There’s a fine line between doing enough work and too much work. Don’t fall into this trap. Be realistic with yourself (and your clients, if you’re a coach) and train for long-term success, not for short-term burnout.
Ask yourself: “Is my training program based on me being strongest at every session?” If your answer is an honest yes, you might need to reconsider your program. Here’s how you can improve it.
I’ve heard before that a program rarely fails due to assistance work, but I disagree. This is the work that carries over to our main and supplemental movements, builds muscle, creates balance, and promotes integrity throughout the entire body.
How and when should you perform assistance exercises? What protocols are used for assistance work? Should exercises be changed or rotated? What about bands, chains, and specialty bars?
This final wave includes a small taper at the end for peaking purposes. There are both banded and band-free options.
Would it be wise to follow the same percentage for a given workout for both the main lift and the assistance work? Or should the assistance work be planned differently?
The conjugate system is about max effort, dynamic effort, and the repetition method. You can do everything with just a rack, bar, bench, and some weights. Here are the next four weeks of the program.
Just like a game of euchre, there is an optimal time to play these trump cards in powerlifting.
You’ve been away from the gym, but now you’re back. With some intelligent programming you can resume training in such a way that you’ll be blowing through your old numbers without ever getting stuck.
Through a lot of ups downs since 2002, I’ve learned things both the hard way and the easy way. In one quick read, here are 137 of the best things to remember about conjugate.
A multi-world record holder in the bench press, a successful gym owner, and a successful all-around lifter, Magruder has certainly made his mark.
I had a training ego. It drove everything I did — every weight I put on the bar, every lift I took, and the design of every workout. And then one day, my training ego gave up.
Knowing now how to set up and execute the lift, there is one final process to perfect your bench press.
So far, we haven’t even moved the bar. Keeping in mind what we learned in part one of this series, we are now ready to begin the press.
This article includes video that shows the many physical and technical aspects you need to master to get the most of your sumo deadlift.
There will be times that your personal life overwhelms you. Getting through these rocky times will never be easy, but there are ways to ensure you make it out alive.
For correcting weaknesses in a given portion of a lift, you need to use what I call Mechanically Similar Movements.
We all love a chalk-filled garage gym or a basement torture chamber with Olympic plates leaning against cracked cinder block walls, but the commercial gym presents some perks that your powerlifting gym lacks.
Not any old training system will give you an 860 raw squat at 220.
You’ve read the book, you know the program. Here’s how to perfect it.
Whether it’s shoes, equipment, or programming, your choices make a difference in how you perform under the bar.
