Is There a Best Strength or Weight Training Program?

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From The Roads We Choose, Chapter 6, Vozmi v Sputniki Silu, Moscow, 1990 (translated by Dr M Yessis, Fitness & Sports Review Intern Oct 1992)

Athletes and bodybuilders are always asking what is the best program to develop strength or muscle mass, or a combination of both? Even magazine articles and books relate to the program that a particular athlete or bodybuilder uses.

In reality, however, there is no one best program. According to Plekhov, it is impossible to have one best set of exercises or exercise program because there is an optimal exercise program for each "season" or specific purpose.

For example, think of your wardrobe - you have a coat, a rain coat, a jacket, a light coat, and a heavy coat. Which is best? The answer, of course, is that there is no universal attire for every kind of weather or for every season of the year.

Thus, it should not be surprising that there is no universal set of exercises that is equally effective for big and small, thick and thin, sanguine and melancholic, young and old, strong and weak. The main point for each athlete who trains independently to remember is that the diversity of systems, schools, and exercise complexes exists not because authors disagree. Rather, the diversity arises because training means need to be developed, and training methods applied, on an accurate and flexible individualized basis.

Also, the need for individualization arises from the individual differences in people, including age, genetics, gender, and so on. Analysis of worldclass athletes shows that their progress and development is quite diverse. For example, there are world champions who have never had a change in weight class. In essence, they significantly increase their strength with virtually no change in muscular mass. Their entire improvement was due to qualitative rather than quantitative changes. Thus, this is one course that training can take.

On the other hand, there are athletes who go through several weight classes as their muscle mass increases. Sometimes, this is one-directional upward movement in the same way that height and weight increase with age; in other cases, athletes have competed successfully in two or more weight classes, gaining and losing weight in the processes. We call them the wandering champions. Two of the best examples are Tommy Kono (USA) and David Rigert (USSR).

Cases are known in which the change in an athlete's bodyweight took on fantastic proportions, as much as 100 kg up or down. We recall the sensational experiment that Bruce Randall did on himself in the mid 1950's, when he shrunk his waist from 158 cm to 82 cm in three years and won the 1959 Mr. Universe title.

Naturally, strength increases markedly during workouts such as this. The widely circulated stories about the physical feebleness of bodybuilders who are supposedly exhausted underneath waves of pumped up, inflated muscles are pablum for the gullible.

For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, at a bodyweight of 112 kg, bench pressed 250 kg and squatted with 260 kg. Franco Columbo, who trained for powerlifting alongside bodybuilding, bench pressed 215 kg, squatted with 250 kg, and deadlifted 330 kg at a bodyweight of 85 kg. These performances are awe inspiring, especially if you keep in mind that they are a by-product rather than a direct goal of training.

There is published material about Yuri Kutenko, who lifted 72 pound kettlebell 1000 times in one hour; and about America's Jack Lalanne, who has performed hundreds of nonstop pull-ups and push-ups. And finally, kettlebell lifting has been growing in popularity in our country for a long time.

All of this can be considered yet another course that training is taking:
strength + endurance. It is impossible to encompass the universe.
Accordingly, it is impossible to illustrate all of the courses that strength development can take.

Strength and its Development

It would be pointless to promote strength development to a person reading this. However, once again the question arises: what road should one choose to become strong? It seems like a simple question. The answer is elementarily simple and even suggests itself: "To be strong, you need to take up weight lifting." But weight lifting proper is only part of the truth.

First, the so-called "age barrier" in weight lifting has been lowered.
Eighteen-year-old athletes, rather than having just begun training, are setting world records. This trend may be effective for those of world-class caliber, but it sharply curtails the mass-scale base of the sport. Most experts feel that strength training should start at the age of 13-14.

Thus, age and norms are the first limitation. Now for the second. Let's say that the desire to become strong started at an early age, but that genetics has ordained your constitution to be unsuitable for weight lifting.
Coaches embarrassingly turn their eyes away and recommend you try out for volleyball, but your friends and contemporaries naively and unwisely push you to try out for weightlifting.

Now for a third case. You are 15 years old and you have a powerful physique, reminiscent of a mighty oak, not a spindly twig. Does this mean you should go in for weight lifting? Yes, of course , if you live in a city. But what if you live in a remote settlement?

What if your heart is really into another sport, but you have a legitimate desire to become stronger by using present and available athletic exercises?
What if injury or disease temporarily or permanently makes weight lifting pursuits difficult or impossible? What if? ... if ... ?

Let us try to look at this problem from another angle. The highest manifestations of strength in competitive weight lifting are tied to the traditional Olympic lifts, the snatch and jerk. But the snatch and jerk are striking and effective exercises that have a critical training lack, they fail to develop all muscles proportionally.

And, in the atmosphere of big-time sports, it is considered to be a waste of time to spend time and energy on other exercises. The result: a weightlifter possesses less than harmonious muscle development. Weight lifting works mostly the extensors of the back, hip, thigh, shin and foot. Consequently, we see an unsymmetrical body build: relatively thin arms, underdeveloped chest muscles, with bulky leg and back muscles.

Furthermore, the snatch and jerk are technically complex lifts. When we watch outstanding weightlifters perform, we admire their blend of Herculean strength and razor-sharp technique. But this technique does not apply to daily life; moreover, it requires a lot of time and energy. It is an absolute necessity for weightlifters to master technique; for people who simply want to become strong, it is superfluous.

We have already talked about an interesting development that has come out of weightlifting; freely translated, it is "powerlifting." The maximum displays of strength in this discipline occur in the powerlifting triathlon: the bench press, squat, and deadlift.

The utter simplicity of these movements is clearly their virtue if the goal is to develop maximal strength. The three powerlifts are representative; that is, they develop the main muscle masses of the body. An athlete can build up a significant training load without excessively depleting his nervous system, which is of no small importance.

Example: the world record in the jerk is more than 260 kg. A powerful athlete produces a colossal lift such as this with a flurry of strength, after which he throws the barbell down and heads for the winner's stand, accompanied by the applause of the fans. Another sport that involves lifting weights takes on an entirely different appearance. The heavyweight-class winner of the first USSR championship in Kettlebell lifting jerked two 72pound kettlebells 100 times in a row! Which athlete is stronger?

"The weightlifter," we answer. "He lifted more weight, therefore he is stronger. The kettlebell lifter could lift his 144 pounds from morning till night. He still would not be able to duplicate the one lift performed by the weightlifter!"

This assertion is absolutely true. However, it is no more true than the opposite, that is, the weightlifter would not be able to repeat the kettlebell lifter's exercise. This simple discussion concerns different sports, and the question, "Which athlete is stronger?" does not make sense in this context. Powerlifts measure absolute strength; high-repetition kettlebell lifting measures strength endurance.

Strength is needed in swimming, skiing, shooting, tennis, jumping, acrobatics, rowing and cycling. Each of these sports requires strength, not in an isolated, absolute sense, but specialized strength that is specific to the sport. Strength has specific characteristics in every type of sport. This is one of the reasons why the generalists (as opposed to specialists) that used to exist have become all but extinct in big-time sports.

At the dawn of the sports movement, athletes were much more given to what we call "multiple profiles" than they are today. For example, weightlifters wrestled; they lifted barbells, kettlebells, rounded solid dumbbells and metal stones; they participated in tug of war; and they were not averse to boxing or exhibiting some unique strength act that involved horses, horseshoes, chains, rails, beams, or other suitable items.

Indeed, weightlifters in general were not afraid to invade either closely related or quite unrelated types of sports. Weighing 120 kilograms did not stop the eminent wrestler Ivan Zaikin from taking part in cycling races. He was also a pioneer of Soviet aviation.

The winner of the weightlifting competition in the first modem Olympic Games (Athens, 1896), L. Elliot, won the one-arm kettlebell lifting with 71 kg, took fourth place in wrestling and fifth place in gymnastics (rope-climbing for speed). V. Jensen, who took first place in the two-arm barbell press
(111.5 kg), also took second place in revolver shooting, third place in military rifle shooting, and fourth place in gymnastics. Medalist S. Versis took third place in the barbell press, third in the discus throw, and sixth in the shot put.

The term ‘track and field athlete’, at that time, meant a runner (at any distance), a jumper (long jump, high jump, and sometimes in the long jump and high jump together, that is, there were competitions in which the total of the two jumps was counted). In addition, track and field athletes threw everything they could get their hands on, from sledgehammers, weights on chains, and logs to grenades, including all of the modern implements. Other sports were also popular with these athletes.

But there was an early trend toward more and more specialization in sports.
All-round athletes G Lurich and George Hackenschmidt, who set many records in the Iron Game and who sparkled on the wrestling mat, competed as wrestlers only during the second half of their athletic careers, even though they did not stop training with weights.

The unbeatable Ivan Poddubny never really demonstrated his capabilities in weightlifting. Supposedly, the stern Ukrainian Hercules preferred to keep his ability secret. However, his ability was great, as was evidenced by the only case in which he violated his rules. Ivan, at a not so young an age, put on an exhibition of his musculature and at the same time performed a 130 kg bicep curl from the floor.

At the dawn of the sports movement, athletes were much more given to what we call "multiple profiles" than they are today.

The eminent weightlifter, Stanislav Eliseev, a many-time world record holder and one of the first people in the Soviet Union to set records in the one-movement, nonstop clean, and also Peter Krylov, who is remembered as the "king of weights", competed on the wrestling mat, but did not amass many wrestling laurels.

At the same time, Krylov soundly defeated the well-known wrestler Stanislav Zbyshko Ziganevich in an athletic duel with dumbbells and barbells, even though he did not yield to him in height and weight, and even though he was incomparably weaker as a wrestler.

Time passed, and the so-called "combination of professions", which had earlier been the order of the day, became an oddity. Today it would be hard to imagine a weightlifter or wrestler, no matter how powerful, who could come close to the performances of the multi-combatants.

In the 1950's and 1960's, certain throwers, as a result of many years of weight training, turned in some fairly high performances in Olympic weightlifting (for example, discus thrower V. Lyakhov reached the Master of Sport level in the heavyweight class); however, they failed to show up at any of the notable weight lifting competitions.

Yuri Vlasov and Leonid Zhabotinsky, champions of the Olympiads of Rome, Tokyo, and Mexico, felt nostalgically about the track-and- field aspect of their background: both began as throwers and both were predicted to have brilliant careers, but for both of them this beginning remains a mere episode in their long and renowned athletic careers. Weightlifting, shot putting, and discus throwing have become "jealous"; the levels of performance have become so high that cross-over champions are a relic of the past.

Gary Gubner, a gifted American athlete, was perhaps the last person (in the early 1960's) who tried, at a world-class level, to wage a battle on two fronts, track and field and weightlifting. His attempt, though valiant, was not crowned with success. "Pure" throwers pushed Gubner out of first place, and Soviet super heavyweights Vlasov and Zhabotinsky solidly locked up the first two places in weightlifting, so much so that Gubner was scarcely noticed.

R. Bruch, a bearded, eccentric shotputter and discus thrower from Sweden who set world discus-throwing records, once appeared in his country's team handball championship, inspiring fear in goalies with his common-like shots clear the field and scaring field players with the powerful swiftness of his huge 125 kilogram body, which was coated with an armor of muscles.

So what happened? Nothing, really. Bruch did not transform himself into a handball player. The era of "dualist" has long past. Today, the level of sports competition requires that athletes develop specialized physical qualities.

Journalists, in describing the athletic career of the eminent weightlifter Vasily Alexeev, recall his youthful fascination with volleyball. We believe it when they write about Alexeev's swift jumps, his unreturnably powerful spikes, his impenetrable blocks. However, it is indeed hard to imagine two-time Olympic Champion Alexeev, at the full blossom of his sports talent, playing on a big-league volleyball team.

Sport is a model of life. As with life itself, sport is a realm of lost opportunities. Every gain is accompanied by losses. By definition, the roads we choose in one direction are also the roads that lead away from another direction. Choose your path ... and then once you have chosen your path, go for it!

[For anyone who may be interested in reading many more Russian articles like this one, contact Dr Yessis for back issues of the highly informative Soviet Sports Review: dryessis@dryessis.com ]