When You're this Big, it's the 70's.

My unhealthy fascination with the Prilepin table led me to fire off a question to Justin Lascek of 70s Big. Check out the resulting Q&A here. At the risk of sounding more Canadian: thanks Justin!

In Communist Russia, Prilepin Tables You!

OK, so 'table' isn't a verb that makes any sense in this context and while Prilepin may be from communist Russia, he doesn't even have a wikipedia entry to his name. Why would I waste your time butchering the English language and talking about obscure communists? The reason starts with Alexander Sergeyevitch Prilepin being a furious number cruncher. This alone doesn't find a way to my heart, as I view statistics with the same less-than-quiet loathing I reserve for dubstep and Australian wildlife. What validates Prilepin's number crunching is that he presided over the junior and senior men's weightlifting teams in the USSR between 1975 and 1985, when those teams were remarkably dominant.

While he lived, none dared mock Vasily Alexseyev's choice of singlet.

If you want someone to blame for keeping the memory of the USSR's dominance in weightlifting alive, it might just be Louie Simmons, whom I mentioned in Polar Bears, who has been successfully using Prilepin's numbers to produce his own batch of hormonally-manipulated North American supermen. Theories, studies, and formulas regarding training are as easy to produce as they are to market. If they weren't, Men's Fitness wouldn't have a monthly publication cycle. Achievements like those of Westside Barbell and the USSR's weightlifting team are harder to come by. So when they share a methodology, chances are they might be on to something. 

Dave Tate. Like the ubiquity of the AK-47, a terrifying example of
what happens when Russia stockpiles something horrible and then loses control of it.

What Prilepin and Louie discovered was that when it came to getting stronger, speed was king. Between two very different barbell sports, while the weight was important, it was the speed of bar in training that would dictate the difference between a made or a missed big lift. In Olympic lifts, speed makes the lifts possible: without the momentum of a fast initial pull, the bar will travel no further than the athlete's hips. In powerlifting, while the big single reps that define competition may seem slow, the Conjugate Training method employed at Westside has a definite need for speed. This method splits it's training days between max effort and dynamic effort days. On a max effort day, weights approach their one rep max and up. On a dynamic effort day, the poundage is dropped to 50-60% percent of their maximum lift, and the focus is put on moving the bar as fast as humanly possible. The sets and repetitions on either day at Westside are based on those that Prilepin outlined in the following table:

Prilepin noted that outside of the number of repetitions per set in the table, training with a particular weight would either produce substandard results by either not providing enough volume (not enough reps to produce gains) or by impacting the speed of the lifts (at too many reps, the speed of the lift would suffer).

Following the scheme produced world records in the USSR and at Westside.

So what, you ask, does that have to do with me? I'm assuming at this point that you're not an elite level powerlifter intent on cycling steroids and whey powder until you can throw around small cars, and that you don't have a closet full of chalk-infused singlets. Is Prilepin's table applicable outside the domain of people who have more neck-meat than some bears? Well, the way I actually ran into the Prilepin table is through following Justin Lascek, one of the founders of the incredible 70s Big, and his contemporary, Rudy Nielsen of Outlaw CrossFit. Justin is a  Bachelor of Science, and while I can't find any info on Rudy's schooling, his methodical approach to discovering good training methodologies qualifies him as a scientist in my mind.

Pictured: Scientists

What caught my attention in particular was Rudy's definition of the Limited Conjugate Method he outlines in The Outlaw Way. This is not just a coach from one of the thousands of CrossFit franchises that put their own spin on Glassman's anarchic hopper model of fitness, this is a coach that has consistently put his athletes into the CrossFit games by not doing CrossFit. In fact, I'm now absolutely jealous that Rudy has a gym population large and trusting enough for him to experiment on, especially since he does exactly that. Case in point, he's compared populations of athletes who are doing something similar to the Wendler 5-3-1 program I'm using, to athletes doing his Limited Conjugate training. The results, by the way, went wholly towards Conjugate Method. I'd be jumping off my Wendler 5-3-1 program based on that, but you don't gain experience in a program by refusing to commit to it; for better or worse, it's Wendler for at least a few months more. While I do that, I'm glued to Rudy's blog, watching as his athletes climb into the top 40 spots in this year's CrossFit Open.

So we've now seen the Prilepin table show up across three different sports, each dedicated to different domains of fitness (or if you believe CrossFit's line, all of them). This rings some seriously loud alarm bells in my mind, and it should be doing the same for yours.