QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

The Twelve-Day on, Two-Day off Diet

This diet has had a few “incarnations” on the internet. I think it is public domain, because of the number of variations. I removed some of the “suspect” points about the diet, especially the points surrounding how much to expect to lose. That just isn’t true, nor safe.

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Shopping List for Someone Who Doesn’t Have Kids

Meat
Poultry
Sausage
Bacon
Fish
Shellfish, if you can eat it
Canned Tuna
Salmon (in the can or fresh…the king of grilled foods!)
Eggs (buy them in the five dozen containers)
Heavy Cream, for coffee
Real butter, if you use it
Cheese, for some people, not for everybody
Salad Greens: everything you can eat raw!
Lemons and limes to sweeten drinks and squeeze on fish and salads
Herbs/Spices
Olive Oil
The best “in-season” fruit

The Ten Commandments of Lifting

… and Daniel came down from the mountain, yeah, verily, and carried tablets of iron…

1 Use whole body lifts, rarely isolate a muscle

2 Constantly strive for more weight on the bar and move it faster

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An Attempt to Match the Old York Courses

When I reference being 43 in this article, it will give you an idea of how old this is…

That “thump” you heard was my rear end crashing down. I decided to do my own little variation of York Course Three and try to get to the Bronze standards on a few of the lifts. Well, I tried. I did learn more in the last hour and change, though, than I have in about six months.

One arm clean and jerks: okay, I’ve done them. But, I keep missing jerks in meets, so I paid attention today. I only got up to 151 with the right (160 is bronze for my weight) but I noticed that I was falling left just like I do in meets. I split with the left foot front.

All of a sudden, it made sense why Dave Turner gave me Dave Webster’s article on the jerk. I am not “Pushing my head through.” And, I don’t do it on snatches either, so I either dump them forward or lose the rack behind. Head through!!!

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Light Weeks?

I like three hard and one easy week. I examined my journals (all the way back to 1971) and found that I naturally do it with illness, injury or crappy efforts. So, I decided to just learn to plan it. It is really a hard thing to teach young athletes, but the same holds true with everybody, I think.

There is a book called “Consistent Winning” which I think really gives some good ideas about how to do it. You may disagree with the premise but it works.

When I use my “Body as One Piece” program with all the triple pyramids and overload lifts, you find that you come back stronger. Of course, you only squat twice a month on this program, so you are really fresh. Note: this program works for someone off the learning curve. It is fairly advanced. But, I would still recommend for someone who has a year or so under their belt to unload regularly. Joe Mills recommended going back to the York Courses when he noted a lack of progress. At the PBBC, we “bodybuilded” for a couple of weeks, usually just lots of arm work, inclines, hypers and assorted crap, along with bodyweight for reps contests in the squat and bench press. I can almost predict when a person is going to crash in a program by just looking at the structure of the month after month after month of expected training. Life is not linear.

I have never been convinced that improvement in lifting (or throwing or life) is linear. So, I like the idea of planning off weeks. But, what most people misunderstand is that I think you really need to load those weeks before the off-week. I guess I straddle two theories here:

1. You are going to end up taking time off sooner or later, or submit yourself to endless crappy workouts that you will soon convince you that you are genetically inferior.

2. When you train, you really have to train hard. I like Brooks’ idea of picking twelve exercises and trying to attain Hoffman’s Gold standards. Attempting a bunch of bodyweight snatches, cleans, and presses as well as a host of one arm lifts is hard work. In the “Body as One Piece” program that I have my throwers use (the fourth week is off), the squat workout is PR squats for 7 sets of 5 followed by jumps. We overload these lifts whereas the athlete stands and goes down under their own power then we help them come up. (Don’t try this without talking to me more.) They can never grind these lifts nor slow down coming up. But, that is 35 reps (on paper) with their max, once a month. In reality, the first two sets are done with PRs, but the last ones are just pathetic attempts. Paul Northway once had to do 135 on his last set. He could snatch 265 in high school, but on his seventh set could no longer lower himself.

This is hard work in my world. Supersetting triceps x and arm curls is not.

I think you are on the right track with your son, but get him going on floor to overhead lifts, the clean and press at least, as soon as you can. This is the lift that got a lot of us going in the right direction.

So, what does time off mean? For me, it might be a week of arm work and circuit training. Or, more rollerblading. It is active, but not killer. Joe Mills used to recommend the York courses when guys got stale in the weightroom. Whatever you choose to do, keep your eyes on four or ten year progress rather than week to week or even month to month.

How many days per week?

Compared to things like football or wrestling or boot camp or war, three days a week full body is not too stressful. I think the human body can handle a ton of load and make progress, especially in strength gain.

The secret is to find the least amount of work that will provide the most gain. I have trained clean on five days a week O lifting for two years and still made progress. Then, I slid back to three days a week and my lifts jumped by twenty and thirty pounds.

But, I think you have to put the load in first. Like Earl Nightingale used to say about most people’s careers: “They stand in front of an empty fireplace and say ‘give me heat.’ They don’t realzie that you have to put some logs and kindling in first.”

Depending on what you want, of course, but overall, I would argue that three days a week whole body would be “about” right for most people. The Bulgarians and Soviet lifters did three days a week until about 1972 for the bulk of their training and did marvelous. (I don’t think, in fact, I know, they weren’t clean) Three days a week was the standard for American lifters for generations.

I have trained twice a week for long periods of time. I did this workout for a while:
Day One:
Squat
Clean

Day Two:
Snatch
Bench Press

I threw 182 in the discus that season with only two additional throwig workouts a week. So, yes, less does work, but again, I think I had the background to back off, if that makes sense.

Athletic Carryover: Answer to a Question

“Great weightlifters would readily (one year) make elite/champion kettlebellers and not vice versa”

I can only address this with my experiences, but I have only found two things in life that “carried over” into other sports: high school wrestling and the O lifts. Wrestling in high school is one of the rare times in life that it is just you and one other person. If your team gets pinned and pinned, but you win…well, you won.

O lifting is an amazing sport for carryover. I once, on a stupid bet for a twelve pack of beer, raced a ten kilometer run without ANY (zip, zero, nada, nothing, any) running in the past year or two or three (or maybe five years), but I was getting ready for an O meet. Lots of people…lots…finished well behind me. In fact, this Nazi psycho running chick at the job I had at the time finished behind me, too. O lifting gives your VO2 intake a ride every workout and it carries over into other sports.

Moreover, it is much easier to go from a 300 pound snatch for one to 50 one hand kettlebells with a heavish kettlebell, than it is to do 50 one hand snatches with 72 pounds to a single with 300.

When I was at Skyline College, one of the geek runners said that “we work harder than you guys (throwers).” First, I challenged him to fight (actually I told him to attempt a bizarre act by himself), then, I thought about it. At the time, I was snatching in the 240′s and Clean and Jerking in the low 300′s, plus tossing the discus over 170 and the shot over the low 40′s.

He would do repeats of the 400 in the mid-60′s as much of his training. My question: if you switched us for, say, $1,000,000 to the first to repeat the others workout…who do you bet on?

I feel that a power athlete can always build the endurance end up quicker than an endurance athlete can build up the power end.

As a personal challenge to yourself, simply get your snatch up to 300 and your clean and jerk up to 385 at your current bodyweight. This should not take long. Then, test your kettlebell endurance and see if you have lost or maintained anything.