To answer one of the most common questions we get, this post is for everyone who wants some basic guidelines on how to customize their programming for increasing strength.
Choosing the right training volume for strength
Let’s get it out of the way: there is no magic number or prescription to increase your squat. When people hop on popular strength-specific programs like the Russian Squat Routine (RSR) or Smolov and see results, the results usually aren’t due to the lifter hitting all the right percentages and all the right sets. In other words, the designer of the program did not use some secret sauce in writing every number exactly as specified. These programs work because most of the time the workload is a simple increase from what the lifter was performing previously.
For example, the RSR is a 3x/week program that has athletes perform 15-18 working squat sets for the first 5 weeks before a test. Smolov has athletes squatting 4x/week for a total of 26 sets a week for 4 weeks (numbers are approximate.) These are large and enormous volumes, respectively: it’s extremely unlikely that an athlete was already performing close to this amount of workload prior to starting one of these programs.
Often times, when following a squat routine, athletes simply move squats to beginning of their session, or add another session dedicated to just squats.
This is why programs work--which is to say that you don’t need to have an elaborate program to progress. Setting aside a few training mesocycles for strength does not necessarily require drastically changing your current program if you are happy with it.
Role of hypertrophy
Not all work is the same. For any given athlete, the primary contributor to strength is muscular cross-sectional area. We’ve seen too many times to count the lean, skinny weightlifter who’s trained for years and only pushes heavy triples and below in the squat. When they ask us what they should do, the answer is clear. It is time to look not just like a weightlifter, but like one who lifts weights.
The physiological difference between a rep at 80% intensity and 100% is not muscle fiber recruitment. Rather, it’s rate-coding, the frequency at which the CNS sends impulses to the muscle, which then modulates the strength of contraction in each individual fiber. Remember our goal is hypertrophy: if we already are at full recruitment at 80%, and we can do more reps/sets at 80% than at 90%, then this is likely why hypertrophy happens best toward the lower end of the intensity window. Because we can do more work/volume at full recruitment.
With this in mind, take time out of the year to really build the foundation of muscle size. Include it alongside the usual work you do at high intensities.
Increase or decrease training volume?
Don’t just track your training: quantify it. The easiest way to do this is just via the number of weekly working sets. Divide this into squat volume, pulling volume, snatch volume, and clean and jerk volume. Include hypertrophy work in its respective categories as well.
If you haven’t made progress in some time and all the other bases are covered (not fatigued, recovering well, not super stressed out, uninjured, protein and calories high enough), just increase your number of weekly working sets by 15-20%. Stay there for a 4-6 week cycle, deload (in earnest), and see if you’ve improved. If not, increase again.
If your legs are small (or even if they aren’t; they’re probably smaller than you think), the increase in weekly volume should come from the addition of hypertrophy work. And alongside the increase in sets, increase the number of reps per set. Start spending most of your time in the 8-12 rep range. For some exercises you could see as many as 20 reps per set.
And make sure that legs/quads are doing the work - if your lower back and glutes are more fatigued than quads after hypertrophy squat session, that means you’re leaning forward and cheating, and your legs won’t grow.
It doesn’t take a max-out session to assess progress. If anything, this “all-out-testing” usually is a detriment to progress. When starting a new cycle, just repeat a given load at a given rep range, and see if things feel lighter or if you feel like you have more reps in reserve now compared to then (another good variable to track).
What about if you don’t have your other bases covered, or if they are but you generally feel beat up? In these cases it can often be wise to decrease training volume, if not just to avoid injury, then to clear up fatigue which could have masked progress for the past few cycles.
Common mistakes in program design and execution
For straight forward strength work, we like the RPE system, it’s fairly easy to understand.
The most common mistake we see in strength work is spending too much time above RPE 9 (less than 1 rep in reserve, no matter how many reps in the set). It’s simply too difficult for most people to maintain good positioning (see above about switching quads to glutes and lower back) at that kind of relative intensity. It’s also a bottleneck for overall set-to-set training quality: opening a workout with a nasty grinder of a working set drastically reduces the chance that you’ll be able to hit anything nicely afterward.
When training in China (actually training, not just watching these lifters flex for Instagram), you’ll find that most athletes spend the majority of their squatting and pulling time around RPE 7-8. In fact, on top sets, Chinese lifters can often be seen giving fellow athletes a little pull on the bar when the rep starts grinding. This (usually) isn’t done to boost each others’ egos. They know that ugly slow RPE 10 reps aren’t always appropriate at that point in the training cycle, and want to maintain good positions.
Another common mistake, this one on the program design side, is a lack of targeting for weak points. Often, poor execution of lifting can be linked to poor program design. If a lifter has trouble keeping the knees forward in the back squat, it doesn’t make sense to have them pulling 3x/week. Their weakpoint is most likely their quad strength (which again is rooted in hypertrophy), for which they need targeted programming. Conversely, if a lifter is extremely upright in the squat and has trouble keeping their heels down, it doesn’t make sense to have them performing cyclist squats at the end of every session. But we see either this mismatch between athlete and program or worse, a lack of intentional consideration for weakpoint improvement in maybe half of the athletes who ask us strength-related questions.
And lastly is a mistake in one’s understanding of training. Weightlifting at the professional level is full of calm people who are comfortable with unbelievable levels of monotony. Weightlifting at the amateur level tends to attract a kind of analytical and neurotic personality type who makes adjustments to training every time they read another article (this one included).
What we are trying to say is that the basic concept underlying weightlifting--more work--is the most important thing. Most of the time you need to do a little bit more and just keep doing the same thing. Not too much more, just a little bit. And maybe the reason that new exercise from your favorite weightlifting guru works is that you added more work.
Your Brothers in Strength,
Coach Zhang: eddie@coachpapayats.com
Coach Yats yats@coachpapayats.com