they discovered and left cross training to specialize in these newfound interests.
It was CrossFit that introduced Louie Simmons and the monstrous powerlifters of Westside Barbell to the wider world. These were the guys using bands and chains as well as leaping onto boxes or mats stacked to impressive heights. Really, Simmons’ achievement in the late 80’s and early 90’s was to get hold of translations of Russian training manuals. He revealed to the Western world that as far as strength and athleticism were concerned, the human central nervous system has a five gear transmission consisting of -
1. Isometric Strength
2. Maximal Strength
3. Strength Speed
4. Speed Strength
5. Quickness
Understanding the role of each gear in a given sport, as well as how best to train it, is what enabled Eastern Bloc athletes to eclipse their Western counterparts. This utterly boggled the mind of American industrialist and weightlifting advocate Bob Hoffman, founder of York Barbell. He simply could not fathom how smaller, ‘fattier’ looking Russians could outperform the sheer specimens he sponsored, who often competed on the weightlifting platform and physique stage on the same day.
Decades later, Louie Simmons and his lifters enjoyed great success putting to use some of the methodology the Soviets had developed. Broadly speaking, this involves training both the muscular and neurological systems, the latter being the central nervous system’s ability to recruit greater numbers of motor units in every contraction. It includes:
1. Eccentric Action Training: muscles yielding or lengthening under load
2. Concentric Action Training: muscle action as it’s conventionally understood, muscles shortening under load
3. Isometric Action Training: when muscles neither shorten or lengthen but exert maximal force against immovable resistance
4. Kinetic Energy Accumulation Training: also known as plyometrics, this exploits muscles’ enhanced contractile potential after forceful or rapid lengthening
5. Contrast Training: varies the external load either during workout, an exercise, a set, or even during a repetition
Despite the considerable depth and breadth all this represents, Simmons’ Westside method is a strangely narrow approach to strength training. I didn’t get too far on it, so this was when I jumped to Mark Rippetoe’s STARTING STRENGTH approach. I was simply following Coach’s advice and not putting all my eggs in one training basket.
More interesting is the idea that even if the Eastern Bloc coaches knew more about optimizing these methods, they were not lost on there Americans decades ago - if Coach’s instruction back in high school was any indication.
We did quarter squats on occasion with hundreds of pounds, using enormous truck and crane gears as plates to load as much as 800 pounds on a bar. This builds tendon strength and trains the Golgi tendon organs, proprioceptors that sense tension and function as circuit breakers for the central nervous system, though they tend to be a little conservative in their tolerances.
We did fairly rapid-peaking progressions, usually lasting about eight weeks, moving up five pounds a workout, allowing reps to decrease as the loads increased. Once we reached new maximum singles, we switched groups of exercises and repeated the process. This worked better for some than others - but it’s certainly on the list of viable training options.
Coach also had us doing jump squats - any time someone’s attitude needed adjusting, as they were crippling - but also to develop explosiveness. His shot putters similarly did rapid presses with light weights as the track season drew near.
From Rippetoe and STARTING STRENGTH I learned the core logic of programming, which is what got me to surpass those limits I reached long ago. Still, the view from that mountain does not take in the entire landscape, so it’s time to move on.
The trick now is to see who’s made better sense of all that depth and breadth of training science from Russia - and everywhere else by this point. News both good and bad must be considered:
GOOD - It was neurological training, namely pin presses, that finally allowed me to break the 300-pound bench press barrier a few years ago. Similarly, it was pin presses along with a relatively light amount of concentric work that brought me to my all time best, 310.
BAD - Afterward in each case above, I was so eager to lift even more that I put all my effort into standard concentric sets and reps, beating the Hell out of myself with volume and intensity to the point that I made myself regress. I was like one of Bob Hoffman’s magnificent bronzed gods losing out to a lesser mortal.
GOOD - My bench presses right now are rolling along, thanks to neurological work, the floor presses done from a dead stop and which compel a high level of motor unit recruitment.
Those quarter squats once upon a time probably had something to do with the fantastic progress I made as a novice.
BAD - I lifted some pretty heavy weights up until two months ago, deadlifting 527.5, and squatting 445 for singles - plural - in a workout. I’m paying the price for it, however, with that piriformis, glute, or ham that doesn’t want to go heavy nowadays.
So what got me in trouble, the volume or the intensity of concentric reps? It used to be that those were the only two variables to consider, but now it would appear that they’ll be sharing the bill with those from new domains. Figuring out where I went wrong is just as important as finding out what might be right. Did too much volume deplete glycogen, sparking an increased cortisol output - the effect of which can be a blunting of protein synthesis? There’s more than meets the eye.
This is the larger realization: it’s not just that some training routines work while others fall short. Sets, reps, time, and effort WILL effect physical change, which can be either positive or negative.
Stay tuned for the details on the new neurological and muscular brew.
