Post-meet training week, a new training block and the Eternal Now

Two videos this week everyone, in honor of me not writing last week and eating with great vengeance and furious anger. This first one is an awesome compilation of power/squat jerks in international competition. The Chinese in particular are insanely good at squat and power jerking.

The second video is the 85kg champion from 2013 European championships, Apti Aukhadov. Staying with the theme of the day (and unbeknownst to everyone watching), Apti switched from split jerks to power/squat jerks. High fives for the awesome multi-directional views here as well. Epic consistency and technique; notice the final jerk is faster and caught higher than the first two.

The week right after a meet is such an individual thing. Some people are so banged up physically that they can't do much of anything besides go for some walks. For some people the body feels good but the nervous system is bashed up and a 50% lift feels like a max lift. You just have to see what you're feeling and react accordingly. I did three workouts this week, all of which consisted of sled work, Prowler work and high rep dumbbell circuits for the upper body. I didn't spend more than 45 minutes in the gym at any one time. The first time I picked up a barbell was one week after the meet and I did some power clean/power jerk and power clean/push press singles at 90kg. Nothing special, just moving a bit.

As far as the week post-meet, there are a couple general guidelines that I can suggest. In A System of Multi-Year Training in Weightlifting, Medvedyev stated that recovery methods involved approx 60-85 mins PER DAY. This is difficult to do for those that work full time jobs or don't train full-time, but it's something to keep in mind the week after a meet, when your training is throttled back. This is an ideal time to dial up the accumulation of recovery time.

-Get outside. Go for walks. Get in the sun.
-Nap and foam roll. A LOT.
-Keep the time in the gym to a minimum and emphasize prehab/rehab movements and things you haven't done for awhile. I did some DB bench for the first time in probably a year.
-Get outside. Get in the sun.
-Nap A LOT.

Here's an example of what my Tuesday/Thursday workouts looked like:

Foam Roll/Reverse Hypers/Fire Hydrant Series/Agile 8
Abs x100/TKEs 2x20
Band Shoulder Circuit
25 minute circuit - DB Single Arm Press 15+15/Chins x10/Parking Lot Sled Drag
Abs x100
Reverse Hypers and Traction

I also ate like a total fat ass basically this entire week. I stayed carb-free during the days all week, but Thurs/Fri/Sat/Sun nights were carb explosions. Really just let the diet chill out a bit and didn't stress. No idea where my weight is at and I don't care. No meet for the foreseeable future so no worries. If anything this past meet solidified my thoughts that it's better for me to stay in the 94s rather than try and move up to the 105s. Mostly I need to think about getting my body composition squared away a little bit and get a little more Jacked, Tan and Vascular. To that end I'm gonna make a couple changes for this upcoming block:

-I'm going to actually start counting my carbs on my backloads; 200g seems like a nice round number to start and can tweak it up or down.
-I'm also going to start eating breakfast every morning and try to dial the calories up a little bit in the morning.
-Trying two PWO shakes instead of just one. I got the chance to have a chat with Kiefer and he discouraged the idea of just carbs intra-workout and encouraged me to just have an additional PWO shake. My preferred PWO is Muscle Feast's Anabolic Recovery, so I'll probably dial up two scoops of that during my workout and another two scoops for the drive home. This also decreases the amount of food for my backloads, which is probably a good thing.
-Same recovery methods as always: not pushing the recovery means on training days so as to not interfere with adaptation. I would like to push the contrast showers a bit more in the mornings.

I will do a better job of writing out training, recovery means, etc with this block than I did on the previous one. Better to do it here than try and read the chicken scratch from my training book.

With this upcoming block (courtesy of Greg Everett at Catalyst Athletics), a lot of this is going to be going by feel. Last training block I didn't squat more than three days a week; this block I'll be squatting twice a day and around ten times a week. When I hit my all-time back squat PR of 190 I did it when I was experimenting with Bulgarian training, squatting daily and doing all singles. I have a better base to build off  now with my best back squat set of five increasing from 140-170kg and my SSB squat pushing up to 400lbs. I'm excited to get back to singles now and see what happens.

I'm operating with the below max lifts in mind as far as making percentage calculations for this block:

Front Squat - 160
Back Squat - 190
CJ - 130
Snatch - 105

One of Greg's guidelines for this block stood out to me: no sitting down. Isn't this weightlifting? Hell, the Iranians and the French basically take smoke breaks in between reps. I tested it out a bit as I was getting ready for my last meet and I actually really enjoyed it. It's really easy to sit and relax a bit and let five minutes go by without knowing it. Plus pacing around the platform makes me less of a target for people who want to just sit and chat.

Don't get me wrong: I love talking to people. I love talking lifting, teaching lifting and it still makes me giggle and beam with pride whenever someone asks me for suggestions or training ideas. BUT one of the few places that I've found peace and quiet is on the weightlifting platform, both in competition and in training. For my money it is the epitome of being in the present moment, or the Eternal Now, as it is often referenced in Zen. I very much like that feeling. I'm not worried about a trade, my bank account, if a girl likes me, if I'll ever get married and have kids, if my mom is OK, if I'll ever pay off my student loans or if I need to fart. I'm there. I'm here. I'm everywhere. Going to war with gravity while you have a barbell somewhere on your person tends to focus the mind.

My Trip To Bulgaria...and I didn't even get a passport stamp

One of the most hotly debated topics in athletics is the "Bulgarian" method. Developed by Ivan Abadjiev, the premise is to take maximal attempts in the classic lifts (snatch and clean and jerk), as well as the front squat, as the vast majority of your training. This runs counter to many of the generally accepted truths about weightlifting training regarding CNS burnout, injury, accomodation from limited diversity of movements, etc. Despite these reservations, it seems to be working pretty well for many of the Eastern European champions of the past 30-40 years as well as lifters of California Strength and Average Broz Gym. Me being a glutton for punishment, I decided to give it a shot for this meet cycle, from mid May to mid December.

Note: David Woodhouse wrote an extremely good article on Abadjiev on Weightlifting Exchange, found here. There is also a translation of the Bulgarian documentary School of Champions as well as a lecture (with English notes) from Abadjiev found here. These resources formed the basis for my initial training thoughts and I borrowed some ideas from Cal Strength and Average Broz along the way.

The whole thing became an amalgamation of ideas. My goal every day was to get a max snatch, a max CJ and a squat. I used snatches and cleans from the box, the power lifts and the classical lifts as well as the front and back squat. Including presses and jerks, I believe I used around 10 barbell exercises in total during the 24-odd weeks. I still did a very small percentage of supportive work (lots of pullups, a little ab work and some Prowler).

The theme for this training was this: "To Get Through It, You Have To Go Through It". Simple concept, but not easy. These methods go against everything I'd read from the Russians, everything I had learned during my undergrad and CSCS as well as what I'd learned from listening to the US coaches speak. On the other hand, I'm a great believer in Knowledge Without Mileage = Bullshit (thank you Henry Rollins). If I don't "go", I'll never "know". So I went.

Results: the first month or so was great. I set a new clean max at 130kg and a new snatch record at 100kg. I equalled this 130 clean 5 separate times over the first 5 weeks. I matched my snatch record twice and surpassed it twice, hitting 102 on two separate occasions and having a couple near misses at 105 and 107, along with a miss at 107 that nearly decapitated me. My back squat reached a PR of 190kg, suprassed later in the cycle at 195kg. My back jerk topped out 140kg, which I later surpassed at 142kg. I set records in the power snatch, topping out at an ugly 95kg. My power CJ topped out at a pretty ugly 125kg. Oddly enough, my front squat actually regressed to 140kg; I've done a triple at 160kg in the past. My push press topped out around 110kg for a set of 5 and I did multiple sets of 5 at 100kg.

So the first month looks great right? PRs, records, velvet ropes parting, champagne falling from the heavens! Around week 5-6, while all this is happening, my body was slowly descending into the Smackdown Hotel. My CNS went to hell. I noticed when speaking that my words wouldn't quite come out right. This isn't really a new problem, but it's usually for something I say rather than not being able to finish a sentence. I couldn't sleep more than a couple of hours a night for weeks in a row. My joints got brutally stiff when I trained, even worse if I skipped a day. My waking HR, usually in the mid 40s, started getting up into the 60s. I noticed myself getting short and snappy with people and my eyes were pretty much constantly hurting and bloodshot.

This is part of the beauty of the system: you're programming/brainwashing your body to perform a limited number of motor tasks. Accommodation becomes your best friend. After that first month, despite feeling completely awful and sickened by the sight of a barbell, I was still hitting 90-100% of my max snatch and CJ each and every workout. My squats also stayed high, but the drop was a bit more pronounced since I always performed the squats at the end of the workout. I didn't need to warm up with anything besides a set of reverse hypers, some pullups and bar work. Had I tried to introduce brand new stimuli here (sprinting, strongman, etc), there is no doubt I would've become injured. The fact that you have limited biomechanical means to stimulate the organism removes that aspect of variation. The loading becomes the sole means of stimulation as the body has become accustomed to the movements.

This is probably one of the most psychologically damaging aspects of this style; the monotany creeps into your psyche. I have anecdotally read that many of the athletes did not fail physically, but rather psychologically. One must also understand the conditions these athletes operated under were far different than the conditions of US-lifters; for these lifters, their total was their livelihood as well as the livelihoods of their families. The comparison is not "apples to apples", so I hesitate to use this as support for the physical demands.

After progress stagnated around week 6 or so, there was a point where I could've made a different decision. In looking at my log, I see that this was an excellent time for a deload, maybe keeping frequency but only working to 80-85%, anything to take my foot off the gas. BUT, in my limited research, this was something that every source seemed to agree on: when you reach this point, you had to keep going. The key was to drive through the "dark times" as this was precisely the time where the body is retooling. So I kept going. I upped my use of the back squat as a means to increase the absolute loading and kept driving hard for new maxes.

At this point, I was basically alternating the following 7 days a week:

Pwr Snatch, Full CJ, Back Squat
Full Snatch, Pwr CJ, Front Squat

I was still hitting my 90% minimum, but it was getting more and more difficult and I was moving further and further away from my all time PRs. Some technical flaws started becoming a little more evident; I started leaving the bar in front on my snatch, catching it low on my clean and not getting my heels to the ground. Trying to catch a snatch or a clean is tough enough; try doing it on your toes!  I also had a slight scare with my back during this time and I dialed down the intensity for a few weeks. This didn't help and I think it may have thrown my body into all sorts of jacked-upded-ness (write that down).

The past few weeks I've dialed things down as I'm getting ready for a meet on Dec 10. I will still take maximal classical lifts and squats leading up to the meet, but at a reduced frequency and I'll probably add some lower level power lifts (something along the lines of a dynamic day ie 10-12 reps of each at around 60-70%) to groove the lifts and get my CNS snapping. Something I read from Medvedyev that has stuck with me: highly skilled athletes have the ability to tense their muscles faster than others, but also the ability to relax their muscles quicker than others. Think of an Oly lifter like Ronny Weller, who doesn't set up the lift so much as drop and go. That ability to tense is what Louie Simmons references when he expounds on the benefits of dynamic squatting off of a box. Squatting on a box requires you to generate a ton of muscle tension quickly with no room for the stretch reflex to use elastic energy.

So, as I sit here, assessing the last few months and debating where my training should go after this meet, what did I learn?

1. Intensity is King. Periods of maximal and submaximal loading (90-100+%) are beneficial/necessary and something that I hadn't done with regularity since I was previously using my interpretation of the conjugate system. If you're a proponent of using blocks, maybe program 2-3 weeks of a limited exercise range and 90-100% lifts, especially around 4-6 weeks outside of your meet date. Use Prilepin's chart and aim for 4-7 lifts over 90% of your max for that day. Read that again; your max ON THAT DAY, not your absolutely maximum. This goes along with some re-reading I'm doing from Medvedyev and Siff, essentially stating that the average weight of the barbell lifted has a high correlation to making new records. Implication: more repetitions performed at a higher %. I also found some interesting info on 90-100% lift guidelines, but I haven't fully fleshed those out as of yet.

2. Waving Works. Many of my best results in the snatch and CJ came after missing weights multiple times. I would work up to a couple misses in the snatch, then drop 20-30kg and work back up. The first time I made 102, it was on a third wave where my initial miss had been at 90 and second wave miss had been at 97. I believe it was my 5th or 6th miss of the session before I made it. The CJ is a little different and I only used one wave since the load on the barbell (as well as complexity/CNS impact) is much higher than the snatch. Also: I'm much more comfortable snatching than cleaning. I haven't tried waving squats, but for the quick lifts (the Oly lifts as well as the jerk) the response was very positive.

3. Ignore Recovery Methods At Your Own Peril. As I tweeted a few days ago, the Russian lifters averaged 400-500 hours of restorative work per year. This equates to 65-82 mins PER DAY of restorative work. I did nearly nothing as far as restoration outside of eating, sleeping, supplementing (very bare bones: protein powder, fish oil, creatine, multivitamin, mineral supp, curcumin) and some foam rolling. Massage, epsom salt baths, contrast shower and many other means can be done to assist in recovery. I wanted the "full effect" and I ignored some of these methods intentionally to see how the body would respond. Maybe not the smartest idea, but one of my themes of this block was to Trust My Body to be smarter than me and find a way.

I say that with a caveat: recovery methods need to be cycled. The point of training, after all, is to irritate the organism to the point that it adapts to imposed demands. Going overboard with recovery can actual blunt the training effect. Medvedyev addresses this in stating that recovery should be emphasized on "rest" days, or days in which fundamental loading is minimal or non-existant (ie GPP days) so as not to interfere with the training effect from fundamental loading sessions. Even in the weekly training cycle, the Russians are making a reference to a High/Low methodology (introduced to my by James Smith of Power Development Inc).

4. Eating Patterns Matter. A modified Warrior-style of nutrition works incredibly well with this type of training. Michael Keck gave me some ideas that I put into practice during this cycle. Never once did I come into a workout feeling hypoglycemic or cloudy from my eating; I was always just a little hungry and on edge. I carried out this style of eating through the entire span of this cycle, starting out weighing 223 and currently sitting at 208 as I type this (with a belly full of Wahoo's Fish Tacos). The weight loss came with no real cardio and I see how this style, coupled with morning track work or cardio, can yield great body composition results. For my purposes, it kept me feeling edgy and sharp both in the gym and in my career. I anticipate using this style for the forseeable future; Thanks Mike!

Do I think the Bulgarian system "works"? Obviously. It has produced (and continues to produce) great results in the world of weightlifting.

Is it the best system for a 31 yr old professional with long hours in a fairly high stress job? Maybe, maybe not. I definitely didn't set myself up for success, but I had a plan and excluding the one setback with my back, I executed it about as well as I could have hoped. Win, lose or draw, it has been an excellent learning experience, one that makes me a better lifter and gave me a deeper knowledge about my body and its abilities.

The proof comes in two weeks.