Category: Training

I’ve been thinking about writing this piece for a while and I guess I’ve finally gotten around to it.  It will assuredly be multiple parts but will be somewhat self limiting.  The title is a bit pretentious, I mean how can I discuss All You Need to Know About Training in a single article.  Yet it’s not far off since what I’m going to discuss really hits all of the global points that are important when it comes to training for sport.  But you ask, what about the details, the endless minutiae.  Well….

The Stages of Coaching/Training

The reality is that many (including myself) drastically overcomplicate training.  I actually identify three phases of coaching:

1. You know you know nothing
2. You think you know something
3. You realize what you don’t know

It’s usually during phase 2 that folks overcomplicate things.  In college, oh my, the complex periodization programs I’d draw up.  It was a spreadsheet exercise with pie charts and graphs and I’m sure in hindsight I had more fun drawing things up than I did actually doing the training. … Keep Reading

I want to continue from my discussion of the stretch shorten cycle previously to discuss the contribution of neural factors to strength performance.  At the end I’ll try to summarize this mess.

Neural & Muscular Factors in Strength Performance

Back in the very early days of the study of strength training, an observation was made that people’s strength went up far more quickly in the early stages of training than their muscle size.  Quite in fact, it was often observed that strength increased fairly significantly before any measurable muscle growth had occurred.   This indicated that there was some other adaptation, usually taken as neural/neurological (because there isn’t a hell of a lot else that it could be) that was occurring to explain it.

At the most extreme, it was felt that all of the gains in strength were neural although this is kind of questionable:  protein synthesis goes up after the first workout even in beginners and it would seem unlikely that there was no increase in muscle size occurring at all.… Keep Reading

In a long-ago written article (that was written while I was doing a lot of endurance training, go figure) I wrote about the primary determinants of endurance performance and today I want to do sort of the equivalent article and talk about the determinants of strength performance.

Now, if you want to get technical, you can define different kinds of strength.  What is often measured in the lab is isometric strength using some kind of tensiometer (that will give you force output in Newtons, or whatever the units are) but in practical sense most will be more concerned with how much weight they are lifting in some gym movement.

 

Even that can be subdivided and some folks might really get up their butts by worrying about concentric strength (how much weight can be lifted), isometric strength (how much weight can be held at some position in a movement) and eccentric strength (how much weight can be lowered under control).… Keep Reading

I’m actually not entirely sure how to introduce this piece, it’s just been something that’s been going through my head when I walk my dogs in the morning and I’m not even sure what stimulated it in the first place.  But as the title suggests, basically I think it’s time for the majority of the general training world to forget Bulgarian training.

The Endless Return of Bulgarian Training

Now, I’ve been in this field professionally for nearly 2 decades at this point and I have watched this endless fascination with what the Bulgarian OL’ers are supposedly doing come and go for the entire time.  And it was around far longer than that.

From about the time that the Bulgarians came on the scene (in roughly the 80’s) and started handing the Russians their asses in Olympic Lifting (at least in the lighter weight classes), all while using a training system that went more or less against the beliefs of the day, people have been fascinated with their training.… Keep Reading

For no particularly good reason I want to write about something that has already had endless words written about it and that I probably won’t contribute much meaningfully “new” to the topic on.  But so it goes.

That topic is the 20 rep squat (sometimes called more specifically the 20 rep breathing squat).  This is kind of the original rest-pause training, an entire book has been written about it although if you gain 30 lbs in 6 weeks, it’s not gonna be mostly muscle, and I imagine most have at least heard of it.

But I’m hoping not to make this just the same old generic article that everyone has seen.  Yes, I want to look at the 20 rep squat in a general sense, in terms of how it is done but I also want to look at variations and a couple of things about it that many may not be aware of. … Keep Reading