Pavel Tsatsouline (61:48)
If you don't mind, Andrew, I'll break it up because a lot of great questions right there. So one, as you mentioned, there are different ways of training, and again, we degrees, the groove load parameters, apart from the long rests, are very much based on Soviet weightlifting system. And I'd like to talk a little bit about that later. Another system that is completely and radically different, and it ties very much to Mike Menzer's training, for reasons that become obvious, is the classic American powerlifting system from the 80s. And when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is there are many ways to get the job done. You know, Atkuvir, his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different, different adaptations that result, you can arrive to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways. So to say this is right and this is wrong, you cannot sometimes do that. I mean, I can say most of things are wrong, but I can also say there's multiple right ways of training and they can be radically different. And they're different because they rely on very different phenomena. So in this particular case, you're talking about recovery and frequency, which is again, a great way to address it. I'm going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same pedigree that they have brought so many gold medals. So one system is the Soviet weightlifting system is again where athletes would train several times a day. And Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that, and every day. And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system, exemplified by Hugh Cassidy, Marty Gallagher, Ed Cohen, Kirk Kowalski. So starting from the 70s through the 90s, those are really glorious day for US powerlifting. And in that system, they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week. So it's kind of a little bit like Mike Mentzer's work, kind of. But we'll address why. So how can that be and how can both systems work? So you address the recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity, which hetero means different. Chronicity refers to time. So the different systems in the body recover different rates. And if you don't take that into account, then you're going to have some serious problems. So the Soviet system took. If you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they looked at, okay, we want to do frequent practice, which is exactly what we do. We don't want to beat the muscles up so much. That takes them very long time to recover, you know, not too much eccentric stress. Not too much acidosis, avoiding, things like that. And they were able to adjust the loads in such a way. So let's say your weights are heavy, but not too heavy. The reps don't go too high, so you're able to recover pretty much overnight. And the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days or more sessions, you get better results. And it's your body is able, and your nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything is able to handle much more if it's split into small doses. So let's use an example of a meal. Let's say if you were trying to an eating competition, how much you can eat in 24 hours. So it's not like those Coney island, you know how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting? No, but you'd probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day. And this is the same idea, just like that parable from Nassim Taleb about the king that got angry at his son and he says he's going to crush him with a big rock. And he realized, well, what did I do? I don't want to kill this kid, but the king's ward is king's ward, right? So he ordered his peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dump these pebbles on the kid. So that's the same idea. So fragmentation of the load always allows you to do more and do it safer. So something else is related to that in some training systems. Some training systems rely on adaptations, let's say for strength that goes in the muscle, that go beyond just the contractile proteins, just, you know, the part, you know, my part, that make that create force. So, for example, the Soviet system, they also tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate, which is the kind of immediate fuel for muscle contractions. For this type of work, we're lifting heavy weights over and over. And so by training, sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate adaptation, but without still allowing muscles to recover. So this kind of a dance, and it's fairly complex. Then, on the other hand, the American system did something completely different. And the explanations for what happens in the muscle within this American system, we don't know for sure, but there's a hypothesis by Russian specialist Vadim Pratasinko that seems quite credible. So again, the system. Here's the system. You train hard, you do one hard set once a week or two hard sets. So the satellite cells that are immature cells in the muscle, they're sitting there waiting to jump in if you need to replenish the messed up ones. In order for the satellite cells to get their job done. They try to figure out, scientists try to figure out what sort of stimuli are, are required. And one, a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the microstructure of the muscle can, can provoke that stimulus. So but that damage has to be very, very specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just going to get a whole lot of scar tissue. And you know, some satellite cells will just die and others will just become, becomes scar. But if the cross bridges in the muscle, the cross bridges is that part that does create force in the muscle. If they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job. So the way the muscle contracts is, so there is, imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water. So water is one protein, it's called actin. And myosin is the oars that are moving in there. So the oar dips into the water hooks and pools. And that or relies on available energy in the muscle. So these ATP molecules of stored energy, they're floating around. And the head, myosin head needs that ATP in order to both to hook to produce force, but it also, it needs ATP to unhook as well. And it's in this in between stage, it's called a rigor. So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there is not enough energy for it to relax, so the muscle is stuck in rigor. So think of rigor mortis. So if you tear that body's muscle, you know it's going to tear. And supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to, when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle. But the, but the supply is not. And so if you're, if you do that in the first, let's say 20, 20, 30 seconds before acidosis set in, that's what, that's what should happen. Because if you wait longer, when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, acid, it kills that reaction that, it kills that reaction that uses ATP. So you're not using as much anymore. Sure, the, the demand is down, the supply is down, but it's on demand, so it's not so good. So if you raise that fatigue point, so if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate, that kind of rocket fuel of the muscle within about 20, 30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks Some of these oars are going to get stuck and when the muscle is lengthening and they're going to tear, and that's a very specific tear. It doesn't happen on the outside of the muscle. It happens just on the inside in there. Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike Mentzer's method and explains the American powerlifting method, interestingly enough, about Mike Mentzer. And again, to the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means train a muscle really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume. Professor Yudiver Kashansky, before he died, famous Soviet sports scientist, known in the west mostly as the father of what is called plyometric symptoms. The West. But he's also done many other things as well. He spoke very highly about Mensur. He thought Mensur was brilliant. Mensur was an innovator. But many people, some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people do not. And so pretty much what Pratasenka suggested that might happen is eventually you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete, how much you can deplete the creatine phosphate in that window. That's when you hit the wall. And this is where the American system comes in. This system is called cycling. The history of cycling is fascinating. The relationship, the interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. So just to go back for a minute, Soviet track athletes in the 50s were using the typical stupid high rep, high reps to burn. Then in the late 50s, some very sharp young specialist, Vitaly Chizinov, he made a case at a conference. What are we doing? Let's look at what he said. Let's look at Paul Anderson, DY Hepburn, Bruce Randall, these North American strength athletes, let's look what they're doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for sets of 3 to 5 reps. Let's knock this down. Since off Soviet track athletes started doing that right there. So this is how the Soviets, for example, learned from Americans. That's an example of how it went the other way. The classic periodization, as it's known, Matveyev periodization, in which you kind of start out with higher volume and less specific to lower volume, more intensity and so on. That periodization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union. Lifters thought that's just completely not, it's just not usable. It's just inappropriate for their needs. Arkady Vorabyov, the profession And Olympic champion made very strong case why. But Americans who got some limited information about it, American powerlifters, not weightlifters, were able to develop their own training system based on that premise, something that the Soviets didn't do. And the way it worked is like this. You don't necessarily have very high volume, but you start, I'm going to give you a most classic example of this type of cycling. Again, this is again, Cassidy Gallagher, Colin Karwaski, four week blocks. Let's say there's like going to be three, four week blocks, maybe four. So you do lift once a week. On week four, you go for pr. So let's say this is a month of fives. So this is on your week four, you're going to do a PR set of five. You plan for it. Week three is somewhere around your old pr. Week two is lighter, Week one is lighter still. Okay. And then after that you may increase the weight, but still relative effort is going to drop and you're going to kind of repeat the process. So it does multiple things on the muscular level. So what Parthasanka explained, you pretty much decondition yourself temporarily and you progressively increase that creatine phosphate use. So initially when you're deconditioned, it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus. You don't have to push really hard in first week, you push harder in the second, and harder and harder. There's a concept, their concept in periodization, so in sports science of reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus and resistance, kind of like in the medical terms, you know how much it can, you know it, it's, it's not affected by it. So when you're starting light after layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much. So boom, sudden you build this muscle and then you keep building up. And when you reach, when you reach a peak, then you just, then you just step back again. And on the side of the nervous system and endocrine system, much later, Soviet research, they said you can train hard. Maximum two weeks out of four, that's it. More than that you cannot handle.
