An Ideal Workout Scheme

I've got some significant advantages this year. I'm self-employed, at a gym. So I can set my own schedule, which means I get a full night's sleep every night, and I'm at the gym almost every day. As such I can set myself up with an ideal workout program.

Odds are that none of my readers can implement a program like this. That's fine. By explaining what ideal is we can look at it as a thought experiment and also take the achievable parts and implement them where doable.

What's Ideal?

First we need to establish what ideal we are looking for since ideal is necessarily based on objectives. The plan I'm about to describe is not ideal for a marathon runner or a tennis player. The objective I wanted to work on is maximum strength as a foundation for developing sport specific characteristics. As such the plan is a modified powerlifting routine.

Powerlifting is competition in Deadlift, Squat and Bench Press. Our basic, core movements with a program geared towards the highest strength possible - that is the highest 1RM. I also wanted to include the Olympic lifts because, as a(n actual) power athlete, I need those characteristics as well. (Powerlifting is not actually maximum power, the Olympic lifts do that. And competition in the Oly lifts is called weightlifting, even though it's not actually the most weight - go figure.)

The only real omission in powerlifting is a dynamic back exercise, since the deadlift is basically isometric for the spinal erectors and upper back. There are also overhead movements missing, though the bench does work those muscles and the overhead lifts from the Oly lifts cover that reasonably well. Therefore, my plan added these components in.

The plan

The plan's outline comes from this blog post by Greg Robbins over at Eric Cressey's blog.

• Monday - Squat High
• Tuesday - Deadlift Low
• Wednesday - Bench High
• Thursday - Squat Low
• Friday - Deadlift High
• Saturday - Bench Low

The days are divided up by our core exercises, so that we get two days of each, which is a lot of training volume. More volume gets us technical training as well as gains in weight moved. This plan keeps the same muscle group from being used maximally two days in a row e.g. my back is relevant for the squat but not maximally like it is for the deadlift.

There are two days between each day of a core exercise, which is sufficient recovery time.

There are no two days in a row of High intensity, thereby allowing me to recover in a whole body sense and not just in a muscle specific sense.

The heavy days have a warm-up portion for the main exercise as well as the maximal lifts. These are submax and help me dial in my technique as well as utilizing post-activation potentiation. The linked article describes this component.

Category	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
	Squat High	DL Low	Bench High	Squat Low	DL High	Bench Mid
Warm-up			Planks	1-Leg Stability	Turkish Parts	Planks
Prep	Box Jump	Turkish Get-up	Heavy Throw	Single Leg Box	Broad Jump	Yoga Push-up
Oly	Clean	Snatch High	Landmine Snatch	Clean and Jerk	Snatch Low	Landmine Jerk
Main Warm-up	Squat Warm-up		Bench Warm-up		DL Warm-up	Incline Bench
Main	Squat High	Deadlift Low	Bench High	Squat Low	Deadlift High	Bench Mid
Accessory	Step-up		1-arm Bench	Split Squat	1-arm Row	Lat Pulldown
	Suitcase Carry	RDL	Wrist Circuit	OH Squat	SLDL	Pallof
Prehab		YTI - Scapula	Ext. Rot.			Wrist Ext/Flex

* Squats are Front Squats - of course.

What else is going on

All of this is in addition to the regular training that I undertake. So there is the conditioning at the beginning of each of my classes, which includes some velocity-power work and more of the trunk stability components.

Plus, of course, there is all my technical training with the sword. Altogether I was getting about 12-14 hours a week of intense training. Plus the walking to and from work (a kilometer each way) and to any other place since I don't own a car. And going out dancing periodically. It's a lot.

Actually, it was too much to start with.

The down side

I overtrained. I felt like I'd done too much lifting to get technical training in as well, so my swordwork was decreasing. I recognized it fairly early and made adjustments. I removed some exercises (which is already reflected above). And I reduced the volume on others. I hit a sustainable point though. It just took some trial and error.

Applying it to your own case

Well, now how does this apply to you? Many ideas are possible. Here are a few ways:

• First you can arrange your schedule around the core lifts instead of body parts or some such. You do Deadlift, Squat and Bench every time for a 3-day schedule but each day there is a most important, most intense lift.
• You can run a 4-day program with Deadlift and Bench one day, and Squat and Pullup another. It's still more.
• Perhaps this just motivates you to do a Powerlifting program for the early phases of your periodization.
• Just put more sets in for the core lifts, at submax intensities, to get the technical training time under the bar. 

There are lots of other possibilities and I'd love to hear your thoughts, too.

Conclusion

I encourage you to put a lot of thought into what you could be doing to maximize your training. 

Olympic Lifts v. Kettlebells

A recent journal article(1) on kettlebells initiated another round of discussion on the merits and/or advantages of the kettlebell. I want to talk about that, and I will in a moment, but just to be clear: I have nothing against kettlebells. My objection is when folks think they are better than another tool at everything, as opposed to using them for what they do well and using the correct tool for other objectives.

First, the results of the study: conventional weightlifting was superior to the kettlebell training.

Now, listen to how the results are described by the authors,

The principle finding of the present study was that short-term kettlebell training significantly increased vertical jump, and that the gain in vertical jump performance was equivalent to that achieved with a combination of [Olympic] weightlifting and traditional heavy resistance training exercises.

Both kettlebell and training and weightlifting increased back squat 1RM.

The results of the present study indicated that both weightlifting and kettlebell movements are effective in improving back squat and power clean 1RM as well as vertical jump ability; however, weightlifting exercises are more effective for strength development.

Does this sound like the weightlifting was superior? 

In all three tests (power clean and back squat 1RM and vertical jump) the conventional training produced larger gains. In the vertical jump and power clean the gains were close enough to each other that the differences were not statistically significant.

Which brings me to the next point: significance. The fact that the test for statistical significance was "passed" does not mean the results are significant in any other way. The increase in jump height for the KB group was less than 2mm. This is not telling, not meaningful, not important, not momentous, not compelling, or frankly even suggestive (yup, I used a thesaurus).

True, the conventional protocol produced jump height gains of just under a centimeter, so it wasn't any of those synonyms either.

On to the conversation! There have been numerous blog posts about this already. And there are two criticisms of the study that I've seen multiple times, so I'd like to address them.

A. The test procedures. Others have criticized the selection of tests on the grounds that they don't test what the kettlebell training trains or the tests are more similar to the weightlifting exercises so of course that group got better.

The tests selected for this study are standard tests. This has two advantages. First the results of this test can be compared to other studies that used the same test. Second, there is already a body of literature demonstrating that these tests correlate to actual measures of athletic performance. Both of these point are important for useful science.

If the conventional weightlifting exercises and tests are more similar, doesn't that tell us that the specificity of those exercises is higher? Remember, correlation between those test and athletic performance have already been demonstrated.

And while kettlebell exercises can be useful, one characteristic they don't possess is a high degree of movement specificity to many sport actions. (They are instead good for metabolic specificity etc.)

B. Another criticism was that the weights used for the KB protocol were too light. For the KB protocol everyone used a 16kg bell. For the conventional training 80% of 1RM was used, which was substantially higher. Some argued that the KB group should have used the same weight as the conventional group.

There are two problems with this criticism. The typical KB program uses the same weight or a narrow range and the objective is to increase reps not weight. The KB protocol used in this study looks like others I've seen suggested for kettlebell training.

But the sillier part is that the researchers couldn't have used kettlebells heavy enough for 80% of 1RM. They would have needed a set of KB's that went from around 60kg to 150kg. The largest I could find online was 48kg. And a blog post that a manufacture was planning to go up to 100 kg. So weights that size would've been impossible to get.

And why? Because KB training isn't done that way. The researchers compared a typical KB approach to a typical Olympic lifting approach. That's reasonable.

Lastly, a pet peeve of mind when it comes to discussing kettlebells. There were no kettlebell exercises done as part of this study. There were exercises done with kettlebells. All of the KB protocol could have been done with dumbbells. And for cheaper

1. Otto WH 3rd, Coburn JW, Brown LE, Spiering BA (2012). Effects of weightlifting vs. kettlebell training on vertical jump, strength, and body composition. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, volume 26(5),1199-202

The Best Power Clean?

Comfort, P., Allen, M., & Graham-Smith, P., (2011). Kinetic Comparisons During Variations of the Power Clean. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, Volume 25 (number 12) 3269-3273.

This article in the most recent NSCA journal discusses two basic variants of the power clean exercise. The clean is an excellent exercise for training power production of the lower body. It's already assumed that the power version is preferable for sports training for it's specificity. This study examines the differences between starting positions: on the ground, the hang position and mid-thigh. The study also compares the clean pull from mid-thigh.

The study found that the mid-thigh start position produced the highest force (ground reaction force (GRF)), highest rate of force production (RFD) and highest power (P). The clean and pull produced similar forces. For the purposes of sports training, and especially the incredibly quick movements of combat, these characteristics are some of the most important.

That the force characteristics are highest for the mid-thigh start is not surprising given the mechanics. Regardless of the start position the bar has to be brought to the same end position. Producing sufficient force for this with a smaller movement requires the acceleration to be higher. And so RFD and Power are higher.

The conclusion is that, for sports and combat training, the mid-thigh start position best suits the the strength objectives.