Grease the Groove for Strength

by Pavel Tsatsouline, Master of Sports

"Our communist enemies, who are trying to bury us, have exercise
breaks instead of coffee breaks." - Bob Hoffman, York Barbell Club

Your grandmother used to tell you : to get good at something, you
must do it often, do it a lot, and do it to the exclusion of other
things. Yet you never listened, why you little..! If you did, how
would you ever get the bright idea of deadlifting once every two
weeks and doing ten assistance exercises for the bench press?

Specificity + frequent practice = success. It is so obvious, most
people don't get it. Once I came across a question posted on a
popular powerlifting website by a young Marine: how should he
train to be able to do more chin-ups? I was amused when I read
the arcane and non-specific advice the trooper had received:
straight-arm pull-downs, reverse curls, avoiding the negative
part of the chin-up every third workout... I had a radical thought:
if you want to get good at chin-ups, why not try to do... a lot of
chin-ups? Just a couple of months earlier I had put my
father-in-law Roger Antonson, incidentally an ex-Marine, on a
program which required him to do an easy five chins every time
he went down to his basement. Each day he would total
between twenty-five and a hundred chin-ups hardly breaking a
sweat. Every month or so Roger would take a few days off and
then test himself. Before you knew it, the old leatherneck
could knock off twenty consecutive chins, more than he could
do forty years ago during his service with the few good men!

A few months later Roger sold his house and moved to an
apartment. A paranoid Stalinist that I am, I suspected that he
plotted to work around the 'chin every time you go to the
basement' clause. By the degree of the Politbureau Comrade
Antonson was issued one of those 'Door Gym' pull-up bars.
Roger wisely conceded to the will of the Party and carried on
with his 'grease the chin-up groove' program. Roger
vanovich's next objective is a one-arm chin. He just does not
know it yet.

My father, a Soviet Army officer, had me follow an identical
routine in my early testosterone years. My parents'
apartment had a built in storage space above the kitchen
door (it is a Russian design, you wouldn't understand).
Every time I left the kitchen I would hang on to the ledge
and crank out as many fingertip pull-ups as I could without
struggle. Consequently, high school pull-up tests were a
breeze.

Both Roger and I got stronger through the process of
synaptic facilitation. Neurogeeks never got around to
telling iron heads that repetitive and reasonably intense
stimulation of a motoneuron increases the strength of its
synaptic connections and may even form new synapses.
Translated in English it means that multiple repetitions of a
bench press will 'grease up' this powerlift's groove. More
'juice' will reach the muscle when you are benching your
max. The muscle will contract harder and you will have a
new PR to brag about. Four times powerlifting world record
holder Dr. Judd Biasiotto set up a bench in his kitchen, got in
the habit of hitting it every time he was in the area and put
up a 319BP @ 132!

Obviously, you do not have to be a Commie weightlifter with
Rocky IV pharmacy to benefit from high volume heavy training.
Here is how you can to set up a 'grease the groove' program
for one rep max strength or for strength endurance in your
dungeon:

1. Intensity

The science of motor learning explains that an extreme, all out
movement is operated by a program different from that used for
the identical task performed at a moderate intensity. As far as
your nervous system is concerned, throwing a football for
maximum distance is a totally different ball game than passing
it ten yards, no pun intended. According to Russian scientist
Matveyev (yeah, the chap who invented periodization), you must
train with at least 80% 1RM weights if you intend to make a
noticeable impact on your max. According to Prof. Verkhoshansky,
another mad scientist from the Empire of Evil, for elite athletes
this minimal load is even higher -85% 1RM. Yet many comrades
will be very successful greasing the groove with 60-80% weights
as long they emphasize the competitive technique -high tension,
Power Breathing, etc.

Naturally, if you are training for strength endurance rather than
absolute strength, you should train with lighter loads. To meet the
Soviet Special Forces pull-up standard of eighteen consecutive
dead hang reps stick to your bodyweight plus heavy regulation
boots.

It is critical for the program's success that you avoid muscle
failure as aerobic classes and rice cakes. Do not come even
close to failure, whether you train for max or repetitions! A triple
with a five-rep max or ten pull-ups if twenty is your PR will do the
trick. The secret to this workout is performing a lot of work with
reasonably heavy weights. Pushing to exhaustion will burn out
your neuromuscular system and force you to cut back on the
weights or tonnage.

2. Repetitions

According to former world weight lifting champion Prof. Arkady
Vorobyev, one to six reps are optimal for training of high
caliber weightlifters and increasing this number hinders strength
development. Or, as Luke Iams put it, "Anything over six reps is
bodybuilding."

Do more reps, and your body will think that you are practicing a
totally different lift. Dr. Biasiotto who once squatted an unreal 605
@ 130 has switched to bodybuilding and knocks off 325x25 these
days. His legs are no longer 'a pair of pliers in shorts' as they
used to be in his days of heavy triples and world records, but he
would be the first one to tell you that there is no way he could
put up a massive single training this way.

Of course, for bodyweight pull-ups, push-ups, and other
commando feats of staying power you will need to bump up the
reps to satisfy the law of specificity. Roger Antonson worked up to
training sets of nine by the time he set a personal record of
twenty chin-ups.

3. Volume

Vitaly Regulyan, one of the top Russian benchers, does fifty to
seventy heavy sets per lift! What are YOU waiting for? A
permission from Mike Mentzer? Up the volume!

'High volume' does NOT mean a lot of reps with Barbie weights.
Such training is good or nothing but a muscle pumper's virtual
muscle. Do I sound like Anthony Dittillo? -Good, the man is right,
give him a cigar! 'High volume' on the synaptic facilitation power
plan means maximizing your weekly tonnage with heavy weights.

'Tonnage' -or 'poundage' if you are not up on the metric system -
refers to the total weight lifted in a given period of time, for
example a day, a week, a mesocycle. Say your best deadlift is
500x1 and last week you did the following pulls: 400x5/20,
450x2/50. Here is how to calculate your weekly deadlift poundage:
(400x5x20) + (450x2x50) = 85,000. As this number grows, so will
your strength, at least up to a point.

Make sure that volume does not come at the expense of intensity.
Average intensity is calculated by dividing the poundage by the
total number of lifts: 85,000 : 200 = 425 pounds. Intensity can be
expressed in pounds or % 1RM. In the above example 425 pounds
is 82,5% of 500 pounds one rep max; the intensity is on the
money.

The strong man must make an effort to gradually build up both the
volume and the intensity while making sure his body can handle
the load and does not overtrain. Trite as it sounds, listen to your
body.

4. Frequency

Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a Soviet strength expert who jump
shipped from the Dark Side of the Force to America, summed up
effective strength building as training as often as possible while
being as fresh as possible. An eighties study by Gillam found
that increasing training frequency up to five days a week improved
the results in the bench press, something big Jim Williams knew
a decade earlier when he benched in the neighbourhood of 700.
Ditto for Dr. Judd. Before Biasiotto took up benching in the midst
of his kitchen appliances, he had worked out in his training
partner's spider web insulated and rat infested garage where he
benched five times a week for fifteen heavy sets within an hour.
That brutally efficient routine boosted skinny Judd's bench from
140 to 295 pounds in nine months!

Russian strength researchers discovered that fragmentation of
the training volume into smaller units is very effective for
promoting strength adaptation, especially in the nervous system.
In other words, one set of five every day is better than five sets
of five every five days.

It is even better if you chop up your daily workload into multiple
sessions. Motor learning comrades know that while the total
number of trials is important, the frequency of practice is even
more critical than the total volume. Paul Anderson had it all figured
out when he supersetted heavy triples in the squat with gallons
of milk throughout the day. If you can swing it -all the power to
you, people!

5. Exercise selection

Concentrate your gains on the snatch and the C&J, SQ-BP-DL, or
any other few select lifts and forget assistance work! The
synaptic facilitation approach is very powerful because it greases
the specific groove of your pet feat. Additional exercises will just
distract you from your purpose. I plan to expand on the cloudy
issue of specificity of strength in a future article. For now, be a
good Communist and show some blind faith!

The synaptic facilitation power plan can be summed up as lifting
heavy weights as often as possible while staying 'fresh as a
cucumber' (Russkies have a thing against daisies, you wouldn't
understand). Contrary to what some snobby pantywaists believe,
this heavy, high volume approach is not an iron fossil but one of
the most scientific approaches to strength training there is. "Chain
yourself to the squat rack and call me in a year." Words to live by.

Source: Pavel Tsatsouline is the author of "Power to the People!"
A book about Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American