Okay, so maybe the title of this article isn't entirely fair to myself. Here I sit, at 9:45 am on a Thursday, with literally NOTHING on my agenda that I'm responsible for today. I've been awake since 5:30, tossing and turning until the rising sun's light filled my room and I finally got sick of laying in bed analyzing my current training program in my head and hearing my roommate talk and mumble in his sleep. As a graduate student, my schedule doesn't match up with my peers who are still completing their four years of undergrad. My classes were short but intense, beginning in late September and finishing the first week of December. Therefore, for the last week and a half my life has consisted entirely of eating, sleeping, training, and hanging out with friends.
While I've been living the dream these past couple weeks, I've had far too much time to reflect upon and analyze my current training schedule and philosophy. I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to training, and admittedly, I usually end up driving myself insane scrutinizing every single detail of what I do. I spend countless hours on the Internet, reading articles, listening to interviews, and watching Youtube videos of the world's elite strength coaches and lifters. My thirst for knowledge about the subject of strength and conditioning is unquenchable, but often leads me to drive myself insane trying to process the vast amount of information that I take in on a daily basis. In order to combat my tendency to over complicate everything I do, I felt it would be therapeutic to take this opportunity to break down, for the benefit of both you as a reader and myself, what I and my training partners do, and exactly why we do it.
Some of the best advice I've ever heard came from Mark Bell of Supertraining Gym in California. Bell is a world-class powerlifter who is incredibly generous with his knowledge of the sport of powerlifting and training in general. If you search him on Youtube or Google, you will find more videos and articles of his and his member's training than you'll know what to do with. In one of his videos, Bell said each and every day you train, you should have a goal and a focus going into the workout. It doesn't matter what you're training for, how you're training or where you're training, you must come into the session with a specific idea in mind of what you want to accomplish with your workout, and how you're going to accomplish it. Without an understanding of what you're trying to achieve, both short-term and long-term, one cannot expect to be able to take the proper steps to reach their goals.
Now, how is this applicable to you? Not everyone is an athlete. My training partners and I are all current or former college football players. We train with a specific purpose so that we may improve attributes that are necessary to be successful in our sport. Some may go to the gym for general fitness purposes only, some aspire to be powerlifters, other want to be Olympic lifters, and even more just want to be strong because they're red-blooded Americans and want to look good for the opposite sex. Whatever you're reason is for training, it's vital that you approach your training in a practical manner. Blindly going into the gym without a purpose or goal isn't going to get you where you want to go, regardless of where that is. With that in mind, here is a general breakdown of how and why we train.
1) Warmup--I'll classify both general and dynamic warmups into this one category. I've written before about stretching before working out. Studies have determined that it not only doesn't help to prepare the body to perform work, but that it is also detrimental to strength and power output. So, instead of the classic static stretch, we perform two different warmups that total 15 minutes. First, a general warmup is done with the purpose of raising the heart rate and getting blood pumping through the body to the muscles which prepares the body to perform more strenuous work. Then, after five minutes of a general warmup, we perform a dynamic warmup. Dynamic warmups are specific to the activity one is doing. It involves performing movements that activate the muscles and central nervous system, preparing them to handle the training that will follow. In just this 15 minute period, you can improve your numbers in the gym and your overall health. I promise you, if you haven't experienced a gym-related injury yet, one is coming your way if you don't begin to warmup properly. I'm not talking about going in and bench pressing 135, then 185, than 225 cold and calling that a warmup. I mean taking the time to work on mobility and activation drills to properly prepare your central nervous system and muscles to perform work.
2) Power--Power is defined as force times time. This may be the single most important concept in sports. With the exception of long, slow athletic events such as cross country or long-distance swimming, most sports involve explosive movements, where the body must produce a great amount of force in a short amount of time. Think about it, in football, each position, from offensive lineman to kicker, must be able to, in a very short burst, reach peak force production in order to be successful. A lineman must come off the ball and with only a yard of space between him and his opponent, produce enough force to drive the defensive lineman off the ball. A kicker must use their trunk musculature and entire lower body to quickly produce enough force to kick the ball as far as they can. In soccer, an athlete may go from a dead stop to a full sprint in a matter of seconds, then have to bury a shot hard enough to beat the goalie. In basketball athletes must be able to go from a complete stand-still to a maximal jump as fast as possible in order to pull down a rebound of shoot a ball over the hands of a defender. These are just a few examples, but in each one, the athlete who is able to produce the most force the fastest, is most often successful. This is known as "rate of force development," and is the pinnacle of what an athlete is striving to achieve and improve through their training.
I say the pinnacle, because power can only be developed once a number of other criteria are met. Because power is equal to force x velocity, power can only be achieved when an individual possesses a base of strength (aka force) production, and an ability to move that force quickly (aka velocity). Therefore, everything we do is based on the idea that while our goal is to improve our power production, we must do so through training that focuses on improving our maximal force output, as well as our body's ability to produce force rapidly.
Now, how does this apply to the normal gym goer? I haven't met many people, (guys mostly) who want to be weak and look weak. Chances are, if you're going to the gym, your goal is to get stronger and get bigger. So you may ask yourself, why do I care about things like "rate of force production," I just want to be jacked and be able to deadlift and bench press a ton of weight. Well, first, if you want to build muscle, you need to get stronger. Using the same stimulus over and over and over won't do. Any gains you get in muscle size will stall as the body adapts to the training stimulus. So, in order to continue to build muscle, you must manipulate the volume and intensity (sets/reps/weight/exercises) you are performing. Inevitably, this means you have to lift heavier and heavier things for varying reps which will build muscular strength and size.
So now you're using a program that varies the volume and intensity of training so that your able to avoid hitting a plateau where the body adapts to the exercise stimulus and your gains stop. Great, but you're still failing on that 350 pound bench press you want to brag to your friends about, or you just can't seem to finish off that 500 pound deadlift you've been working for. One of your problems may be that even though you have great maximal strength, your rate of force production isn't high enough to finish these movements with maximal loads. Lifting weights is no different than a basketball player jumping, a soccer playing sprinting, or a football player trying to knock the crap out of his opponent, it all involves the body exerting force on an outside object. In order to successfully complete these tasks, the body must be able to produce maximal force as quickly as possible. Think about it, with no momentum, in order to deadlift 500 pounds, the body must be able to produce enough force to overcome that load. However, if it takes too long to reach this peak force output, you're not going to be able to move that weight from point A to point B.
If you've ever watched an Olympic lifter clean and jerk or snatch you understand what I mean. Regardless of how heavy the weight is, the bar is ALWAYS moving quickly, or they won't make the lift. A basketball player never jumps slowly, or there's no shot they're going to get higher faster than they're opponent to grab a rebound. One of the most impressive things about world-class powerlifters like Brandon Lilly, is that even as the weights get heavier, they continue to move the bar with incredible speed an technique, even as they reach near maximal loads, (search Brandon Lilly's 815 pound deadlift on Youtube if you want to see what I mean).
So, how do you get over the top to pull that 500 pound deadlift you've been working at for years? You focus your training on improving your body's rate of force development. Using submaximal loads and explosive movements, you train your central nervous system and muscles to reach peak force production faster and faster. Now, instead of being like a crappy car that needs 20 seconds to get from 0 to 60, you can reach your maximum strength output rapidly, which allows you to use the maximal strength that you possess to move heavy loads.
3) Strength--I once read a great quote that said, "without strength, there is no power." Strength is the foundation by which power is built. I don't care how many power cleans you do at 135 pounds, how many box jumps you do, or how far you can throw a medicine ball, if you don't have a base of max strength, you are not going to be powerful. While we work on a power movement at the beginning of each workout, the core lift of our workout is always designed to build pure strength. The best lifts to achieve this are the bench press, the overhead press, the squat, the deadlift, the clean, and the snatch. These lifts recruit more muscle fibers and muscle groups than any other. Not only are they economical because they allow you to work so many muscle groups with one movement, but they allow you to use heavier loads because more muscles are involved, all of which means that the body will produce more testosterone which is the key muscle-building hormone. Simply put, if you want to be strong and powerful, you need to be attacking heavy compound movements that tax many muscle groups at once and build your body's maximal force output. There is a reason the squat is called "the king of all lifts" and the deadlift is known as "the greatest assessment of raw strength and power."
4) Speed--We improve the central nervous system's and muscle's ability to produce force quickly through the use of submax loads, at max speeds. For example, we'll use between 50 and 75% of a person's one rep max or estimated one rep max. Because the weight is lighter, the athlete is capable of moving the weight at a high velocity. Essentially, they are focusing on moving the weight as if it were a maximal load, trying to apply as much force as they possibly can to a weight that is submaximal. This teaches the central nervous system and the muscles to activate quickly and improves rate of force development. There are numerous ways to improve rate of force development, one not better than the next. Its all a matter of properly implementing a system that teaches athletes to produce velocity. Some prefer Olympic lifts, others like basic jump training, right now, I am trying out a system of using submaximal weight on lifts like the push press, squat, and deadlift to improve speed and therefore, power output.
5) Assistance--I need to make this very clear, assistance work is just that: ASSISTANCE. It assists your major lifts. No, bicep curls, triceps kickbacks, and chest flys should NEVER be the cornerstone of your lifting. These exercises are utilized after the main power, strength, and speed movements of the workout in order to build muscle and strength in specific muscles that will help boost core lifts, build up weaknesses, and avoid muscular imbalances. Due to the nature of assistance exercises, I am not of the belief that people should do the same assistance work weak after weak for long periods of time. I rotate my assistance work almost every workout, focusing on muscle groups that are important to improving our core lifts (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press) and to help improve weaknesses in myself and my athletes. For example, most athletes are pressing dominant. They spend their lives trying to build a big chest and neglect the upper back, biceps, and elbox flexors. Simultaneously, most people squat but don't deadlift, because they have been told (incorrectly) that the deadlift will screw up their back forever, or just because the deadlift is just too damn hard. Finally, many athletes do millions and millions of crunches and movements to improve abdominal strength and size, but neglect the all-important muscles of the lower back which are just as vital for spinal erection of stabilization. These muscular imbalances not only lead to less than optimal strength output, but can also lead to injuries because the stronger muscles must pick up the slack for the underdeveloped muscles of the posterior chain. So, with that in mind, my training partners and I do a ton of upper back work, (pull ups, band pull aparts, face pulls, rows of every conceivable kind, lat pull downs, etc) and glute, hamstring, and lower back work (Romanian deadlifts, snatch-grip RDLs, banded good mornings, barbell good mornings, speed deadlifts, glute/ham raises, back extensions). These exercises serve as assistance to build up weaknesses and improve the muscles that perform work during our core lifts.
Wrap Up
In approaching our workouts, we organize them starting with exercises that require the most energy and effort, and finish with less important assistance work. We begin with activation, (warmup) then do a power movement, then a maximal strength movement, then speed, and finish with assistance and core work, which also serves as our conditioning. This is a very basic and broad way to explain our training, and I could go on forever explaining exactly why we do things this way. I'm not saying this is the best method, I'm not saying it's the only method. However, it is a basic and effective template that I have utilized with personal success for some time now. So maybe the title of this article is a bit unfair to me, because there is method to my madness.
Everyone is different, and it's important to discover what works for you. The key here is to take the time to break down your goals and what you need to do to reach those goals as I have done here. Then, once you have established your long term goals, figure out the specific steps you need to take to reach them. Remember, every workout you should have focus. It doesn't matter if its to move submaximal weight as fast as possible, try a new lift that you think will build up a weakness of yours, get one more rep than last week, or hit a personal record on the deadlift or squat, just make sure you take the time to set a goal for that workout that will help you on your path to achieving your ultimate goal. Embrace the grind, find your why, then focus on what you have to do to get there.
