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

So you just assume... But in the US, some years back, decades before, there were some kettlebells were used by some old time strongman like Zig Klein, for example. And there was a company named Milo, no relations to the magazine. Really? What is this thing you're obsessing with Milo? Why... Milo's the guy who carried the calf. So if you look... Okay, the progressive overload is usually explained as this legend of Milo of Kratona. 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 the guy became very strong. So that's why that name is present in the strength game. So back then, today it is just one of the finest publications on strength training, mostly niche things again, like gripping. I wonder if anyone's actually done that. Like carry a calf. It would not work. Isn't it amazing that something can grow physically faster than you can keep lifting it? Absolutely can, but your typical training plan that people say, I'm going to have five pounds for my bench press today. I'm going to do this every week. And then by Christmas, I'll be the world champion. And it 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 put it in the Milo 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 building up again. Why? We do not know exactly. So for some reason that unidirectional adaptation, just in one, we're getting stronger at the bench press or what have you, we're carrying the calf. It just cannot proceed indefinitely. There's 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's 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 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. So what you're doing pretty much is you are making the adaptations more stable. And it just happens on the cellular levels, membranes become stronger and so on. But old timers just, they would say that you're solidifying the gains. So the way that many old timers trained is they would just take the same weight and the same with the same weight for a long time. In the beginning, it's challenging. Let 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 Sommer, he's a gymnastics coach, he used that with gymnasts. It's very common. I use that tactic with my latest edition of my kettlebell, simple and sinister because it's much more reliable than just progressive overload. And also because psychologically, first of all, it weeds out the impatient people. So you're told to stay with the same load for a while. Some people automatically say, oh, forget it. I cannot do that. Well, I don't want these people falling off my stuff anyway. In a second, so you're staying with this weight or these reps for some time. In the beginning, they challenge you. And then sometime goes by and suddenly they don't anymore. So it's just very much a very clear, clear sense of accomplishment. So this is called step loading or using the old timers, old timers terminology, the constant weight training. If you look at the other ways of making progress. 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 for a while, which we can't. 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 lightweights, 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 Cone, Kurt Kowaske, lifters like Donna Austin, who is, or Lamar Gant, whose deadlift record still stand decades after, they use this classic cycling. So the classic cycling, you start with the moderately challenging load, then you keep proceeding, go heavier and heavier and heavier. Then you compete, then you start over. And to give you a very simple tactic, that's something that your listeners can use in their training, whether they follow the cycling format, whether they do something else, is that Russian scientist discovery, that your endocrine system pretty much can take two weeks out of four of heavy loading. That's just the way 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, four weeks sets of five, four weeks sets of three. And in week one, you start out with a weight that's comfortable. In week two, moderately challenging. In week three, you repeat your previous PR for these reps. And in week four, you set your 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. I got distracted, so I wanted to talk about the history of cycling. So Bill Starr, who is a huge name in the game, he was a former top weightlifter in the United States back in the 60s, later on very successful coach, strength coach, and author. The Stronger 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? Periodization, the simplest terms, is planning your training, according to certain principles, to end at peak performance. So that's just the really kind of a 50,000 level, 50,000 foot definition. And they did not have their full information about what 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 effective, 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 loading. 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 were 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 Akhadi Vrabyov, who was an Olympic weightlifting champion, and he was the premier sports scientist. So he argued that in nature, most changes are discrete. They're not gradual. They're discrete. So whatever adaptation takes place in your body, the same thing, whatever happens with many physical processes, chemical processes, and so on. So he concluded that training has to be highly variable. So you understand, when I mean that it's a 20% minimal change, we call that delta 20 principle. It doesn't mean it's constantly going up. That's not possible. It goes up and down. It just keeps whiplashing. 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 going crazy. It comes with lean sane. 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 experienced 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's under the hood right there. So there's a very clear pattern. Variable overload, 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, Baddish Cheko, he's a former coach of Russian national powerlifting team. 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 lifters use them very successfully. But whenever he tried to read this plan and try to make any sense of that, it just drives you crazy because you see like, okay, here's a string, here's a pattern, it's going right here and suddenly it's gone. So if traditional cyclings like clear photograph, the variable overload makes me think of, remember in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where the kid is looking at Soros painting, you know, on the east, there are 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 a number of scientists. So it's a very much collaborative effort. So Vrabiyov was one for sure, Medvedev, Chernyak, a number of others. And it was a very, before even dissecting this method, let me tell you how successful this method was. You can look up the world that weightlifting records in Olympic weightlifting, and you hear about all these different records set by this lifter, that lifter, and so on and so forth. So a few people realize that the International Weightlifting Federation has changed the weight classes at two or three times since the 80s. And the reason they did that is to erase the drug, the record set by the drug taking athletes back then. Of course, you know, I'm very happy that as soon as they change 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 chart 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, in about half of these classes, the records from the 80s still stand. So for example, what Yurik Vrbanian did in 1980 at 82 kilos, he totaled 400 kilos in the snatch and the clean and jerk. That's never been done before. And Yurik Vrbanian was a wiry guy who wouldn't have been taken for a lifter. Just amazing. So first of all, the system still remains. If we're just taking a very large big picture, 50,000 foot looking strength, there are great many ways of getting strong. Some of them very good. Some of them mediocre, some of them very bad. But historically in lifting sports, the two systems that have been predominant are the Soviet weightlifting system and the American classic power lifting system from the 70s and 80s. Okay. So that was 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 was very empirical. In for example, when you're studying endurance, going into the cell, studying the biochemistry of the cell and the body, taking it 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 training, for example, hypertrophy, we still have no idea what the hell is going on. So 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? 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 in the Soviet weightlifting system. So what they did, even though they also, you know, they got the muscle, look at that as well, just didn't learn as much, but they coaches program particular loads for athletes and watch what happened. And then they watched how the athletes performed and they watched 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 will do that, or it's got to be the training to failure is going to 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, what? Six weeks for some untrained college subjects, you know, guys who are just on their phones. Proffeosomiy Dvijev, who's also world champion, he studied the training loads of top weightlifters only when they were successful in competition for four Olympic cycles. Four. So we're talking about 16 years and then somebody else do for another cycle. And they're just an amazing pattern has just emerged. So for instance, I'm going to give you give you a rundown of what the patterns are. There are certain optimal volumes, how much exercise you do. There is certain optimal intensities. So if you follow 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 eight reps or something you could do maybe 10 and maybe eight. And you will see that about half of all the lifts that you do are about 75, 80%. Now where do all the rest of the other lifts come in? So there's a normal distribution. So you'll find that 75, 80% are on the top. 80, 85 a little bit lower, you know. So the lighter weights, like 60% are on the bottom and they have you weights like 90% and higher are on the bottom as well. So to figure it out, you just have to do most of your work with these average weights. They are not so light, so you're going to respect them, but they're not so heavy that you have any question about performing lifting them correctly. So then there is another aspect of intensity is just doing some heavier lifts, a very carefully measured number of heavy lifts in addition, like 90% 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 30 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 a given weight. And this is what hurts people's heads. If you look at the weights from 70 to 90%, 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 10 reps. In training, you should be doing three to six reps. That's it. That's the window. And why is that? We have no idea. But the scientists, like in this case, I think it was Matveev who was involved in that, the father of prioritization. I think it was one of the scientists. They experimented with all sorts of rep ranges. And they figured out that if the 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're 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 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 way 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 chaotic. We're just constantly surprised about it with what we're throwing at it. But we do that within very narrow parameters. So this method was purely developed by studying winners. Winners is where they finally took that. But the studies were done at every level. So for example, coaches in the field would conduct something called pedagogical experiments, which is a study that's not quite as scientifically solid, but it's still good enough. So the first we test things out lower level athletes, and then we finally take it to 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 90%, 95%. But 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. Heavy weight lifters can do the most. Or heavy weight lifters can do not as many, lighter ones can do more. So there are some differences at different levels, but the principles fundamentally are the same. And do these principles apply whether people are taking drugs or not? Yes, they do. The difference is in fact, the Verkhachan skin with Vyayev made a very strong case, a very strong case of that. They used the Soviet euphemism for that was restoratives. And they said that this is universal even with restoratives or not. The difference for the drugs would be 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. And I know 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 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, there's several areas where you would see that is, well, one, obviously the Baddish-Sikhos powerlifting programs that have been imported here by the used by powerlifters. The other is we have the program called PlanStrong, which is when again, this is a very faithful representation of the Soviet weightlifting system, but applied to general strength exercises like squats, delts, and so on. And the other thing, what we also do, and this is what we do 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 got a problem. Here there is some variability. So in summary, just say, no, it's not widely known. It's not. Now in the United States, yeah, let's fix it. 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're ramping up your weightlifting and you're trying to increase the amount of weight you carry. So 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's not true just for strength training. If you're looking at endurance as well, the adaptations in the mitochondria as well, you can get some acute adaptations, so 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 solidified. And also, if you're more patient with your progression, as well, you're going to 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.