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Quote from: steven-miller on June 19, 2012, 09:51:14 am

What other reasonable choices really exist if you fall into the B category?

What about really going explosive, be it going very heavy with very low rep ranges (1-3, since these rep ranges force the recruitment of a very high % of the motor neurons) [...]

What is the progressive overload in this training method? More weight, right? And if you use more weight and hold everything else constant, you got stronger. And for type A stronger is possible without gains in bw, and for type B it is not - as we defined. So herein does not lie a solution.

[...] or using lighter weights and moving the bar as fast as possible (where the bar actually moves fast as well). There will be some hypertrophy involved as well considering the TUT, not that much as a regular strength workout (say 3x5) but the thing would be to make you learn to generate a lot of force very quickly (faster neural signals).

If this was an alternative then it would be easier to increase the olympic lifts than it is to increase the squat. I, and everyone else that tried, knows that this is not the case.
Explosive lifts (especially clean and snatch variations) are king when it comes to decreasing an explosive strength deficit (ESD). Gains in this area will come very quickly, but will not come for a long time. A couple weeks of adequate training and there is not much left from the ESD that you could utilize. After that you are back where you started. You can't increase max strength efficiently without a bw increase and you can't make existent strength usable for explosive events anymore because there is not enough ESD left - in other words, you do not have enough excess max strength...

god damn it, steven-miller, you've gotten better at writing, which means i'm actually reading your posts now, which means i'm buying what you're selling.

I am glad to get through...

This is actually very easy to answer and vag is getting decently close with his post.

Yes, it might be more difficult for one guy than for the other to increase his squat. We do not even have to get into the height and levers debate, individuals just vary in their abilities, period. But every healthy male under 40 has a very decent chance to reach the rather modest goal of a 2x bw squat IF he is willing to gain the necessary bodyweight to accommodate serious training and improvements.
There are gifted people (A) that do not need to gain ANY bodyweight to achieve a 2 x bw squat in less than 6 months. If you are that person, congrats to you, you lucked out in the genetic lottery. But most people struggle with that, HARD (B). They increase their strength, sure, but it takes them ages to get to decent levels because they insist on staying skinny. If you are that person, you are making life more difficult than it needs to be. More importantly, you are wasting very valuable time because it will certainly not get easier to achieve your athletic goals with the years.
There are basically two options if you are type B: You can creep forward 25 lbs in the squat per year while not gaining any bodyweight and maybe, MAYBE someday achieve your strength goal that way. Or you can make the reasonable decision and begin eating like someone that trains HARD and have a 2 x bw squat in a couple of months - guaranteed. Sure, you will be heavier. Sure, you might not see your abs anymore. But you are also much, much stronger to move the bodyweight around. 200 lbs is not a high bodyweight if you squat 500, is it?

Now, what is holding people back? It is a lack of realistic self-assessment of ones own talent (for example in regards to strength) and not doing the things that would logically correspond with such an assessment. In other words, if you are type B and make yourself believe that you could be type A, then you will be the guy that has a really, really hard time getting a 2 x bw squat. For everyone else, this is just an increment that comes and gets surpassed rather soon.

I heard that you should squat max about 2.5x bw else if you exceed that then you will start to slow down as you bulk up. so wouldn't squatting 3 or 4x bw slow you down.

There are maybe 5 people on this forum that get close to this number. I would not worry too much about slowing down after the 2.5 mark because you have to get there first.  

Quote from: steven-miller on June 16, 2012, 10:08:43 am

Btw., a 4.5 increase in DLRVJ for 50 lbs in squat weight is massive. What is holding you back is reluctance to taking a more aggressive approach to training and improvement.

this is true, too. so what would you suggest? "squats plus jumps plus one explosive exercise" does not help because that's what i've been doing, in some for another. so what do you suggest? what is characteristic of a "more aggressive approach" than what i've been doing? keep in mind that i have little flexibility in my work hours and no choice about taking these periodic trips to places like pakistan and afghanistan, during which i inevitably regress.

If all you did was pushing your strength in the squat and jumping, how is it, that it took 2 years for a 50 lbs increase? And how is it that you consider a 4+ inch improvement in DLRVJ "not working" regarding such a small strength increase? My outlook is that your strength training, inefficient as it may have been, was successful in that it lead to a greatly higher jump. Therefore I think you should continue focusing on strength and this time do so in a way that maximizes your gains. "A more aggressive approach" makes you forget about keeping your bodyweight down and focus instead on getting some muscle on your body with which it can move itself around more explosively. Programming wise nothing is needed except the really basic things I named earlier. Hell, I am really generous with the variety, kingfish would have you squat every day and drop anything else ;-).

Quote from: steven-miller on June 15, 2012, 09:20:03 pm

My advice would be to focus on basic strength work and a form of max effort jumps. Squats, deadlifts and one(!) explosive lift (preferably powerclean) should be that basic strength work and max effort jumps can be done in addition. If you have to, keep the BSS if you are interested in single leg jumps as well. If you squat heavy on Monday, you might do them on Wednesday, so that Friday can be squats again. You have to treat them as a main exercise for them to be of any worth IMO.

i'm not very consistent on the explosive lift cycles (i do barbell jump squats occasionally more as a form of squat deloading) and IMO - you can do without them, and still be able to transfer your strength made from the heavy compounds into your jumps just by jumping.

I agree fully, you can do without them if you do your jumping. But I insist that including powercleans or powersnatches makes it a lot easier to overcome an explosive strength deficit and I find it a better training method to do this with their help since PRs in the quick lifts are programmable with some reliability and PRs in jumping are not.

I think the only thing holding people back from using "just jumping" as a good plyometric workout (and 100% specific to what they actually want to increase) is jumping while not completely recovered.

That's why IMO people need to pay more attention to recovery/programming to actually benefit from the squat + jump equation.

What do you suggest people should do to improve their recovery, so that squats + jumps begins to work effectively for everyone?

Quote

MON: Gym - heavy legs (mainly quads, glutes)
- DLRVJ x5-15 depending on feeling
- Squats 3x3 @85% OR 2x3 MSEM @ 90-95%
- BSS 3x8
- Calf raise 3x20
- Hip thrust 3x10
- Core, UB superset/circuit as I've been doing them

TUES: Track
- ME sprints 3-6x30-50m
- DL bounds 3x8
- LRLR bounds very submax 5x8-10 (i am so bad at these that i literally can't go ME)
- low-volume interval sprints

WED: Rest OR optional Cardio
- light jump rope/foam roll/stretch
OR
- medium-volume interval sprints/foam roll/stretch

THURS: Gym (explosive exercises/hamstrings)
- DLRVJ x5-15 depending on feeling
- power snatches x10-15, doubles or singles
- RDL/GHR 3x8 (start really light, this is going to murder me at first)
- Jump squats 2x3
- Depth jumps 4x4
- Core, UB superset/circuit as I've been doing them

FRI: Jumps
- 6+ of each jump (DLRVJ, SLRVJ, SVJ)

SAT: Rest OR optional Cardio
- light jump rope/foam roll/stretch
OR
- medium-volume interval sprints/foam roll/stretch

SUN: Jumps
- 6+ of each jump (more effort than Fri)

I personally think that this is very light on strength work for your situation. I don't know how long you want to do this and how you plan to progress, but IMO you lack raw strength. For example, I love power snatches for athletes, but I am not even sure you have any business training them right now. Please do not take this the wrong way, I am sure they will be a great addition to your training a couple weeks/months out, but right now there is too little strength to express through this movement. You will increase them at first, but probably get stuck after a couple of work-outs. You will also not benefit as much as others because they are probably too light and you might not be efficient enough right now for them to represent a significant training stress in themselves. There is a lot of redundancy in there as well that I do not really like for novices.

My advice would be to focus on basic strength work and a form of max effort jumps. Squats, deadlifts and one(!) explosive lift (preferably powerclean) should be that basic strength work and max effort jumps can be done in addition. If you have to, keep the BSS if you are interested in single leg jumps as well. If you squat heavy on Monday, you might do them on Wednesday, so that Friday can be squats again. You have to treat them as a main exercise for them to be of any worth IMO.

I have been reading about David Woodhouse's method as well and it seems compelling. After all, lifting twice a week and still making weekly gains in the front squat and at least somewhat regular PR's on snatch and clean & jerk could hardly be more efficient. I am considering to try a program like this for a short period of time, probably a couple weeks out of a meet. But I am not yet convinced that it can work long-term and for lifters that still need to work a lot on their basics. I honestly would like to get a little more data/experience from him, also about the population of lifters trained with that approach. I will follow his lifters though as I think it COULD work well for a certain time.

Good thread in Pendlay's forum as well, Nick Horton expressed the important points about the bulgarian style training quite nicely.

A reasonable position to take in the debate, I agree with it. The 30% thing is a good rule of thumb, IMO, but there are outliers in both directions and it depends whether jumping is trained as a skill or whether VJ is just used as a test without specific preparation regarding the movement.

I would be interested to know people's opinions about John Broz' statement, that very high volume protects from injuries because the ever present fatigue hinders the body from using intensities where such injuries are likely to occur.

This is obviously in respect to weight training, not throwing a baseball etc. But that is a perspective that stands in large contrast to the points made in the article.

I think this position, volume as the main predictor of injury, can only be argued for when there is a minimum intensity requirement. To effectively train there certainly is. But regarding the bench press example one could certainly ask whether an injury had occurred, when 395 lbs were used for 5x5. I think it is less likely. So my counter-argument would be that injury risk is best predicted by an interaction of volume x intensity - much more so then one of those alone (which again leads to the author's point of view and the real questions: how much intensity is required to make progress and at which intensity can efficiency be maximized?)

On a side note: Volume as a predictor of injury could also have nothing to do with improper programming, but simple statistics. If there was a fixed injury risk of 0,1% per repetition at a given intensity, then doing more repetitions would increase the likelihood of an injury. But NOT because of fatigue and improper mechanics, but just because there are more opportunities for the incident to occur. The injury risk of 0,1% could still remain the same and injury could even happen when a heavy single is programmed (although less likely). The take-away message is that injury cannot ever be ruled out and not every injury is due to improper programming.

The author agrees that athletes need to be strong - good. Discussions seem to be a lot more uniform once you can agree on such a basic thing. I am sure most coaches also agree that an athlete needs to be able to display good form on every lift to train efficiently and avoid injuries.

If we can take those two things for granted, then there is an objective way to measure progress in strength once in a while. Just determine a repetition maximum (1 rm - 8 rm) and see if it has improved compared to before and by how much.

Having established an objective way to measure strength, how to get to an adequate level is up to the means and preferences of the coach and athlete. In general, it is always better to get away with less work to gain the same profit (so that resources can be spent elsewhere). So if an athlete lucks out in the genetic lottery and has incredible strength per default, that is the easiest thing to work with (case A). You don't need to lift, you are fucking strong in the first place. The next best thing is training and taking performance enhancers (case B), followed by just training (case C).

When we are concerned with how to optimize only the training (in case C), then the question becomes how to get strong the fastest OR how to get strong investing the least amount of resources.
The question is however NOT what works at all, since a lot of things work to some degree.

So I cannot disagree with what has been said in the article. I do by no means think that going up to heavy singles would be the only method to improve strength. In fact, I have been a big fan of 5s and 3s and occasionally even 8s for strength training from the very beginning. But I think the article lacks an answer to the question that truly interests us. How do we, as athletes, get our squats to 600 ASAP. Instead it merely reminds us that methods other than ME help strength as well - as if people were foreign to this idea...