How You Feel Is A Lie. Remembered as a loving husband and a great father Bob Peoples was an exceptionally busy man. To supplement income on his beef farm he would work shifts in the local mill. A pillar in the local community he was also a popular mayor for many years. Bob however was bitten by the iron bug. After manually hewing a basement out of the rock below his house and constructing the forerunner of the power rack and trap bar, Bob set about mastering the deadlift. His program for breaking the then world record was simple enough. Every day he would work up to a maximum single or triple deadlift after starting with work on the Olympic lifts. Whenever he would go stale he would simply substitute squats for the deadlift. His finest hour occurred in 1949 in his home town of Johnson City. Peoples, while weighing 181 (81.5kg), deadlifted 725¾ (327kg). This was four times his bodyweight and certainly one of the greatest deadlifts of all time, especially considering Bob was a completely drug-free champion. That record stood for 25 years. If we can learn anything from Bob as we come to think about frequency it is that we can probably do more work than we think. Frequency to me describes 2 things: 1. The number of days you train each week. 2. How many times per week you train a particular lift. Number 1 is really about how much time you have available. After all, putting powerlifting before family and gainful employment could well be a recipe for loneliness and poverty. You will have to work with what you have got. Logically speaking the fewer days you have available to train the more you will have to do on those days to gain the same results. This is always going to be difficult. One problem with this in terms of adaptation is that the fewer times you train the less opportunity you are giving your body to improve work capacity. To explain this bluntly with an illustration; it would be very easy to get fat and unfit as an office worker powerlifting low reps twice a week. At the other end of the spectrum if you are training most days each week (like Bob), alternating some higher rep stuff in there (admittedly not like Bob), then you will have no trouble keeping in shape and your workouts won’t be such a shock to the system. It’s worth noting that the more frequent your training sessions are the easier it is to over-reach your recovery ability. Unfortunately my word count is up so next time we will look at number 2. That is an option everyone can alter in their training to help a troublesome lift. Roy
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:09:38 +0000
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