Charlie, I’ve heard it almost as an urban myth that you’ve used heavy strength training in order to exploit the after-effect on the track.
I was wondering if this had any truth to it…what are your thoughts on the potentiation effects of heavy strength training on subsequent power/explosiveness/speed training?
He has already commented on this, it is not true and he does not recomend heavy lower body lifting within I believe 6 days of comp? To much fatigue to specific fibres.
However, there is truth to potentiation, and he has stated that the more advanced the athlete and more efficient the nervous system, the longer this potentiation effect lasts.
As well he is a believer that the nervous system is a general organism, so stimulation of it via any means stimulates it fully.
He did this via building up Ben’s bench press, and having ben perform a 450lb double two days before.
This potentiated his nervous system via high stimulation with the maximal loads without fatiguing specific fibres. Hope that helped.
You mean the story of Ben performing his 3 rep max in the squat before breaking the record? Charlie said it never happened since there were no weights at the warmup. Heres the actual part of the article:
"Arm Cycling and the Three-Rep Max Myth
Q: In your book The Charlie Francis Training System, you state that Ben Johnson was able to cycle his arms at 4.7 times per second when sprinting. Was the cycle considered the arm moving forward and back as one cycle, or is the arm forward one cycle and the arm back a second cycle?
Also, I thought I read an article by Charles Poliquin that said Ben Johnson performed a three-rep max squat about ten minutes before he broke the world record. If this is true, could you please expound on how you use this training principle?
A: Each cycle is in one direction only. (Although Ben averaged 4.7 strides per second, his peak frequency was 5.2 SPS!) As for the three-rep max story, well, I heard that one too! Sorry, it never happened! In fact, it couldn’t have happened, either, since there were no weights at the Olympic warm-up venue.
For the record, we always lifted after speed work, never before! Ben’s heaviest squat workout was two sets of six at 600 pounds, past parallel. Though, obviously, he could have gone much higher, he never did; after all, that was enough! Of course, this means there was no three-rep max, either!"
Numba, your point in number 3 is not entirely accurate. It is true that any training stimulus also stimulates the CNS (to some degree), however, there is a great degree of gradation between the amplitude/magnitude of a lesser stimulus and a greater stimulus. This is made evident in Charlie’s MU recruitment chart.
For example: according to Charlie’s chart, a max attempt C&J recruits a very high amount of high threshold MU’s, while, a max biceps curl, comparitivley, recruits a much smaller amount of MU’s.