elitefts™ Sunday Edition

I find it difficult to ignore what I believe to be one of the best results-producing programs of all time. It has been given plenty of press over the years in IronMan magazine of the Peary Rader years, throughout the pages of Milo published by Randall Strossen, and also in the writings of Steve Jeck and Peter Martin in their co-authored book, “Of Stones and Strength.” The program I refer to is the Pull, Push and Squat.

I love simplicity in training. I still believe that the majority of trainees can achieve what they want to achieve by utilizing just three exercises, three days a week. With only three exercise movements, you can ensure that over 80 percent of the body has been trained efficiently and effectively. If you want, you can add an abdominal movement as a finisher. By all means, add it into the mix, but it is not really essential if you work the three main movements correctly. It reminds me of the advice that the great Doug Hepburn once offered a trainee after he finally had gotten the courage to ask the legend how to improve his squat strength. His reply: “SQUAT!”

Simplicity in programming is a reality that we cannot deny. The longer I am in this game, the more I realize this each and every day.

Most of us just do not have the time to train for hours every day, but we still want to be competitive (at least with ourselves), lift good weights, and get results for our efforts. We often get caught up with the latest programs and neglect the simple rationale that was the default message in the original Peary Rader IronMan that hard work on a few basic exercises will hold you in good stead over an extended period of time.

You can always experiment to see what works best for you and the people that you train, but just for a moment reflect on the wisdom of the ages. Bill Starr is the master of simplicity and I have been trying to replicate his formula for over 25 years in my programming. His masterpiece is of five sets of five reps with three basic exercises — the "Big Three of Power:" clean, squat and bench press. In the history of programming, I believe this is the single best workout for producing results. Bruce Walsh, the father of strength and conditioning in Australian sport modified this formula slightly and substituted the push press for the bench press, as we play most of our sport on our feet and not lying down. Whichever you use, you will gain like never before.

There are a number of other pearls of simple wisdom that I gleaned from the pages of IronMan magazine as a young man. One simple concept that remained a part of many of my programs is barbell/dumbbell alternation. Simply put, if you use a bar for one exercise and are doing two exercises per body part, then use dumbbells for the next. For example, if you are benching with a bar, then do inclines with dumbbells as your next exercise. For the lower body this holds true. If the first movement is a bilateral movement, then use a unilateral movement as your second exercise. This could, of course, also be used with dumbbells.

Something else that I am currently testing is the varying of sets and reps schemes based on the above ideas. For example, using my two favorite lower body exercises, I would do three sets of six on safety bar box squats slightly above parallel and then move onto cambered bar or safety squat bar Simmons’ Good Morning Combo for six sets of three. Of course, I could very easily flip the order and use the sets of three as a neural potentiator for the more hypertrophy-oriented sets of six. Either way, it is good solid basic program that takes a minimal amount of time to provide results.

There are many movement combinations such as this that you can use. Another of my favorites is to do power snatches for three sets of six after having done block cleans and push presses for six sets of three reps.

For those in the competitive arena of powerlifting and Olympic lifting, you will obviously have to do more exercises and sessions to optimize your performance. Team sports players, and individuals who want to become bigger and stronger would then go no further.

Essentially, you perform three exercises (one from each of the pull, push and squat categories) for three full-body training sessions a week. Choose how you mix them up. You might decide to add a heavy, light and medium load selection based on exercise selection within this paradigm or you may even try the randomized approach and have six exercises from each category listed and roll a dice to determine which you will do today. Just to get you started, I will list my six favorite exercises in each category and you can build from there. As for sets and reps, use the full-range based around what you are trying to achieve: high reps, low reps, step loading, heavier to lighter, lighter to heavier, five sets of five, wave loading, rest pause, Marsh protocols, Rule of 24 patterns, 5/3/1 style, or five sets of one with Bud Jeffries style. You might even randomize this as well. As long as you are lifting with intensity and focus, I believe that the results will look after themselves.

Pull: Snatch, clean, pulls, deadlift, chins, bent-over row

Push: Military press, push press, split jerk, incline bench, flat bench, floor press

Squat: Single-leg sprinters, front, back, overhead, split, kneeling

Abs/Core: Turkish get ups, roll outs, Zercher lifts, suitcase deadlifts, full body twist, sledge hammer hits on a tire

The system would look like this, using Olympic movements and a Rule of 24 sets and reps pattern. Feel free to substitute whichever exercises you feel are most appropriate for yourself or the people you train:

This is the simple version of the plan. With this plan you have a limited time to train but you still want a program that produces results. I would warm-up each session by using one of the following on each training day:

Monday: Cosner Step-Up: Hang power snatch followed by a step up and down on one leg then a second hang power snatch and a step up and down on the other leg.

Wednesday: Sots Press: Starting in a military press position, push the bar up as you squat under the bar, finish position is in a full squat with the bar overhead, return to standing with bar overhead then lower bar to shoulders and repeat.

Friday: Snatch Squat Press: Similar to the Sots press but standing with the bar on the shoulders, hands gripping the bar in a snatch grip press-behind-neck position. Slowly push the bar up as you squat under the bar (bottom position is the receiving position for the squat snatch), and then lower the bar to behind the neck. Stay in the squat position while you perform a snatch grip press-behind-neck and then return to standing while keeping the bar extended overhead.

Random Advice, Ideas and Thoughts

  • As Robbie Deans (International Rugby Head Coach) is often to be heard saying, “Start with the end in mind.” Coaching is an extension of teaching. So, get out of your office and teach — especially in the gym. We should always be correcting different aspects of a lift, with our aim being perfection of technique. If you are not training in the gym yourself, start. It makes a lot of difference for your athletes and for you. Whenever you lift, you are on display. Be a technician and lift properly. You do not have to be the strongest, but you should try at all costs to have the best technique. Whether you like it or not, you are a role model and should model the behaviors you want your athletes to follow. With position comes responsibility and I would hope that the greater the responsibility one has is directly correlated with a greater humility and empathy. Meditation helps me to clear my mind, but Olympic lifting training (moving meditation) allows me to focus my thoughts. What you do not know, you ask someone. There will always be someone smarter or more experienced who will be able to help.
  • Mel Siff and Louie are the only genuine geniuses that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting in our field of endeavor. Go to conferences and you will always pick up at least one useful idea and often you will have what you are currently doing reinforced by a few of the speakers. Don’t be surprised if you learn more by networking with other coaches about their program between sessions. The tradeshow is the best place to hang out and chew the fat. You will often find me there more often than in the sessions themselves. Several quotes that I particularly like from Louie are, “Strength training is the overcoming of weaknesses,” “Everything works, but nothing works forever,” and “Strength training is simply math and physics.”
  • As Confucius is reported to have said, “Find a job you enjoy and you will never work a day in your life.”
  • A quote attributed to Christian Thibaudeau is that, “Complexity is the language of simple minds.” This being a truism, I would like to believe that the reverse of this statement is also true. That is, simplicity is the outcome of a complex questioning mind. I am a physical performance coach for rugby, so I have to juggle all the physical training elements to ensure that performance on the field each week is optimized. To allow any single fitness variable to excel at the detriment of another will, at some stage, have a negative effect on the performance of a player. To be sure, continue to work on your strengths but be careful that the things you ignore don’t become your weakness.
  • Another great quote from Peter Harding is, “You are there to train, not entertain.” There are people out there that make a very simple job extra complicated. Cut away all the hype and all the commercial emphasis and just get fit, fast and powerful. Many strength and conditioning coaches do not have an established philosophy of training, and bounce from a new idea or fad to another. As a result they throw the baby out with the bath water. Remember, as the saying goes, “If you do not stand for something, then you will fall for anything.

  • Great players and great team coaches make individuals in my position look good. People often ask why are the Crusaders so successful?  The simple answer is they have a great culture, they recruit people with great character, and they work hard. Was the strength and conditioning program partly responsible? Who knows? It helps when you have the current two best players in the world in the key positions of seven and ten on your team at the same time, combined with the coaching genius of Robbie Deans. They are the rock stars; people like me are the roadies.
  • How do you get your team faster? Simple: recruit faster players.
  • I do not believe in over training, but under recovery will get you every time.
  • I no longer believe in periodization, in a classic sense. I believe, as Louie has often said, “Whatever you do not train, you lose.” For me, the concurrent training of the key bio-motor qualities is a challenge while ensuring that players recover.
  • Rugby is a collision sport. Sometimes the rules of training go out the window. Did the Roman gladiators ensure that the pelvis was in the correct position before they engaged in a life and death struggle? Players often take over five days to recover from a match. I have players who have done no leg work for an entire season and who still deliver every week of the season. Conversely, I have had players who work hard every week in the power rack and these athletes also deliver week in and week out. There is not a single generic program and individualization within the confines of a team sport is the Holy Grail of strength and conditioning. I could list for you a starting fifteen of players who are outstanding in the gym, but they would not be the same fifteen chosen by the coaches to go to battle on Saturday.
  • My basic philosophy is to first get players strong and powerful, metabolically capable, and as quick as they can be. Then give them to the head coach so that he can show them what he wants them to do. As Rusty Jones once said, “I get them bigger, stronger and faster, and the head coach teaches them how to play.” Does anything that I do transfer to the field? To tell you the truth, I do not know for sure. Confidence transfers. Physical and mental toughness transfers. So, hopefully, a part of what I do helps a player to give his best on the field of battle.
  • Do I make a difference? I hope so, but I really do not know. It is all about relationships: building them, developing them and the players knowing that you genuinely care about their well being as people first, and athletes second. I trained as a physical education teacher initially since there were no other options at that time. Teaching taught me two invaluable traits in my current role: communication skills and organizational skills. I may have been chasing my tail on the science ever since, but knowing your players has always been number one in my book.
  • If I could start all over again, I would change just one thing. I would do a pure science degree first, to get a complete grounding in a scientific discipline. Then I would do a master’s or doctorate in biomechanics, and a diploma in teaching along the way as well.

For those entering the profession, thank you for carrying the torch. It is a wonderfully rewarding career. For those of you who have been in it for a while, keep doing what you do best. To you all: keep it simple, never lose your sense of humor and always have fun. The greatest teacher of all is experience. Trying different methods will give you a more complete understanding as to how these methods affect the body. Personally, I like to test all techniques on my assistants and myself before exposing any of my athletes to something new. To return to the minimalist training concept we started this article with, here is an interesting idea I have borrowed from the strongmen training. This involves the use of a minimal number of exercises per training session (often, just one exercise) but with increasing the number of daily and weekly sessions to accommodate the complete development. Similar to the Bulgarian weightlifting model, I like to concentrate and perfect form on the major compound movements, particularly the Olympic lifts. One set and rep protocol I have been using lately is 3x3, 4x2, 5x1, often changing the exercise. This may mean changing from military presses to push presses to split jerks over the course of the workout.

Today I tried just the one exercise approach, using split-style snatches from various positions, high blocks, blocks at knee level and finally from the floor and worked over the following protocol: 3x3, 6x2, 12x1. I know this is a lot of sets for one exercise. Because of that, I would not use it all the time, but it did achieve the result I wanted. I wanted to perfect form on this movement with incrementally heavier weights, so I used a greater number of sets as the reps decreased. The triples were above 70%, the doubles above 80%, and the singles were above 90%. There is an excellent article by Jim Schmitz in the June 2008 edition of Milo on the use of the split lifts. He recommends using sets of four reps, but performing a slightly different movement for each rep. Here is an example to familiarize you. I will probably do six sets of this fun complex:

Rep 1: Power Snatch
Rep 2: Split Snatch with left leg forward
Rep 3: Split Snatch with right leg forward
Rep 4: Full Squat Snatch

Final Quotes

SupeRugby winning strength and conditioning coach Damian Marsh, put the complete picture into sharp focus when he said, “It’s all about the buy-in you get, from the players you have, in the environment that you help to create.” Todd Blackadder, former All Black captain and now coach once said, “If it is not excellence, then it is mediocrity” and, “What we accept, we are actually condoning” so be ever vigilant in assisting players to be the best they can be.

I hope that this article will cause some interesting comment and debate.