As some of you might know, I presently occupy space at Oliphant's Academy of Physical Culture, Toronto's oldest continually running gym. The gym's original founder, William Oliphant, was a very well respected mind in the weightlifting community for nearly half a century, rubbing shoulders with Joe Weider and York Barbell's Bob Hoffman.
Lately, I've gotten so wrapped up in percentages of 1RM, Prilepin's table and periodization that I feel I've neglected to mention an important part of designing a strength and conditioning program: being an asshole.
Allow me to elaborate.
Developing a program shouldn't revolve around destroying the athlete with every workout. Not that workouts should ever be easy, but there are diminishing returns for workouts of excessive volume. It's disingenuous to simply prescribe workloads that outstrip the athletes capability. Plus, once you've ground their recovery ability into the dirt, what use is an athlete that can't participate in any activity outside their strength and conditioning program?
However, every now and again, there's room to be an absolute jerk.
Today, I came across this:
That's Ido Portal, more monkey than man, teaching a troop of like-minded monkey men (and women). I was inspired. Which means that this Friday's workout is going to involve some quadrupedal movement. Forwards, backwards and sideways. Sprinting. This isn't the kind of thing that will hurt anyone, but if you've ever sprinted on all fours, you know it pretty much sucks.
Will the average participant ever need to move sideways, on all fours, at top speed? Probably not. Will this carry over to any other form of athleticism? Maybe. Kinda. I guess.
The point is, I don't care. It's going to be hard. It's going to be ridiculous and lots of participants are going to be frustrated and exhausted. The value of the exercise is precisely that.
It's easy to get comfortable doing things you're competent at. We want to get competent at things, which is why we spend the majority of our time doing things that matter, like squatting and deadlifting. However, not all of life is as predictable as a set of 45lb plates and an Olympic bar. Learning new movements, and dealing with sucking at them, is just part of life.
I've had a chance to read over 'FIT', the brainchild of Lon Kilgore, Michael Hartman, and Justin Lascek of 70's Big. Fit is a manual that attempts to cover all aspects of the fitness world, encompassing strength, conditioning, endurance and mobility. It's full of templates and explanations, and tries to tie it all in according to the individual athlete's needs.
Since it's my primary area of interest, I was happy to find a relatively coherent guide to combining strength and conditioning. Special care was indeed taken to building programs that make sense for individual athletes. Instead of lumping everyone into a single category, a la CrossFit, FIT provides programs for complete beginners, the strong but unconditioned, the conditioned but weak, the young, the old and a multitude of various combinations of physical attributes. For a guy like me, in his 30s and concerned that his conditioning is passable but his strength is stalling, it has some decent advice (have a strength program, for example, instead of an ad-hoc strength workout whenever CrossFit HQ calls for it, and maybe limit yourself to one lift per workout). There's multiple shout-outs to the Wendler 5-3-1 system that I've been using for the last six months, which of course makes me feel special and loved. Also included are good write-ups and pictorials on the major lifts, conditioning and assistance exercises, plus some added mobility work.
The Cons:
Some of the methods in the book seem a bit harder to connect, as sometimes the terminology feels inconsistent. When combining different volumes of lifting with conditioning, I feel the book takes a little more work than it should. With half a brain, you can figure out what the authors are asking you to do, but for those that need everything spelled out for them, having to cross-reference several charts to build a program might be daunting. Fortunately for those people, there are several preset programs included. What's also missing is a method of planning metabolic conditioning circuits (met-cons) that meet the recommended time requirements. How do you go about programming a five minute met-con workout? There are a few templates, but addressing issues of loading and rep schemes and how they will effect the time component is noticeably absent (more on this below).
What Now:
If reading a book hasn't changed the way you do things, reading it was probably a waste of time (it happens). So here's what has changed for me:
1. Adding max rep components for basic exercises. The 10 reps across 3 sets metric made me realize my programming was falling short for pull-ups and dips and other assorted exercises.
2. I'm still trying to find a way to program the perfect met-con. As I mentioned above, FIT calls for met-cons to be either in the 5 minute or the 10 minute range. This isn't the first time I've heard of this limitation, as both the irreverent Outlaw CrossFit and CrossFit Football both follow a similar guideline. I'm pretty good at
'guesstimating' what should fall into that range, but the scientist in me wants a concrete formula I can test against reality. Digging into 600+ posted workouts and results to gather evidence for this task gets annoying pretty fast, so I can forgive the 'FIT' crew for not having a shake-and-bake solution ready for us. In the words of Uncle Drywall: 'If you think reading the comments section makes you dumber, try mining it for data. Fuck. '
On a final note, Lascek himself just did a post on Prilepin's Chart, and I'm just going to go right ahead and tell myself I was partially responsible for that. Let me have my moment of misplaced self-importance, people. Seriously though, Lascek has been nothing but helpful with his Q&A sessions, so not only is FIT a fantastic resource, it's authors aren't sitting on their laurels; they're an active resource for anyone interested in strength and conditioning.
