Training Mistakes

Recent progress has taken me to lifetime PR's after years of stagnation thanks to fundamental changes in my training. Those same changes and lessons I've applied to my athletes who likewise have experienced big PR's. Thinking back on the lessons that have brought me to a new level of training, here are the things that made the biggest difference:

1. Avoiding weaknesses. Training should be fun and enjoyable, otherwise we'd burn out pretty quickly. Part of the enjoyment comes from doing things you're good at. If you have a natural affinity towards a particular exercise you'll likely perform it often. But does that come at the expense of an exercise you're not good at but is likely an exercise you should do in order to improve?
   For most of my training career I neglected two big lifts: the good morning and the barbell row. I was a naturally good squatter with poor pulling levers, which meant a sucked at good mornings and rows. I wasn't good at them, they're uncomfortable, so I just didn't do them. As a result, my deadlift stagnated for years and my entire back was weak. Once I decided to focus on these two lifts, everything improved: my deadlift went up 45 lbs, my back stopped hurting, and my shoulders felt in the bench press better thanks to stronger lats.
   The same goes for the bench press. I never spent much time doing triceps extensions because I sucked at them. Guess where I was constantly missing bench attempts at meets? Right at lockout. Once I started regularly practicing extensions of all kinds, more close grip presses, and partials (from pins and boards), my bench improved.
2. Training too heavy too often. While it behooves you to train at maximal intensity year-round in order to get stronger, you have to know how to program those heavy lifts. One max effort day per week for the upper and lower body is sufficient, and you'll likely need to rotate your ME lifts weekly to avoid accommodation. If you train the same lift to a max effort for multiple consecutive weeks, you'll stagnate and possibly get hurt. I made this same mistake and tried to remedy it by trying to push myself harder in each training session and recover as best as I could, but at some point you have to train smart as well as hard. Rotating lifts weekly allows you to still train at a maximum intensity year-round while avoiding stagnation and maintaining progress.
   Assistance work can get too heavy as well. Bigger supplemental exercises -- i.e. squat/press/deadlift variations -- ought to be trained heavy ideally hitting regular PR's. For smaller exercises, the weight doesn't necessarily matter. A triceps pushdown or a dumbbell curl is used to build up weak muscles that will improve the bigger lifts.
3. Neglecting GPP. A lot of people equivocate GPP with conditioning and cardio. For strength athletes your aerobic base is part of GPP but only a part of it. GPP means exactly what it stand for: general physical preparation. That includes not just cardio but also flexibility, coordination, and a number of other basic physical characteristics. Strength itself is GPP for athletes in other sports; for powerlifting it is the key trait. But it relies on a strong base of general physical characteristic and skills. As with specific weaknesses discussed in the first point, other non-lifting traits might be what's holding you back.
4. Training alone. The past three months have put me in a position where the majority of my training is done by myself. While I made progress during that time, I would've made more progress if I had training partners each workout for spots, coaching, and a little extra motivation. Scheduling might be a little more challenging but it's worth the effort to train alongside others. My training always improves when I'm with like-minded lifters.

These are fundamental principles that anyone can implement into their training. If you've plateaued, look at what you've been doing and see if one of these can make a difference. It might be as simple as training with other lifters or doing a couple quick extra workouts for GPP.

How to Add 100+ Pounds to Your Total

Last weekend I posted a personal record 1,509 pound total with PR’s in each lift. That's an improvement of 104 pounds in eleven months. I’m partly disappointed because none of my attempts were close to true maxes -- everything was relatively easy. But this means training went extremely well and I’m on the right path to bigger numbers. Thinking about the things that made the biggest impact on each of the individual competition lifts, here are the training lifts that contributed the most to the performance of both myself and my training partners:

1. Box Squat: there’s only one way to do a box squat, and I wasn’t doing them properly prior to my last meet. A properly executed box squat entails controlling the descent all the way down to the box, completely relaxing the hips while sitting on the box, then arching the upper back while driving from the hips straight up off the box. Squatting to a proper box height, especially for dynamic effort work, is crucial as well.

Along with depth is the way you initiate your ascent from the box. My dynamic effort weight leading up to the November meet was far too heavy, and I got in the habit of using the box as a means of popping myself up rather than using my hips and hamstrings. This made for an incredibly weak bottom position once the box was removed, and I had no power out of the hole at my last meet. From an outside observer’s perspective, you’ll usually see one of two things happen when the lifter is using the box itself to initiate their ascent: 

i) The box rocks or slides when the lifter comes off the box — this is an obvious sign they are pushing off the box rather than away from it.     

ii) Less common but still detrimental to squatting strength is using the whip of the bar to initiate the descent. The lifter will jerk or bounce slightly just before the ascent which creates an oscillation of the bar. While this is proper technique for initiating a jerk or getting unstuck out of the bottom of a heavy clean, this will not build the hip power required to drive up a heavy squat.

2. Pin Press: Bench presses from the pins ingrained in me a valuable piece of bench technique: push yourself through the bench rather than pushing the bar away from you. This gives you a stronger foundation for pushing through heavy attempts, helps keep the shoulder blades retracted, and allows you to get more drive from the triceps. Without the stretch reflex, the only way to push through a heavy pin press is to fully drive yourself through the bench itself to get that heavy dead weight off the pins with enough momentum to reach lockout. We used pins of various heights working up to singles for max effort work, and we rotated between high pin presses and board presses as supplemental work after dynamic effort bench. Along with different heights we varied our grip widths.

3. Good Morning: the greatest contributing factor to building my deadlift has been prioritizing the good morning as both a max effort movement and an accessory exercise. All kinds of varieties, especially with the safety squat bar and cambered bar, narrow stance and wide, out of the rack and from the pins, have helped immensely after neglecting this lift for the majority of my training career. No other lift has built the strength of my entire back, abdominals, and hamstrings like good mornings. Like the box squat, you must be honest with yourself about technique in order to maximize the training effect. Even on max effort work, we aim to get the torso close to parallel to the floor with the bar clearly ahead of the knees through the majority of the movement. This will limit the weight used in the short-term but will yield greater carryover to the deadlift and squat which is the primary objective here. 

A few general programming notes:

• We followed the old Westside standard for max effort lower movement selection: 60% good mornings, 30% squats, 10% deadlifts.

• Assistance work for the upper body focused primarily on triceps and lats.

• Assistance work for the lower body focused primarily on hamstrings and abs.

• For accountability, motivation, and spotting, get some solid training partners.