Category: Training

One of the longer standing arguments in the field of strength training has to do with the definition of training intensity.  Various training camps define training intensity differently and this invariably leads to arguments where each group is talking across one another.

In my opinion, most of the arguments are simply an example of people using the same words to describe different concepts and I don’t see any real reason for there to only be a single definition of intensity that can be valuable in the weight room. In fact, by using various definitions, I think that training can be more accurately described.

Intensity of Load

Arguably the first definition of intensity came from sports scientists and coaches (especially Olympic lifting coaches) trying to define and measure things relevant to them. In this case it meant defining intensity as the percentage of maximum load that was being used.

In this scheme, a 75% load (e.g.… Keep Reading

I must be out of the loop as I had never even heard of Greg Everett until he emailed me and said he wanted to send me a copy of his new book. Which he then did. And for which I thank him. I love books and I love good books and his is a good book.

Olympic Weightlifting is not a sport that has nearly as much written about it as say, powerlifting or bodybuilding, at least not in the U.S. Outside of the Russian Translations (which are often very difficult to parse) from Spornivny Press the two primary books out there are Arthur Dreschler’s Encyclopedia of Weighlifting and Tommy Kono’s Weightlifting Olympic Style.

I suppose I should also mention El-Hewie’s Essentials of Weightlifting and Strength training. While thorough, I found it nearly unreadable and I can’t say it did much to further my understanding of OL’ing beyond developing a great appreciation for the importance of hair style in lifting (you’d have to have read the second edition to know what I’m talking about).… Keep Reading

After a decade and a half in gyms, weight rooms, coaching, and as an athlete myself, I’d say that there is one nearly over-reaching pattern that I have observed: most people train at too high of an intensity far too often. More accurately, they end up trying to train at too high of an intensity but, for reasons I’ll soon explain actually end up training in a medium intensity no-man’s land.

In this article, I want to argue fairly strongly for the inclusion of both hard and easy days in training. The key in this approach, and this is what I’ll address, is that the goal should be to keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy. This will make more sense shortly.

Alternating Hard and Easy Days

The original idea of alternating hard and easy days appears to have come out of early running training (probably the Oregon system under Bill Bowerman). … Keep Reading

In the previous article, I looked at research examining The Metabolic Effects to Short-term High-intensity Interval Training.

Summing up briefly, it showed quite clearly that, at least in relatively untrained individuals, a short-term (2-6 week) program of high-intensity interval training (workouts typically done three times per week) can generate similar adaptations to longer duration training.

In that post, I finished by asking the following questions:

There’s no doubt (and I haven’t intended to suggest otherwise) that high intensity interval training can have benefits. It’s time effective and may induce similar performance adaptations to longer duration traditional cardio. With regards endurance athletes, it’s clear that even short periods of low volume interval training can have rather large benefits for performance.

But with most of the benefits seeming to occur with only a handful of sessions per week (2-3 is the norm) and with benefits appearing to end fairly quickly (3-6 weeks), we might ask what a trainee should do when either

1. They need to train more frequently than that
2. They are looking at their training over a period longer than a few weeks.

… Keep Reading