Why the Soviet Weightlifting System is Effective w/Pavel Tsatsouline | Joe Rogan

the Joe Rogan experience so you just a son in the US some years back decades before there's some some kettlebells were used by some old-time strongmen like Zig Klein for example mhm and there was a company named Milo no relations to the magazine really what is lesson with Milo why Oh Milo is the guy who carried the calf so if you go if you look okay the progressive overload is usually explained as this legend of Milo of Croton ax so this guy started carrying a little calf on his shoulders and he would carry the calf

every day so the calf would grow and eventually guy became very strong so that's why that name is present in in the strength game so it back then today it is just one of the finest publications on strength training mostly niche things again like gripping what if anyone's actually done that what carry a cow not work without what isn't amazing that something can grow physically faster then you can keep lifting it absolutely can but you know your typical training plan that people say I'm gonna have five phones on my bench press today I'm gonna do

this every week and that by Christmas I'll be the world champion yeah that just doesn't work so the rate of adaptation is such that your body just cannot do that and it's cyclical in nature so you have to to put it in the my load terms you have to after you carry the calf for a while it grows you have to back off to a lighter calf and start you know start building up again why we do not know exactly so for some reason that unidirectional adaptation just in one you know we're getting stronger at

the bench press or what have you or it carrying the calf he just cannot proceed indefinitely there is some fatigue of some endocrine mechanisms some genetic mechanisms we do not know that but tactically we do have tricks of the trade to beat that to work around that and there is a number of ways of doing that the oldest way of doing that and it's very smart still very smart for a lot of people they would call this I think possibly constant weight training or something like that but the Soviets described it as step loading so

let's look at your typical last look at your typical beginner somebody in the gym and so the person starts lifting whatever weight for whatever reps and the next week let's say next week he has five pounds and he does it again he does it again well the Soviets figured out that it's much better for him to stay at the same weight for several weeks and then make a bigger jump hmm so what you're doing pretty much is you are the making that updations more stable and it just happens in the cellular levels membranes become stronger

and so on but all timers just they would say that you're solidifying the gains so the way that many old timers trained is they would just stick the same weight and the staying with the same weight for a long time in the beginning it's challenging and that it becomes kind of comfortable that becomes almost easy and never jump up so that's just one way of doing it and today it's not unprecedented either if you look at Chris summer his gymnastics coach used that with gymnast it's very common I used that tactic with my latest addition

of my kettlebell simple and sinister because it's much more reliable than just progressive overload and also because psychologically first of all weeds out the impatient people so you're told to stay with the same load for a while some people automatic iself forget it I cannot do that well I don't want these people for my stuff anyway and second so you're staying with this weight or these reps for some time in the beginning they challenge you and then some time goes by and suddenly they don't anymore so just very much there's a very clear clear sense

of accomplishment so this is called step loading or the old-timers old-timers terminology the constant weight training if you look at the other ways of making progress so another approach is called cycling and cycling so the one that I just described that would really be if we could artificially stop the growth of the calf like okay stop growing mm-hmm for a while which we can but the cycling this is where I mentioned earlier this is where you go back to a lighter calf so the classic American powerlifting training template this is cycling so the history of

cycling is very interesting again what cycling is cycling is in the simplest possible terms you take 12 weeks you start with light weights you build up until you go really heavy and that was the predominant strength training system in the 70s in the 80s and that was the strength system behind the dominant American powerlifting team so lifters like Eddie Cohn Kurt kawaski lifters like Don Austin who is or Lamar Gant whose death of trekkers still stand decades after they use this classic cycling so the classic cycling you start with the moderate moderately challenging load then

you keep proceeding go heavier and heavier and heavier then you compete then you start over and to give you to give you a very simple tactic that's something that your listeners can use in their training whether they follow this cycling format or they do something else is that Russian scientists discovery that your endocrine system pretty much can take two two weeks out of four of heavy loading pleasure so it is there are some exceptions if you but forget exceptions generally just two weeks of heavy loading and if you look at the classic powerlifting cycles by

let's say Marty Gallagher so for four weeks you do sets of eight for weeks as of five four weeks so3 and in week one you start out with a way that's comfortable in a week to moderately challenging in week three you hit your repeat your previous PR for this reps and in week four use such a new PR and then you jump to the next rep count so as you see in this particular template you have two weeks two hard weeks of training out of the month and that's just one of the many ways of

doing that partner I got distracted so I wouldn't want to tell about the history of cycling yeah so bill star who was a huge name in the game he he was a former top weightlifter in the United States back in the 60s later on very successful coach strength coach and author the strongest shall survive his book on strength training for football remains one of the best strength training books and Bill Starr recalls that American lifters started getting a whiff of some Russian paradise programs so what's periodization paralyzation the simplest terms is planning your training according

to certain principles to end it beak performance so that's just the really kind of a 50,000 level 50,000 foot definition and they did not have their full full information about how it was done so they just decided to do exactly that and that was a very successful very successful purchase strength training it does not necessarily work for everybody there are some reasons for that mostly because of your sport competition if you're an athlete but it's extremely factor as was shown on the platform and finally so first we discussed step cycling step loading which is constant

training second we discussed wave cycling which is just cycling right wave loading and the third one would be the variable and variable loading is extremely unique it's unlike something else so here's how variable loading works in variable loading you have certain load parameters like for example you will know that your average training weights will be 75% of your maximum you will know that you will perform for example 300 squats per month or whatever so these numbers are arrived at experimentally over decades and what variable loading does as opposed to the traditional methods traditional progressive overload

is that the jump in volume for example from one training unit to another one day one week one month and so on it's at least 20% so the jumps are really high really high the variable loading was developed by Professor Akagi para boeuf who was a Olympic weightlifting champion and he was the premier sports scientist so he argued that in nature most changes are discrete there are not gradual they're discrete so whatever whatever adapt adaptation take place in your body the same thing whatever happens with many physical process chemical processes and so on so he

concluded that training has to be highly variable so you understand what I mean that it's a 20% minimal change we called that Delta xx principle it doesn't mean that's constantly going up that's that's not possible it goes up and down it just keeps flashing so if we use if we go back to the traditional cycling as an example the traditional cycling so it's a linear buildup back up a little linear buildup back up a little in contrast variable overload it's it's going crazy it's comfortably insane in fact this is a little entertaining experience strength coaches

and especially people with some sort of a background in mathematics they are able to dissect and analyze training plans from other coaches you can look at a plan you can take an experience powerlifting coach show him a program from another coach and the coach will be able to tell whether this will work or not who this will work for and so on and kind of figure out what figure out what's under the hood right there so there's a very clear pattern variable over low so it's like a photograph it's very clear variable overload if you

start analyzing the pattern looking at the program so for example buddy's Seco he's a he's a former coach of Russian national powerlifting to you so he took the Soviet Olympic weightlifting methodology and directly applied it to powerlifting so his plans have made their way to the west and some licorice used them very successfully but whenever he tried to read this plan and try to make any sense of that he just drives you crazy because you see like okay here's a string here's a pattern is going right here and suddenly his gun so if traditional cycling's

like clear photograph the variable overload makes me think of remember in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where the kid is looking at so house painting you know we want to use there all these dots right there so when you step away you see something you start getting closer just a whole bunch of dots it just disappears so what's the story behind that so the story is this this method the Soviet Olympic weightlifting method was developed over several decades by a number of coaches by number of scientists so it's a very much collaborative effort so Bobby offers

one for sure innovative chair like a number of others and it was a very before even dissecting this method let me tell you how house this method was you can look up the world that weightlifting records in Olympic weightlifting and hear about all this different records sub by this lifter that left her and so on and so forth if you few people realize that the International weightlifting Federation has changed the weight classes at two or three times since the eighties and the reason they did that is to erase the drug the record set by the

drug taking athletes back then of course you I'm very happy that as soon as they changed the weight classes lifter stop taking drugs like that so if you look at these records kilo per kilo pound per pound and if you charred them compare them to what they did then to what they did today you will find that while they did catch up in a few weight classes and about half of these classes the records from the eight is still stand so for example what Utica van Yan did in 1980 at 82 kilos he totaled 400

kills in the snatch in the clean-and-jerk that's never been done before and Utica valve anyon was a wiry guy you wouldn't take it for a lifter just amazing so first of all the system still remains if we would just take a very large big picture 50,000 foot look at strength there are great many ways of getting strong some of them very good some of the mediocre some very bad but historically in lifting sports the two systems that have been predominant are the Soviet weightlifting system and the American classic powerlifting system from the seventies and eighties

okay so that was a kind of a long detour to before tell you why this stuff that they figured out back in 1960s why it matters just to say it still is the best it still rules so what they did is it was very empirical in for example when you're studying endurance going into this studying the biochemistry of the cell in the body taking apart figuring out how this works is very helpful very on the other hand when you're dealing with strength that approach has been not really effective so if we talk about muscle muscle

training for example hypertrophy we still have no idea what the hell's going on so we can we know which buttons to push but that's just empirical knowledge that's not the understanding of the cell so we really don't understand hypertrophy and really no we do not Wow No and let's I'll be happy to talk about this but if you don't mind let me just finish on this variable overload and the Soviet weightlifting system so what they did even though they also you know they cut the muscle look at that as well just didn't learn as much

but they coaches program particular loads for athletes and watch what happen and then they watched how the health is performed and the watch how the top athletes performed and it looked for patterns and they were very open-minded so they're not thinking like well it's got to be just the heaviest weights we'll do that or it's got to be the training to failure it's gonna do that it's not the case so just to give you an example of how enormous that undertaking was so typical strength training studies one six weeks for some untrained college subjects you

know guys were just on their phones I feel so me DVF was also world champion he studied the training loads of top weight lifters only when they were successful in competition for for Olympic cycles for so we're talking about sixteen years and then somebody else to do for another cycle and they're just an amazing patterns just emerged so for instance I'm gonna give you give you a rundown on what the patterns are there are certain optimal volumes how much exercise you do there is certain optimal intensities so if you followed the variable overload method the

optimal intensity so the average intensity would be about 75% of your max which for most people would be probably somewhere like a traps or something could do maybe ten maybe eight and you will see that about half of all the lifts that you do are about seventy five eighty percent now we're do all the rest the other lifts come in so there's a normal distribution so you'll find that seventy five eighty percent on the top eighty eighty-five a little bit lower you know so the lighter weights like sixty percent are in the bottom and they

have your waist like ninety percent in and higher or in the bottom as well so they figured out you just have to do most of your work with these average weights they are not so light so you're gonna respect them but they're not so happy that you're having any question about performing lifting them correctly so none there is another aspect of intensity is just doing some heavier lifts very a very carefully measured number of heavy lifts in addition like ninety percent or whatever occasionally then they figured out the proper volumes just to give you an

idea if you're looking at let's say you know you might be doing thirty reps of given exercise per session what have you although there's variability but then there's also something else that's very interesting is the optimal number of repetitions with the given weight and this is what hurts people hurts people's heads if you look at the weights from seventy to ninety percent the optimal number of repetitions are one third to two thirds of your maximum so let me give an example to the reader to the listener let's say that you're lifting a 10 rep max

weight so you go all out as hard as possible you can do ten reps in training you should be doing you should be doing three to six reps that's it that's that's the window and why is that and we have no idea but the scientists like in this case that was I think was much fear if was involved that the father of Berta's ation I think it was one of the scientists they experimented with all sorts of rep ranges and they figured out that it D reps are too low they're given a weight you don't

get stronger if the reps get too high either the athlete gets hurt or his technique is compromised or he's just unable to perform the optimal volume so pretty much roughly you're looking at doing about half of the reps you capable of that's it and people can argue with this all they want like what's the science behind this there's no science we don't know the science is purely empirical this particular method is purely empirical it worked for decades it still does and that's one of the ways you can get strong so in summary we have we

have sorry step loading which is where you stay with the same weight for a while where the same reps whatever and then make a sudden jump that's the best wave to train for beginners usually we have wave loading or cycling which is we build up jump back and build up again and we have variable loading which is almost almost chaotic weirdest constantly surprised the body with what we're throwing at it but we do that within very narrow parameters so this method was purely developed by studying winners and winners is where they finally took that but

these studies were done at every level some for example coaches in the field would conduct something called agogic experiments which is which is a study that's not quite as not quite as scientifically solid but it's still good enough so the first what testing is out lower level athletes and then finally take it to a higher level athletes so the things that I'm telling you about they have been universally effective for athletes above the beginner level and of course there are some subtle changes as you progress there are some subtleties like for instance notice that I

said that you have to use some heavy lifts like ninety percent ninety-five it has to be very surgical about how many so for instance beginners do none advanced lifters need to do just some but not many intermediate lifters can do the most or heavy the weight lifters can do not as many lighter ones can do more so there are some differences at different levels but the principles fundamental are the same and these principles apply whether people are taking drugs or not yes they do the difference is in fact the yes verkhoshansky Aliyev made a very

strong case very strong case of that they used the Soviet youthful vision for that was restoratives and they said this is universal even with restoratives or not the difference for this for the drugs would be is just that the volumes will be higher you'll be able to train more that's pretty much the difference but the body will still work the same way now these principles have they caught on in the United States I mean they've caught on with strong first I know the UT you implement these and people teach these but is this something that's

universally sort of accepted or is it still something that people are cute cautiously curious about it's definitely not universal in part because people don't know about it in part you have to implement this correctly so right now this several the several areas where you would see that is well one obviously the body shake OHS powerlifting programs that have been imported here by the used by power lifters hmm the other is we have the program called plant-strong which is Vinh again this is a very faithful representation of the Soviet weightlifting system but apply it to general

strength exercises like you know squats deadlifts and so on and the other thing what we also do and this is what we do with with with the military and so on and so forth we have some simple programs very simple programs that are designed using this Delta 20 principle and using this optimal loads that they could just go out and use the nice thing is unlike progressive overload cycling if something happens you get a problem here there's some variability so in summary just say no it's not widely known it's not now in the States yeah

let's fix it and it makes sense and one of the things that I really like what you're saying about is completing the adaptation with your tendons and your ligaments and all these different things that oftentimes are injured when you are ramping up your weight lifting and you're trying to increase the amount of weight you carry you so this this principle of maintaining at a similar weight for a long time allowing your body to complete that adaptation that makes a lot of sense adaptations need to be stable and it does it's not true just for strength

training if you're looking at endurance as well the adaptations and the mitochondria is wealthy you can get some acute adaptation it's a very short-term like oh you know bigger whatever guns in six weeks or faster 400 meters six weeks yes you can do that but these adaptations are transient so it takes time for things to really get got solidified and also if you're more patient with your progression as well you're gonna find that your gains are much more stable if you take some time off which is important for anybody you travel you get sick some

other thing happens so if you've been training in a manner where you're not forcing yourself [Applause]