KerPlunk goes Russian with mixed result

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3 October 2005

Written by: paperboy Posted under Purposefully Primitive People,

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Andy P recently sent me a synopsis of his venture into what I call Russian esoteric power training. The Russian powerlifters are crazy for volume and intensity and over time build themselves up to be able to work for hours at a time handling bar-bending poundage. Andy gave it a valiant college try but the results were disappointing. I thought it instructive to share his trials and travails because it illustrates that sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men can go astray.not every program every time can work out but, what the hell, Dare to struggle, dare to win.

I worked out 4 days a week. My schedule was a little crazy in that I work and go to school during the day plus I take two night classes. The days that I trained may not have been ideally spaced. I went to the gym Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This is how I split the workouts: Tuesday was bench and squat. On my heavy day I usually worked up to between 4 and 6 sets of between 2 to 4 reps; usually with 85% of my maximum. My 85% max was 205 for the bench and 335 for the squat. I didn’t have a lot of extra time on this because I went to the gym before work. I did less volume but my average intensity was usually around 80%. Thursday workout consisted of dips: 3 sets of 5-reps and I started the cycle hanging 40-pounds of weight onto my bodyweight. I ended the cycle handling bodyweight plus-60 pounds. I did power cleans on Thursday but since I’m still working technique, I used low weight and didn’t really keep track of sets/reps. This was a technical learning experience and I viewed this workout as an assistance day for my bench and deadlift. Friday was bench and squat day and I really hit it and went for more volume. I usually didn’t go above 75-80% of my max on Fridays, and my average intensity was around 70%. I also did good mornings for 6 sets of 3-reps, started at 175, worked up to 215. Saturday was bench and deadlift day. This bench day’s intensity was low. I trained this day to get in another day so I could better cycle the volume per week. I never got above 70% and the average intensity was a little under 70%. My deadlifts were a basic power cycle of singles. This was given to me when I went and worked on my form with the powerlifting coach here in the area. I’m planning on doing some rep work on deadlifts this cycle. I was planning on doing your Progressive Pull routine, actually. That’s pretty much it: I had a week of low volume to get into the groove; I’d guesstimate around 40% but didn’t really keep track. I did six weeks of consciously cycling volume and I may have rounded the numbers a bit.

Bench reps Squat reps
Week 2 60% 55 27
3 75% 68 32
4 100% 90 45
5 85% 72 36
6 90% 85 40
7 60% 55 27

This was followed by a week of maxing out in week 8. I don’t have intensity broken down by week. I attempted a 245 bench max in week 8 and got stuck a few inches from lockout. That would have been 5 pounds over my previous max. I attempted 405 on squat, which would have been a 10 pound increase, and got stuck in the hole pretty bad. Unless I’m just missing something that should be obvious, the only thing I can figure is that I just peaked too early. I didn’t ever feel like I was over-trained, either. Would have been a pretty depressing max week had my deadlift not gone up the amount it did. This morning I weighed 185, which is about a 7-8 pound gain. I’m 5′11″. I have a decent % body fat percentile. I was leaner at the beginning of the summer, probably around 12% right now.

Oh, and your blog today was excellent timing for me…I was already thinking that
I need to do more triceps work: could it have been that the volume of lifts in the
70% of max range just wasn’t hitting my tries hard enough, which made lockout harder?
I want to do some pause squats to work on getting out of the hole. I was wanting to do 5×5s this cycle to work on hypertrophy a bit, is there any value in making the pause
squat and close grip bench the focus of the 5×5 instead of the regular squats and
bench?

I have so many questions about this program that I hesitate to state them due to a lack of space: suffice to say, after going to all trouble to deal with 85, 90 and 100% poundage why go back to 60%? Probably some active rest theoryI would love to know who the author was. Are you saying that you gained 7-8 pounds of muscle as a result of this routine? That would be very coolPavel Tsatsouline will be visiting me here in the mountains in a few weeks for some R&R so perhaps we could bundle our Russian training questions and impose upon him to straighten us out on who is who and what is what on all things Slavic and Euro.