Training for the untalented

 

 

This article talks about training frequency, loads and training styles for the average powerlifter.

I am going to outline the PROGRAMMING side of things I consider important in average people's training. Issues of psychological approach, technique training, recovery work, nutrition etc are something covered in other articles, and are also crucial to success. Here the focus is on purely the mechanical side of training.

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Reader be warned: There is nothing ground-breaking in this article. No magic set and rep formulas or gimmicks. I haven't included them because they do not exist. Sorry.

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The write-up begins with a rather long-winded look at the culture and popularity of different training styles frequencies. If you are not up for a warmup, then skip straight into the chapter titled GET TO THE POINT! But I recommend reading the whole thing. It is a good read (he said, completely unbiased about his own writing).

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TRAINING FOR THE UNTALENTED

Most of us are mediocrities. That is just the way it is, no matter how many inspirational quotes you read or how many Disney movies tell you otherwise. There is no shame to being average, most of us are by default of the word's meaning. Most of us will never become the Michael Jordan, Serena Williams or Ronnie Coleman of our chosen sport. And, let's face it, if you’re not especially talented, it means you’re untalented. Suck it up.

 

Yet, much of the training advice we hear is from the very best. It seems logical to take advice from the best, doesn’t it? And, if you happen to be a super talent yourself, maybe copying the exact training protocols of the all-time greats will work. Most of the time it doesn’t.

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On the upside, mediocre today is better than it ever was, powerlifting wise. That is because trends and science have caught up with the average Joe. Science-based training is a butt of many a joke in bodybuilding community, but the truth is that the non-serious trainers nowadays look better than ever. Wind back only 10-20 years and the average gym goer was hitting muscles once a week, with countless exercises designed to hit the said muscle from many angles. The problem is that this training style requires one to push extra hard to make that single bout of stimulus per week to produce results. And to get serious results nutrition must be on point, one needs to have elite genetics and, sorry to say, take performance enhancing drugs.

 

The modern father of two who has time to hit the gym 3 times a week does few sets of 5-10 reps on squats, straight leg deadlifts, chin-ups and overhead presses each time he hits the gym, or a similar mix of full body compound exercises. Maybe he tops it off with intervals, kettlebell circuit or similar. He is not going to amaze anyone with a 300kg deadlift or have a physique that drops jaws on the bodybuilding stage, but with this approach his less than hardcore intensity still provides tangible results. At least better results than wandering around the gym with Gym shark hoodie and a notebook, jotting down the sets and reps of the fourth bicep exercise of the day. With 3 times a week full body training, a very popular split today for people whose life doesn’t revolve around gym, almost anyone will get decent results.

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What about powerlifting then?

Thus far, the western training has gone through stages.

 

Power and strength training began as full body training regimes of the old strongmen/gymnast/bodybuilders.

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In the 60s and 70s it evolved into some kind of training with split of sessions decided by movement patterns, like push/pull/legs or upper/lower splits. Usually, the powerlifting movements or close variations were hit 2-3 times weekly.

 

In the 90s bro-split bodybuilding gained ground and infested much of training culture in western powerlifting. 1990s and 2000s powerlifting were dominated with three training styles:

 

1. Monday Squat, Wednesday Bench, Friday Deadlift, all days coupled with accessories after main lift and maybe Saturday a filler session (although in my home country people reserved Saturday for alcohol consumption, also labeled as a recovery). Simple style for simple people.

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2. Very popular split was (and is) to divide training into BP day and SQ/DL day. This is often in conjugate style 4 times per week with one emphasising max load and other day emphasising speed work.

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3. Third, and in my opinion the worst choice for natural trainers with mediocre genetics, was a bodybuilding style bodypart split. The only difference from training to pose in your underwear was that the ‘leg day’ began with squats, ‘back day’ began with deadlifts, and ‘chest day’ began with bench.

 

This is the era I entered powerlifting training. My early influences were 1990s bodybuilding magazines that advocaed nothing but the once a week body part emphasised training. Stumbling upon things like 5x5 or conjugate training seemed super advanced. After all, they produced some of the best athletes of the times. Meanwhile Slavic and German IPF lifters and people like Ernie Frantz, continued training like it was still 1970, mostly full body routines (SBD days as the cool kids call them nowadays).

 

The debate about which training style was best could have gone on forever, but as the raw lifting took off, the superiority of the higher frequency, movement pattern orientated training was suddenly apparent.

Why was that?

 

Powerlifting training had been increasingly more equipped since the 1970s. By the early 00s it was near to what we now know as multi ply and single ply. Yes, kit has advanced since those days, but the difference between raw and equipped was already stellar, enough to make them two disciplines distinctly different sports. The Prilepin table and other Soviet studies on volume, frequency and intensity that were used by Russians and Germans were derived mostly from weightlifting. In weightlifting the time under tension is only a fraction of what it is in equipped powerlifting, and the tension requirements on body represent polar opposites. Weightlifting is fluid and dynamic, equipped powerlifting requires maximal statics strength and forcing the body to unnatural strength curves.

Anyone who has trained equipped, especially multi ply, knows that squatting 6x3x80% (% from 1rep max) done three times a week would destroy joints, nerves, relationships, government budgets and personal sanity. Raw lifting on the other hand is considerably closer to the demands of weightlifting. A 200kg raw bencher or squatter lifting 6x3x160kg Monday, Wednesday and Friday may be a tad sore, but not in need of medical attention.

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When equipment was stripped down, the old style of lifting reigned supreme once again. Squatting 2-3 times per week has become the norm, some lifters advocating up to 6 times per week. And with talent pool today being exponentially bigger than in the 1990s, we have seen an unprecedented shift in results.

Ask a 1990s lifter and many would tell you 200kg raw bench is impossible without the aid of PEDs. That was something that people honestly believed.

Now it is not uncommon weight in tested competitions in any of the higher weight classes, and untested some 70 kg lifters push past the magical 200kg limit.

300kg deadlift was another magical threshold. Despite what some may think of drugs in tested sports, UK alone has over 200 tested athletes who have surpassed 200kg raw bench, and more than 240 surpassing 300kg deadlift. Take into account the gym lifters, and you have literally hundreds of lifetime natural lifters pushing weights that majority thought impossible to achieve without PEDs just two decades ago.

 

The main reason isn’t supplements or training kit, it is purely the shift in training. We have gone a full circle to higher frequency, movement pattern based training. This time around it is teamed with modern nutritional and training knowledge, unlimited access to technique advice courtesy of internet, and infinitely larger talent pool to draw from.

Whilst this training style comes with some drawbacks, like the neglect of assistance and issues with longevity (if you have a harmful pattern of squatting, doing them 6 days a week pulverizes your hips or knees fast), injuries overall are down and results are up.

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                                                                                         My friend George. Mediocre talent but good work ethic. 4 years between pictures.​

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Get to the point!

How should an untalented person train powerlifting? What principles does one want to build his or her training on?

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There are no rules....

But here are some rules.

 

1: Squat variation 2-4 times per week, Bench variation 2-4 times per week, Deadlift variation 1-2 times per week.

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2: Bench variations, do 4-8 working sets per variation, keeping rep range at 3-6 for majority of your sets. For Squat variations, 3-6 working sets, 2-5 reps for most sets. For deadlift variations, 4-6 sets, 1-3 reps most of the time.

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3. Do at lest three quarters of your big movement training with loads of 70-85% of 1RM. You can use Prilepin’s table as a guide for training loads*. For bench variations aim for the higher end of overall volume of the table. For squat variations aim for medium volume. For deadlift variations, aim for lower end of volume (excepting very long-armed deadlifters and trap bar variations, those cases can be treated like squats). [1]

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4: Wave or block your training in 3-5 week intervals that begin with smaller overall weekly demand on body and end with a larger demand. Deloading for a whole week is not something I condone, but having a wave motion in the overall volume load or collating your training in small blocks can utilise weeks of either easier overall demands or targeted rest (for example one week lower body might get minimal volume whilst upper body training is still intense).

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5. Rest periods between sets: For bench variations 4-8min, for squat and deadlift variations 5-10min. These rest periods are longer than one often feels like having, but beneficial. Together with Prilepin’s table’s suggestions of rep/set schemes, this assures most sets are not close to failure, in fact most of the sets are 1-5 reps away from total failure. And that is a good thing. Save the all out sets for talented people. Us mortals have to grind set after set. Assistance and other work can be done with considerably lower rest periods.

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6. Amount of exercises and working sets per session**:

Exercises: 1-3 bigger compound exercises, 1-2 targeted assistance exercises, 1-2 light exercises to fill in the gaps.

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Sets: Bigger exercises overall volume about 6-12 working sets, targeted assistance 5-10 working sets, fluff 3-6 working sets.

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Reps: Covered earlier, but will add that assistance mostly 6-12 rep range. Never more than 6 movements per session.

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7. Exercise selection: Do what you need to do, not what you are good at doing. If your quads suck, squat more high bar, do every other squat variation as front squats, do lunges and leg presses for assistance. If your posterior chain sucks, do the RDLs and GHRs and barbell rows and good mornings. If your biceps are holding you back…

hold on a minute. Your biceps are NOT holding you back, stop curling daily!

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8. Frequency: As stated, I condone 2-4 variations of squats per week. At minimum this means doing, for example, one back squat and one front squat per week. It can also mean 2 sessions where both sessions consist of 2 squat variations. Examples of these below:

 

(percentages are estimated from the conservative 1RM of each given variation)

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These examples are just that, examples. They illustrate the volume management for 2 lower body sessions per week. For more than 2 sessions the overall work doesn't increase much, but frequency being higher it includes more warmups and fresher approach to the lifts, meaning a possibility of bigger rewards from the investment. Splitting this into more sessions also in most cases enhances recovery.

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It is worth noting here that the biggest payoff frequency wise is from doing two sessions weekly for the same movement pattern. The added benefit of doing more than 2 sessions only increases benefits marginally. But for serious trainers consider gaining 10kg instead of 7.5kg on year squat in, say, a year's time, as a worthwhile investment. People who train full-time, such as professional athletes in any sport, rarely train less than 10 times per week, whilst many skill-based athletes training up to 20 times per week, strength and conditioning included. They also leave most of their training sessions feeling fresh, not feeling wiped out.

Even if most of professional athletes fall in the talented category, I think this is worth consideration when imagining what optimal training for human body consists of.

 

That being said, I tend to work on the basis that the actual weight training investment weekly for a normal working person is somewhere around 8 hours. For a example, 4 sessions of 2 hours each. When you add the travel time, little bit of recovery work and cardio, plus the food preparation to eat like an athlete, the investment doubles in time. And if training isn't your profession, 16 hours a week is plenty of commitment. The upside is that this 16 hours is enough to make even the untalented perform on a high level.

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SPOILER:

The spoiler at the end of this write-up is something one assumes anyone reading this understands to begin with: this commitment has to be solid for minimum of a decade, and up to 20 years to achieve a truly high level.

Quick results and shortcuts also exist. Just not for us untalented. Sorry.​​

Good luck, and see you in 10 years!

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Notes:​

* I do not actively consult Prilepin’s table myself as I have programmed literally thousands of sessions and individualise the programs for each client. Majority of the set/rep schemes I program still fall into the table’s recommendations, and it is a great starting point for self-programming, hence I advocate its use.

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**These amounts are based on training 4 times a week. If training more frequently, the number of exercises per workout goes down. Sets of 20 of face-pulls, light hanging ab work, banded rotator work or few sets of calf raises are not even counted here. I condone doing that kind of stuff between sets of assistance, as part of warmup, or home. Here we focus on real exercises.