Fresh off a bronze medal performance at the Arnold Classic, Nadia likes to use top-down planning – that is, planning out specific sets, reps and weights far ahead of time – as they prepare for a meet. This is NOT the ideal way for most lifters to optimize performance for a meet, but it works …
The latest trend in strength training that’s spread like wildfire is “movement optimism” – that is, focusing on making every exercise and every rep as biomechanically “optimal” as possible. On its face, this sounds great. Time is precious, so let’s waste no time and try to get as big a return on our efforts as …
Here’s an excerpt about supplementary exercises from my free e-book, Seek and Destroy: A Powerlifter’s Guide to Identifying Weak Points and Improving Technique. It’s got over 90 pages of information to teach you how to pick exercises and program them to eliminate your own specific weaknesses as a powerlifter. And it’s all yours when you …
A few weeks back, I hosted my Powerlifting Program Design seminar and got to present my coaching and programming approach that I’ve developed over the past decade. That’s the good news. The bad news: I only got through about 75 percent of the material I planned to present. I guess I can be a bit long …
People love to argue about which strength training program is the best, as if one single prefabricated approach is going to be significantly better for the majority of people than any other program out there (spoiler alert: there’s no such thing). If you truly understand what foundational principles are necessary for any program to be …
4 Things All Great Strength Training Programs Have in Common Read More »
A pivot block is a period of non-specific training that we use to give lifters a physical and mental break from heavy powerlifting-specific training. I first heard of this concept from Mike Tuchscherer of Reactive Training systems and to be clear, the way I use them is NOT the same way that RTS uses them. …
I’m generally not a fan of “system-based” strength training. There are far too many individual differences between lifters to try to pigeonhole everyone into the same exact training system. When this happens, results tend to follow a bell curve: 20 percent of lifters thrive, 20 percent of lifters do terribly, and the middle 60 percent …
You’ll hear some coaches say, “Bigger isn’t stronger. Stronger is stronger.” Being jacked isn’t the only prerequisite for maximal strength. Otherwise, top bodybuilders would also dominate the powerlifting platform. But I firmly believe that being jacked gives you the potential to be a better powerlifter. More muscle mass means you’ve got more cross sectional area …
You Probably Don’t Need to Train These 3 Muscle Groups Read More »
I am a firm believer in autoregulation and teaching my lifters how to choose the weight on the bar as accurately as possible based on what I’m asking them to do. This is why we use RPE-based training almost exclusively. In its purest form, RPE (rate of perceived exertion) is an educated guess on what …
A 4-Step Process for Choosing the Right Weight to Lift Read More »
Program design for powerlifting is equal parts art and science. As a coach, you have to balance the scientific principles (progressive overload, specificity, etc.) with the lifter’s individual differences and your own coaching instincts. There are many variables to manage, with some of them more important than others. The biggest ones are: Exercise selection Intensity …
