“Pierre Roy, one of my earliest mentors in weightlifting methodology, once said that unless athletes start complaining of tendonitis, they’re not training hard enough. They should train until they’re literally depressed, then back off.”
"So the idea is simple: brutally train yourself into the ground for two weeks, take five days off, and come back to rebound and break your size and strength plateaus. But here’s the catch: during the two weeks of loading/forced overtraining, your goal is to lose strength… then keep right on training!
When people get weaker they stop. That’s a mistake on this program. You have to go until you get much weaker. You must shoot for a drop of 20% in strength. So if the weight you use for a certain exercise is 100 pounds for sets of 8, then at the end of the two weeks you should have a hard time doing sets of 8 with 80 pounds.
“If you lose more than 20% that’s even better. I’ve seen guys lose as much as 40%. Genetically skinny guys may lose more; mesomorphs may lose less.”
“Consume 30 to 45 grams of fish oil per day during the loading phase. (No need to do this during your five off days because you’ll want more calories from carbs and you don’t want to slow down the insulin response with the fish oil during this off/rebuilding period.”
I was just going to post this on here as well. I read this article and pretty much couldn’t believe what I was reading. I really did not agree much at all with this. Why on Earth would you beat yourself into the ground with this type of training weeks before a World Championship or Oly Final??? Does not make sense to me.
I think it’s a good article. You have to look at who his audience is at t-nation (weightlifters, powerlifters, bodybuilders, recreational lifters). If you wanna get strong, this can be a way to go. It might not be good for athletic performance but alot of people on t-nation aren’t concerned with sport performance unless it involves weights or bb-ing.
How is this much different than Abadjiev beating the piss out of a weightlifting team or a Smolov squat routine?
I just spoke today w/ a docto to some well known track stars and when I told him about the 30-40 gram recommendation he laughed and asked me if I knew anybody who had ever actually done that. I respond no and his response is, “Good, it causes ______ [I forget the name of the syndrome], which is where you essentially have oil diarrhea for up to a week. I have had some people try it before–terrible idea.”
The concept makes sense, but the way it is done is plain dangerous in my eyes. Recommending to people who for the most part cannot even squat properly to do this is an awful idea.
Wow, I’m going to assume he just wrote this article for shock factor. lol Imagine someone doing 400 for reps. He’s gonna intentionally try to get to the point where the most he could possibly do is somewhere between 260-320?
That’s hard to believe. So I take 10-12g per day and am fine but if I took 30g I’d have diarrhea for a week? Don’t think so. 8g with each meal(5) isn’t a huge deal… that’s like a TBSP per meal.
I’m going to guess it depends on the quality of fish oil and the person and whether or not it is on an empty stomach. Just repeating what he said. I have taken 14g once and was fine, but then again that’s about half the of the lowest problematic dose.
I think you are absolutely correct. The more shocking/different a program is, the more you are going to pique the interest of people whether or not the program is or can be effective.
I have personally trained to a point where I could not clean over 185 when my max was ~285. Overreaching is more noticeable on the purely CNS intensive lifts (o-lifts) than powerlifts. Poliquin may be a bit on the weird side but he’s not an idiot.
yes for t-nation readers (powerlifters, bodybuilders, weightlifters, recreational strength trainers). i think doing it along with a “team” sport would be questionable.
Use for ANY sport outside of a weightroom would be questionable- to say the least!
Even in the weight room, there’s a fine line and, once you cross it, you are in such a serious state of overtraining that you may not recover within the same phase or season.
That said, you can stress SOME of you lifts while maintaining others to control the degree of CNS overload. As lifting is better served by more phases in a year, you can still get through all your lifts- just not all at the same time.
He does say that the program is usually for elite, well-coached athletes so it’s definitely more than just the typical t-nation reader he’s addressing. I am unsure if he means elite lifters or other.
I can’t imagine he’d propose this for a top athlete doing anything other than weight training, though, for some time. I’d also be interested if he has ever used such a program with any of his top clients.
An important question would be at what point is planned overreaching actually overtraining? How much of an decrement is someone willing to accept as part of the plan before just bailing on the project for concern over making future gains or overuse injuries?