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  Squat Every Day

  Thoughts on Overtraining and Recovery in Strength Training

  by Matt Perryman

  For other goodies, visit

  www.myosynthesis.com

  Squat Every Day: Thoughts on Overtraining and Recovery in Strength Training.

  Copyright © 2013 by Matt Perryman. Some rights reserved. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This license permits non-profit sharing, downloading, and reproduction of this book as an unbroken unit, provided that attribution is properly assigned.

  To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

  Myosynthesis

  First Edition: May 2013

  Contents

  Preface

  Doing It All Wrong

  PART ONE: Disturbing the Status Quo

  1. The Case for More

  2. The Overtraining Myth

  PART TWO: Recovery Matters

  3. How You Feel is a Lie

  4. Hardgainers and Responders

  5. Nerves of Steel

  PART THREE: How to Squat Every Day

  6. Practice, Not Pain

  7. The Longtails Strategy

  8. Squatting Every Day

  9. Reality Checks

  10. The Empty Life

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  This book started as an experiment I did on myself. Long-time readers of my blog at Myosynthesis.com will know that I started tinkering with daily squatting back in early 2010. I hadn’t intended to do anything but try it out for awhile, just to see what would happen. I honestly expected a crash-and-burn inside a few weeks.

  But it never came. In fact, it started to feel like the exact opposite. The squat numbers kept going up as long as I kept turning up. I expected more injuries, but those never materialized either. Instead, my long-aching joints and sore spots, some of which I’d thought were career-enders, started to feel better.

  I started taking notes, sifting through research papers, and trying to figure out why this was happening. Based on everything I thought I knew at the time, my body should have been stressed to the breaking point ― and it just wasn’t. I blogged about what was going on, and I was content to leave it at that.

  I didn’t have any intention of writing a book about it. After all, it’s one thing for a top-caliber athlete to train every day, multiple times at that. They have the skill, the bodies, and the incentive. It didn’t seem like there would be any appeal for programming that specialized, requiring that much of a time commitment and dedication, for the recreational lifters and bodybuilders that I write for. I’m far from a top-tier athlete, and while I like to tinker with strategies that I’d never “officially” recommend, it didn’t occur to me that there’d be anything of real interest here, beyond the novelty of it.

  The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that what I’d stumbled upon wasn’t just about squatting to a max every day. There was more here, potentially much more, hidden away in the assumptions we all make about our bodies, about our training, and how it all hangs together behind the scenes. At the time, I’d been following John Broz’s lifters, reading his thoughts on the “Bulgarian” system he used, and watching the progress videos on YouTube. I was following Jamie Lewis’s Chaos & Pain blog, reading his exploits in the land of extreme training. There was a pattern at play here ― a pattern that transcended the usual excuses of genetics and steroids ― and I wanted to figure out what it was.

  It was about a year later when I was convinced to write a book about the topic. By that point I’d put in my own time with the system, come up with some good reasons to support it, and frankly I was sold. Not as a program or even a “workout system”, but as a different way of looking at fitness, at strength-building, and the process of recovery.

  So here we are.

  Those of you familiar with my older work will notice that I have made a sharp departure from my usual “scientific” approach. In the last few years, my views on science, especially science’s role in establishing “truth” in fitness and nutrition, have changed so much that it qualifies as a complete break.

  The internet has developed whole communities who believe that fitness and strength can be reduced to numbers and captured in micro-level facts about biochemicals and cellular biology. The conclusions drawn are Truth given by the authority of Science. The more oblique references listed, the more scientific. Let’s call this “Pubmed Science”.

  It sounds good, but this style of truth-seeking is as mythical as the gym-rumors it aims to counter. Combing abstracts for biochemical information or the hormonal responses of athletes or some such trivia removes you from the realities of actually lifting a weight. It strips away all the context and creates mock-quote “facts” in a vacuum. In the absence of any grounding, it’s easy to construct a whole reality out of those “facts”, one which has little to do with the world we live in.

  Pubmed Science is more like telling a story, crafting a beautiful narrative out of scientific factoids. It gives you that story we all need to tell ourselves, that we know what is going on and, more to the point, that we have control over it. I’m all for the safety blankets of illusions, but not when the illusion is held up as a superior, objective, non-biased account of reality.

  My strategy here is not so novel, and will probably seem like common sense to many of you. What I’m doing here is shifting the priority away from the abstract theoreticals and instead grounding my ideas in the practical.

  Any practitioner, whether we’re talking the line technician who keeps the phone lines working or the MD who keeps you healthy, has more knowledge than is immediately evident from their educational background and formal training. There is an unspoken ― and unspeakable ― element in the Doing. The term for this is tacit knowledge.

  Dealing with the contingencies and uncertainties of Reality means that we just can’t write down every last detail, or even a formal list of rules and good ideas. Some things are going to remain fuzzy, and you’ll have to make judgment calls based on necessarily incomplete information.

  Pubmed Scientists see this as a problem, expecting that all questions about living bodies will have distinct, objective, “true” answers. I don’t believe that either is the case. Biological systems largely won’t have concrete answers of the sort you’d find in physics or chemistry ― but, well, so what? I believe it’s wrong-headed to expect those answers in the first place, and on the other hand, the fuzziness works in our favor because we don’t need concrete answers at all. Our judgment about “what next?” is oftentimes better than any “scientific” reply.

  In this book, I start with the assumption that Doing takes precedence over the abstract theorizing of Pubmed Science. In strength training, it is getting in the gym, paying attention to your body, and keeping records that forms our starting point. I start with the premise that not having a precise answer is no problem at all. The idea is to use that knowledge you amass while Doing and learn how to deal with uncertainty.

  With that grounding of personal knowledge to start with, then ― and only then ― we look to the research to give that knowledge context. Formal research is wonderful for explaining why some observations might be happening, and that is the methodology I have used. The science here is in the service of what I saw happening in the gym, not the other way around.

  While this is, officially, a book on strength training and fitness, these themes of tacit knowledge, acceptance of uncertainty, and rejection of reductionist Pubmed Science lie beneath everything you’re about to read, and I would suggest that you read it with that in mind.

  Finally, besides the usual disclaimers about getting medic
al clearance before beginning any such program and such, I would add that nothing written herein is intended as the last word on any subject. This is a record of an experiment I conducted on myself and with the input of acquaintances who decided to throw in and see what would happen.

  Consider this the starting point of a dialogue rather than the an authoritative final word on the matter.

  Doing It All Wrong

  “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

  ―Mark Twain

  “It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”

  ―Epictetus

  It was on March 5th, 1949 when a wiry farmer stunned the crowd in Johnson City, Tennessee with a deadlift of 725 and one-half pounds. An impressive number in its own right, this feat was all the more amazing for the size of the man hoisting the barbell. Our farmer weighed all of 180 pounds, and that 725 pound deadlift set a record which stood for over 20 years.

  Bob Peoples was one of the most gifted lifters of the 20th century and one of the strongest men to ever touch a barbell. No stranger to hard work, Peoples spent his days in the local textile mill and on his farm, sometimes training as late as 2am after a long day, sometimes missing months of training due to work and other obligations.

  What might surprise you even more than a 700-plus pound deadlift by an 180 pound man ― with a double overhand grip, no less ― is how he arrived at that kind of strength.

  In a 1952 article written for Peary Rader’s Iron Man magazine, Peoples summarized the nuts and bolts of his training. His methods were simple, if diverse, and he always came back to the old standby which had served him best: “that is, daily training with a few exercises and working up to limit poundages and 3 to 5 reps.”1

  Although it’s clear from his writings that he tried many different systems and methods over his career, Peoples always came back to heavy, low-rep training done every day of the week. Work schedule or not, when Bob Peoples trained, he trained. Deadlifts in excess of 600 lbs and squats over 400 lbs for sets of 3-5 reps ― each and every day ― are the rule rather than the exception in his recorded workouts. And this, despite a grueling work schedule and a busy life in the community.

  Bob Peoples trained as heavy as he could and as often as he could make it happen. Not for the sake of any training-dogma. In the 1940s there were no internet forums and barely a hint of the mass-media circus that would become the public face of strength and fitness. He trained daily because, through trial and error, he found that this was the most productive way to get stronger. For his efforts he was able to pull over 700 and squat over 500 while weighing well shy of 200 pounds.

  It’s hard to imagine that kind of workout schedule these days. Current thinking in the strength and fitness world doesn’t allow for it. Everyone knows that training every day is reckless, counterproductive, dangerous. Unsustainable without drugs. Only good for genetic freaks. Working with a modern-day personal trainer or coach, Peoples would be advised to cut back on his workouts in order to hit the gym fresh and avoid overtraining himself.

  Bob Peoples lived and trained in a time and a place where steroid use would have been unthinkable. John Ziegler wouldn’t synthesize methandrostenolone ― Dianabol ― and kick off the steroid era for another decade. Peoples lived a busy life full of manual labor, with no research, no blogs and only a handful of fitness magazines to tell him he was training sub-optimally and likely overtraining.

  And yet he still trained every day he could and deadlifted weights that most people will never see in real life.

  If doing everything wrong works better than doing it by the book, is it really wrong?

  ❧

  At the 1988 Olympics, Turkey brought home its first gold medal thanks to weightlifter Naim Suleymanoglu’s spectacular 342.5 kilogram total, hitting a 152.5 snatch and 190 clean & jerk. Numbers of that caliber would grab the attention of many national teams for a 200 pound man. Suleymanoglu stood a scant 4‘9 (1.47m) tall as he competed in the 60 kilo featherweight class, proportions earning him the nickname “The Pocket Hercules” as well as a Sinclair score of 505 ― a score that establishes Suleymanoglu as the all-time best lifter by bodyweight.

  Before defecting to Turkey in 1988, Suleymanoglu trained in his native Bulgaria under coach Ivan Abadjiev. Abadjiev, from a background as a humble basket-weaver, surely didn’t strike anyone as an innovator when he first began his weightlifting career in the 1960s. The man who would go on to coach Bulgaria’s national team to multiple gold medals in the 1970s and 80s started out as a weightlifter himself before several embarrassing displays that left him disgruntled and at odds with the administration.

  As the story goes, it was Abadjiev’s disgust with Bulgaria’s sporting system, and the belief that he could do better, that led him to take over the top coaching slot. Inspired by practices of American weightlifters of the previous generation, Abadjiev’s solution was at once simple and intimidating: his lifters would clean, jerk, snatch, and squat. Every day. For eight hours a day.

  The Bulgarian method, as this would become known, emphasizes specificity. You want to get good at the snatch and the clean & jerk? Then train them, train them hard, and train them often. Bulgarian lifters would train in half-hour sessions focused on one lift, followed by down time for mental as well as physical relaxation.

  While Abadjiev’s method isn’t without criticisms ― some justified, others less so ― and represents an extreme case, the underlying logic is sound. Take the lifts you want to improve and, perhaps, a bare minimum of assistance work, and hammer it as often as you can. That probably won’t require 50 hours a week of Olympic weightlifting, but then again, nothing says you need that level of dedication and sacrifice to make frequent lifting work.

  ❧

  Anthony Ditillo wrote for Peary Rader’s Iron Man magazine for over 20 years between the late 1960s and the 1980s. An eclectic and impressive lifter in his own right, Ditillo was always open to experimentation. Over his career, he ranged from a body weight of over 300 pounds at 5‘7, his trademark “bulk and power” build, to a shredded sub-200 pound bodybuilder’s physique. Although he tried many diverse methods of training, like Bob Peoples he always came back to heavy basics, working in the range of 3-5 reps and training on a regular basis.2

  One of Ditillo’s articles recounts his training in the summer of 1974, when he trained with a good friend and “accomplished Olympic weightlifter” who he named as “Dezi”. As he went on to describe, he was training “for the most part five days a week on the following movements: Bench Presses, High Pulls, Shrugs, and possibly sometimes Power Snatches. I also include whenever I feel like it, full, bar high on the neck, back completely straight, Olympic Squats.”3

  Ditillo, always a fan of sets of three or five reps, stayed with that scheme while working up to maximum weights for the day. He noted that, despite the workload, “the need to psych up for a workout or limit lift is no longer necessary” as your body begins “slowly adapting to the workload you are putting on it and it gets to the point where you can recuperate overnight”.

  Like Bob Peoples, he found it better “to condition the body to accept workouts on a DAILY basis than to use the two or three times a week method of operation”.

  Ditillo’s training partner “Dezi” was the weightlifter Dezso Ban, no slouch himself. Ditillo reported that Ban, weighing all of 190 pounds, clean & jerked 380, power cleaned and pressed 285 for sets of five, shrug pulled 500 and stiff-legged 605 for doubles, and front squatted 455 for five among other feats.

  ❧

  Weightlifting coach Bud Charniga has translated a range of former-Soviet materials on strength training and athletic development, some of which is published on his Sportivny Press website. Among his articles are an interview with Russian superheavy lifter Leonid Taranenko, who would still hold the all-time record in the clean & jerk had the weight classes not been restructured. In an interview with Charniga in the late 80s, Taranenko sa
id that he trained six days a week: three times a day, up to six hours per day, for three days, and twice a day up to four hours on the remainder. This netted Taranenko a 380kg (837 lb) back squat, with a two-second pause at the bottom.4

  Among strength athletes, it’s the weightlifters who treat their training like a skill. All you have to do is one rep with a snatch or clean & jerk to understand why. These lifts are hard. Not only in the sense that they’re skill-intensive, requiring immense concentration, but rep for rep the quick lifts are more physically challenging than just about any other lift. Accomplished Olympic lifters must not only be strong and fast; they must also be proficient at the lifts, and fit enough (in aerobic terms) to tolerate the workouts. It’s a sport that fits well with regular practice and demands a conditioned body.

  This sets the weightlifter apart from powerlifters and strongmen, who traditionally gravitate towards more conservative strength programs and the style of training that treats strength as a simple brute-force equation.

  While developing a brutally-strong squat doesn’t guarantee equally brutal performances with the clean and snatch (as many strong squatters with weak showings on the platform attest), there’s an unexpected lesson for those of us after plain old gym-strength.

  The squat is an accessory exercise for Olympic weightlifters, used as a developmental movement for the hips and legs. A degree of squatting strength is necessary, but certainly not sufficient, for stellar performances on the platform.

  What does it say about training for a goal when weightlifters have such impressive numbers for a lift that they don’t even take seriously? Pound for pound, top weightlifters have squats that rival ― if not exceed ― those of top powerlifters. And these squats are all the more impressive for the technique used, the high-bar, full-depth “Olympic” style with little or no supportive equipment.