A rising star in the world of strength training is Greg Nuckols, chief content manager for Juggernaut Training Systems, and also holder of drug-free powerlifting world records in the 220lb and 242lb weight classes. Greg’s strength writing and research is some of the most insightful and well informed material on the internet today, and it is my hope to bring some of his insight on strength training to Just Fly Sports. In this interview, Greg answers some tough questions on strength training that have applications, not only to powerlifters, but to any athlete seeking to become stronger, faster, or more powerful.
You have written some great articles on daily undulating periodization vs. linear periodization, and some of the training implications. How do you use this knowledge in deciding which route to go with your own clientele?
Greg Nuckols: Thanks Joel. I waited a couple days to respond because I knew I had an article coming out that would touch on this question (One Type Periodization: Part 1). It’s not so much a question of linear versus undulating, but more a question of how much of each element I include in the program. And, in part 2 of that article, it delves more into what situations which element should be more or less emphasized (One Type Periodization: Part 2).
But the quick and dirty answer is that, especially for strength athletes (my primary population), more undulation tends to be more appropriate the farther out from a meet you are to expose your body to a broader array of stimuli, and build a base of general adaptations (specifically hypertrophy). As a meet draws closer, more linear elements predominate and undulation decreases to increase training specificity so you’re peaked (both structural and neural factors) for your best performance on the platform.
Just Fly Sports: Some coaches (especially track coaches, as far as my own knowledge and background has made me aware of) will discourage utilizing training loads that are “too undulating” as they will not create a stable training effect. What are your thoughts on the interplay between the stability of the training effect vs. the variability needed to keep training fresh and burn-out free?
Stability of a training effect is something that matters more with a longer competitive season. Again, since I work primarily with strength athletes, performance on one specific day is all that matters, and you don’t need to be at peak performance again until the next time you compete. Obviously this isn’t the case for sports with a longer competitive season. In general, structural adaptations are more stable than neural ones. It takes a high training volume to build muscle, but a much lower training volume to maintain it. For neural adaptation, specific practice is key. However, research has shown that it doesn’t take a huge “dose” of high intensity, highly specific training to maintain strength (which is a mixture of structural and neural factors) through a competitive season either.
In general, a huge amount of undulation week-to-week probably isn’t a good idea for maintaining a training effect in-season, but it is within the training week itself, since the name of the game is fatigue management. You want to be fresh enough for the strength training you ARE doing, you want to be fresh enough for skill work to be productive, and you want to be fresh enough to perform at a high level on game day. It’ll be much harder to manage fatigue so you can accomplish those things unless you have periods in the week of more or less concentrated stressors (a pretty fair amount of undulation).
Just Fly Sports: What are your thoughts on overtraining and de-loading within the scope of powerlifting?
Overtraining is unlikely. Not that it’s impossible, but every system for self-preservation you have kicks in and tells you to stop before you truly become TRULY overtrained. It takes a special kind of person (or one with some psychological issues – I don’t mean this in a condescending way at all. If you have a history of true overtraining, it’s not unlikely that you need professional help from a trained psychologist) to simply be able to push to the point of true overtraining.
Overreaching is far more likely. It could occur because of an increase in training load, or a decrease in the steps you take to recover from your training load (poor nutrition, not enough sleep, too much stress, etc.). The most common signs of overreaching are some irritability, feeling a little more fatigued all the time, and a decrease in performance in the gym. With overreaching, taking a little time off or decreasing training volume for a bit, with more focus on nutrition, sleep, and stress should sort things out in a couple weeks. Actually, you should be stronger after doing so, assuming the overreaching was primarily a result of increased training stress – that’s the cornerstone of peaking for a competition. You have to push through those things – the irritability, generalized fatigue, drop in performance – for several more weeks (or months) to reach a point of overtraining. In my experience, the larger problem is that people aren’t willing to overreach ENOUGH to have the subsequent spike in performance that characterizes a program for peaking for a competition.
Deloads are great, and, I think, very important for long-term progress. If you boil training down to its most basic level, it’s about exposing the body to more stress than its accustomed to so that it will adapt. As the level of stress it’s accustomed to increases, you have to do more to elicit a response, because its sensitivity to any absolute level of stress is decreased. Deloading, or scheduled periods of reduced volume and/or intensity, can help re-sensitize the body to the stimulus placed on it again. There are plenty of people who never take deloads, but you’ll generally find at least decreases in training stress for several weeks after a big competition.
Just to illustrate this concept with numbers, let’s say your performance is 100% right now, and your responsiveness to stress is 20% (totally arbitrary numbers). Every time you expose your body to 5 units of stress, it yields a 1% adaptation. Then let’s say you deload for a week, or spend a month training with significantly lowered training stress, but enough to maintain performance (though not improve it). Your responsiveness to stress may increase to 50%, so that if you expose your body to 2 units of stress, it’ll still elicit that 1% adaptation, or if you expose it to the same 5 units of stress, it will yield a 2.5% adaptation. In this way, you can keep yourself from eventually having to rely on insane training loads to cause adaptation.
Just Fly Sports: A school of thought in powerlifting (such as promoted in “Easy Strength”) is to always leave “reps in the tank” when training, and definitely not to go to total muscular failure. Do you think athletes interested in power or strength would have anything to gain from lifting to failure (or very close to it?).
Adaptation to training is based largely on the amount of training volume you’re able to handle, and how you manage the fatigue that comes with that volume. Fatigue is the key point here, because equivalent levels of volume could result in different levels of fatigue. For example, let’s say you hit a new 8RM with 80% of your max squat, REALLY straining for the last two reps. You’ll be much more fatigued, and need longer to recover from that session than if you did 4 sets of 2 with the same weight, even though volume is identical.
In my experience, fatigue from training to failure is relative to the movement you do it on. i.e. if you do a set of squats or deadlifts to true failure, it’ll cause a lot more fatigue relative to equivalent volume with a lower rate of perceived exertion (RPE) than bicep curls or delt raises. I don’t think there’s any problem with going to failure on accessory exercises that are inherently less psychologically fatiguing, but avoiding failure on your main compound lifts is probably a good idea, because it’ll let you handle higher training volumes with less total fatigue accumulation.
I also think avoiding failure on your main lifts is wise, simply because it sets up the expectation of success. If you always make all your reps in training with room to spare, you generally have less fear of failure when you try a new max, because you’ve come to expect success.
Just Fly Sports: I find it fascinating, the range of %max that various powerlifters primarily train with. What are some factors that one can use to help determine which end of the speed-force spectrum will provide them with the greatest benefit?
People posit that it may be based on fiber type distribution, but I’m not 100% sold on that idea. I’ve heard stories of a particular nation’s soccer team finding a higher injury rate in players that had a higher proportion of fast twitch fibers when they tried to handle the same training volume as players with more slow twitch fibers, but that performance and injury rates both improved when their training volume was curtailed a bit.
This matches my experience. People who are naturally explosive seem to be able to beat themselves up and accumulate more fatigue (both psychological and physical) with the same training volume someone else may thrive on. I’ve worked with people who have quite a range of natural ability for powerlifting, and in general the more explosive, more gifted ones seem to need less volume than the rest. They may need more volume a year from now than they need today, but it still tends to be lower than equally experienced lifters who aren’t as explosive. Personally, my training volume is quite a bit lower than most of the experience athletes I’ve worked with (though still higher than most lifters who are less experienced), even when I’m in a high volume phase, and when I’ve tried to push my volume higher, I found myself needing to purposefully curtail my effort day to day to avoid injuries.
So take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve found that more explosive lifters tend to do best with more moderate intensities and somewhat lower volumes because of how much stress they’re capable of placing on themselves with really heavy loads and really high volume, and less explosive lifters tend to do a little better with lower intensities to allow for higher volumes for the majority of their training, but they also need and can tolerate more very high intensity work (90% 1rm+) when peaking for meets.
Just Fly Sports: What are your thoughts on bar velocity and tempos for strength athletes? For team sport athletes? Slow eccentrics and pause reps?
For most people, most of the time, the concentric should be as fast as safely possible. There are circumstances (rehab, learning a new movement, etc) where a purposefully slower concentric may be beneficial, but concentrics at maximal speed increase fiber recruitment and strength gains (Speed Kills: 2x the Intended Bar Speed Yields 2x the Bench Press Gains).
Slow eccentrics can have their place, specifically for hypertrophy purposes. They cause more muscle damage, which has been shown to increase satellite cell activity. However, it’s not something you want to do all the time for an extended period of time because it usually comes at the expense of total training volume.
I’m a huge fan of paused reps. Obviously for the bench press, they’re required for competition. For the squat, I think the main benefit is that it makes you really, really comfortable being in the hole with heavy weights (which many people are apprehensive about). For the deadlift, pausing just off the floor and again at the knee can help make you more aware of the positioning for the lift. I also think they’re useful when you want to train hard, while intentionally limiting how much weight you can use if your joints are feeling banged up.
Just Fly Sports: What are your thoughts on supramaximal eccentrics for powerlifters? Supramaximal holds? For other athletic populations?
I’m not sure what purpose they’d have for other athletic populations. For powerlifters, overload work like that can be helpful for someone who’s simply afraid of the weight, but it can be overused. There’s a vein of broscience that states that they’re also useful for “strengthening the joints” (I assume that means tendons and ligaments, primarily). To the best of my knowledge that hasn’t been directly investigated, but it could be that exposing the muscles to more tension than they’d otherwise experience may help desensitize the golgi tendon organ and other inhibitory pathways. That’s still an open question, however.
In my experience, the bench press benefits the most from it (both in terms of magnitude, and how often you can use overload techniques), the deadlift the next most (plenty of people use very heavy rack pulls fairly frequently), and the squat the least. They can be useful to use from time to time, especially if you get the wide-eyed “oh shit” feeling when you unrack a weight, but the bulk of your program should be built around lighter, full-ROM still, obviously.
About Greg Nuckols:
Greg Nuckols is the Chief Content Manager at Juggernaut Training Systems. He’s held several all-time drug-free world records in powerlifting in the 220 and 242 weight classes, with best lifts of a 755 squat, 475 bench press, and 725 deadlift. When he’s not aiding Chad Wesley Smith in the pursuit of conquering the online strength world, he’s usually writing about things related to strength and nerdery on his blog, Strength & Science.
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