Mistakes Made and Truths about Strength Learned

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I lifted weights most of my life and joined the sport of powerlifting over 10 years ago. In my pursuit to become one of the best powerlifters in the world and get everything I could out of my body, I learned enormous amounts of training and strength information. Being the kind of person I am, I don’t try to hoard this information. In fact, I try to get it out to other lifters obsessed with strength. This is because I sympathize with their blight and want to help them avoid the mistakes I made, which have been plenty over the years.

One of the plentiful mistakes I made, and one that I continue to see others make, has to do with the way we look at training programs. Lifters tend to look at their programs the wrong way. I have to admit that I used to look for a one-set program that would give me huge gains and continue to give me huge gains over years of training. I now see so many other lifters looking for this magic program that will give them all the answers in black and white. The more complex and complicated a program is, the more people think it works. They seem to get blinded by percentages, waves, sets, reps, and week after week of rigid information! The simple fact is that strength training is not very complicated in principle. You break your muscles down in the gym and they recover when you’re away from the gym. Hence you get weaker in the gym and get stronger away from the gym. Yes there are some other principles involved, but that’s the basic truth to strength training. So even though the basic concepts of strength training are simple, lifters keep turning to the more complicated programs! Over time I learned to cut away all the crap and get down to the basic truths of strength, which in turn simplified my programs. This simplifying happened gradually, but my experience was that as my programs continued to get simpler, I got stronger.

Another truth about strength is that everyone is different. This seems to be a pretty simple and unarguable theory, but people don’t seem to realize it sometimes. We all have different recovery rates, metabolisms, weak points, fast twitch to slow twitch muscle ratios, different mentalities, and respond different to different work loads. All of these facts lead me to the conclusion that there is no complete set program for everyone, how can there be? Sure some of these strict programs may work for some people, but not everyone. People are just too different physiologically for one strict program to work for everyone. Just because Joe Blow does a certain program doesn’t mean it will work for you. People need to start thinking about these things. They need to ask themselves if the program they are about to dedicate a lot of time and work into, is even a half-way intelligent program and will it work for them?

The next truth about strength training programs has to do with where they come from. I get so sick of people trying these complex Eastern Block or Russian programs like the Sheiko program. I don’t understand why people don’t think about where these programs came from and who they were designed for! Most of these complex programs were designed for athletes that were hand picked as little children to compete in strength sports. They are the true creme of the crop and the most genetically gifted athletes. They showed the best physiological potential in a human that these countries could find. I would guess that most of the people out there trying these programs are not the genetic freaks that they were designed for. What makes Mr. Average Joe think he can keep up with a true genetic specimen? Then there are the bookworm skinny weak guys that say they dedicated their life to strength and they have this great training program they designed. My first thought is always why would someone who wants to dedicate their life to strength want to live it weak? Not the guy I want to listen to! On top of that, these guys do research for years and come up with some modified Eastern Block program. Then they do studies on people that have never worked out and claim they came up with the best new strength program ever! When in fact, these people would grow from just about anything! Next, we have all the top athletes running around writing strength programs. Well most of them are the genetic freaks telling the Average Joe that he needs to do the same workout! It’s the same old story and it doesn’t work in the majority of the cases.

Right now I feel as though I should stop to say that I do think Average Joe can achieve great things and even compete with the genetic freaks. The difference is that Average Joe needs to take his own path to get there. He won’t be able to follow the program of the genetic freak. In most cases, I actually think the genetic freak would get to the top no matter what workout he did. Average Joe has to be smarter about his training, but he can make it to the top. I am living proof of that! If I can take my average genetics along with all of my sleep and compartment syndrome problems to become a world class lifter…then so can almost anyone!

Taking your own path leads to one of the greatest truths to strength training and one of the things that rarely gets talked about. That is learning to listen to your own body and to trust what it’s telling you. This is an insanely hard thing to master, but it will give you some of the greatest gains. I know it took me a while to learn to be confident about what my body is telling me and to act on it, but the better I got at it, the stronger I became. Too many strength programs list all these strict reps, sets, percentages, and training schedules with no concern for the individual or the person listening to his own body. There’s no way for the individual to change the program to meet his individual needs. This is an enormous mistake. Although it gets little mention, even the Eastern Block programs do this in a way. They have the money to run continuous tests on the athlete and the coach has full control. So when athletes were getting worn down or overtrained, they would be held back from training or things were adjusted. Most people think these athletes stuck to the full programs. The Average Joe doesn’t have that advantage. They have to learn to read their body. They need to know when they are overtraining, when to pick up the pace, when to take off, when to deload, what to eat, how much to eat, what exercises work the best, what are their weak points, and all that stuff. Listening to your own body is simply one of the hardest and most productive things you could do to gain huge strength.

Another big overlooked truth about strength and strength programs is the fact that most of us live in the real world. Real life is chaotic and your program has to be able to adjust to that. We aren’t professional athletes and getting stronger isn’t our full life and job. We have families, bills, jobs (most of which are very physical or even stressful), and lots of other responsibilities. We try to set schedules and can maintain them most of the time, but shit happens. The car breaks down, the kids get sick, you have to do overtime, you get sick, and there are lots of other things. So if you’re on this super ridged program with percentage waves and you miss a workout – what do you do with the next workout? Do you jump up to the next percentage or do you stay there and then you’re behind a week? How do you deal with that and especially if your trying to peak for a competition? A good program should be more adaptable for the Average Joe that lives in the real world. You need to be able to change the program to fit in with the hectic life most of us have.

I have also found some great truths in the principles of force training. Which very simply said are (F)orce = (M)ass x a=(A)cceleration. So you need to train maximal strength and dynamic strength. These are principles made famous by Louie Simmons of Westside barbell and he has put out tons of top-strength athletes to back them up. They are very simple but true principles and very easy to add into a program. I have used these principles for many years and have seen great gains in myself, plus many other partners and friends.

So these are just some of the simple truths about strength and strength programs that allowed me to achieve the levels of strength that I have. I trained for years making small gains and it wasn’t until I started realizing some of these truths that I started making real gains along with putting up some big numbers. I was lucky to meet and learn from some of the best and smartest guys around. These were the guys that grinded through the big numbers and learned by paying their dues. I took that information from them and modified a program to be more of an outline so that I could bend it. This allowed me to have a program that I could always change depending on my strength levels, weaknesses, and the pitfalls of real life. It also allowed me to work with a diversity of training partners in which everyone got what they needed. I also spent a lot of time trying to learn my body and to be able to trust what it is telling me. This was a long and ongoing process, but it’s one of the best things I did. I know if people would start seeing some of these truths and think more about where the program they are doing came from, then they too would be able to make amazing strength gains and probably exceed their highest goals!

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