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April 25, 2005
How to Explode Your Weight Lifting Poundage Using After-Effect Overloads
It is not unusual for modern power programs to include supramaximal walkouts, lockouts, or supports after regular lifts. They condition the body and mind for heavier weights. It works, but what if instead of walking out 600 pounds after your maximum 500 pound squat, you do the overload a couple of minutes BEFORE the heavy full squat? – 500 pounds will feel like 400 and an all time high 515 will go up like 490!
Every gym rat knows that the heavier the weight, the more muscle is recruited. Manhandling 600 pounds fires off more motor units than 500 pounds, even if you only hold the bar. This is called the Henneman’s size principle, probably because it builds some serious size! Especially if combined with the after-effect phenomenon, or the fact that your nervous system is a bit slow on the uptake.
Remember pushing your arms against the doorway at the summer camp and then watching them float up involuntarily? It happened because your brain had not caught on quick enough to the fact that the resistance had been removed. Good! After you have supported 600 pounds on your back, five wheels will explode to lockout!
After-effect overloads make you stronger in more than one way. In addition to boosting muscle recruitment, they lower the sensitivity of the Golgi tendon organs, spinal mechanoreceptors, and other governors of strength. After dealing with 600 pounds, these subversive sensors think, “Hey! 515 is not too bad!” and pull the brick from under your gas pedal! This type of disinhibition training has an awesome potential for reaching the final frontier in strength development.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 6:33 AM | Comments (1)
April 18, 2005
Why You can Squat More By Going Barefoot
There is a Russian joke about a guy who wore shoes two sizes too small for him. When asked about his bizarre behavior, he complained about his miserable life and concluded that his only happiness in life was to come home and take off his shoes! You will be even happier than this dude if you lose yours – at least for a part of your squat workout.
The forcefulness of a muscular contraction is determined by the sum of the mental effort and various reflexes. When Dr. Fred Hatfield bounced out of the bottom of his 1,000-pound squat, he took advantage of the stretch reflex. Another power boosting reflex is called the extensor reflex. This reflex causes the leg musculature to contract in response to the pressure on the sole of your foot. It is a protective measure against loading.
Research suggests that always wearing shoes diminishes the sensitivity of the foot, which may turn off the squat friendly reflex. Too bad, because when the barbell is intent on squashing you like a bug on the windshield, you could use any help you can get! The rare squatter who has recognized this problem is Dr. Fred Clary, a human crane who has elevated 900 pounds! Fred regularly performs heavy, 1,000 pounds plus, walkouts barefoot ‘just to fire off those receptors’.
Clary believes that such training sensitizes the extensor reflex receptors and enables him to squat heavier. And not him alone. Long before he became a Senior RKC instructor, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Senior World Champion Steve Maxwell, M.S., read about barefoot lifting in my book Power to the People! He ordered all the people he coached to lose their shoes – and every one of them succeeded in knocking off a couple of extra reps on their leg exercises!
The proof is in the pudding, it pays to add barefoot walkouts or squats to your routine. But since the gym owner might object if you go native with your dirty toe nails scraping his floor, get yourself a pair of deadlift slippers. They look almost like ballet slippers and are probably available in pink. Have fun.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
How to Add a Hundred Pounds to Your Squat
Forget your hamstring striations and quad separations, and add a hundred pounds to your squat, even if it kills you! Forget the pump and train like a weightlifting champion. A powerful technique you are about to learn, will help you to achieve squatting greatness in the shortest time possible by conditioning your nervous system to the peak of performance.
Robert Roman used to conquer gold for the Soviet Empire on the weightlifting platform. Today he is a top coach who has trained many young lifters to greatness using his revolutionary methods. Roman is convinced that developing superior sport specific body awareness will make a difference between being good and great!
It is not enough to have muscle, you have got to know how to use it. Soviet experiments revealed that even elite lifters made huge errors in estimating the height of the lift, the magnitude of the force, etc. When special techniques for maximizing what Roman calls the ‘muscle-joint sense’ were developed, the top guys outdid themselves and some unpromising also-rans became world class!
Robert Roman’s sportsmen develop their muscle-joint sense by lifting …blindfolded! Their coach explains that because we so heavily rely on our eyesight, we do not pay enough attention to the various sensations in our muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints. When blindfolded, the lifter is forced to listen to his body. Contrary to what a mirror gazing bodybuilder wants to believe, this tremendously improves the technique and its stability!
Kick off your muscle-joint sense training by getting a pair of blindfolds. Roman does not recommend lifting with your eyes closed because it distracts you from what you are supposed to be doing. Training with the lights turned off may be an effective alternative, but the gym owner might object, at least if he finds you before he stumbles on a dumbell and cracks his head against the Smith machine. So blindfolds it is.
Start squatting light with your eyes open, then cover your eyes. Keep alternating open and shut eye sets or reps, but do not add wheels until you own a given weight, blind. Do not just go through the motions but concentrate on the feedback your body has to offer: muscular tension, joint angles, etc.
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 6:25 AM | Comments (0)
April 4, 2005
The Russian Squat Assault
There are many effective routines but few are powerful enough to acquire cult status. The Five-Sets-of-Five... The Twenty-Rep-Super-Squats... The Smolov...
Shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union, powerlifting coach S. Y. Smolov, Master of Sports designed what is undeniably the hardest and the most effective squat program ever. This strong statement is backed up with extraordinary gains from lifters on both sides of the pond. After I wrote up the Smolov in Powerlifting USA magazine a few years ago I was swamped with incredible success stories. Here is one. A drug free master lifter took his squat from 560 pounds to 665 in thirteen weeks! Then he went on to win the world lifetime drug free master title and to set a world squat record in his class! Usually, a report like this is followed by ‘individual results may vary’ in small print. Not in the Smolov’s case! Such gains are typical. I repeat: many advanced strength athletes have added 100 pounds to their squats in just over four months!
Now for the bad news. Quoting the above powerlifter, "I have never worked harder in 25+ years of exercise." Coming from a world champion, these words carry weight. The original Smolov routine calls for four heavy squat days a week totaling 136 reps with very heavy weights!
Russian expatriate powerlifting authority Andrey Butenko spoke up about the Smolov regimen, "I've used this squat program many times and I was drug free. It gave me huge gains and that's the only program I would recommend for fast and guaranteed improvement… my weight has gone up with huge increases in the legs and the back… it is very, very, very intense... or insane, but it does work... I've done it a hundred times and it always worked… It kills but it works!"
Accept the Russian Squat Assault challenge! This brutal routine will flush every cowardly myth about "overtraining" down the toilet and make your legs swell with muscle and power! Comrade Smolov promised that your gains will surprise you and he has not let anyone down yet. Squat till, as Soviet weightlifting great Yuri Vlasov put it, there is "dark red twilight in your head" and "the roaring of blood in your ears" and you will earn it. The power.
I am a realist; most iron athletes just do not have the conditioning to survive the full Smolov. So I have developed a kinder, gentler version of the program adapted to two days a week…
For more information on this topic order Pavel’s Beyond Bodybuilding today.
Posted by james at 6:04 AM | Comments (315)