Today’s episode features Max Aita, head coach of Team Juggernaut weightlifting.
Max has been involved in the sports of Weightlifting and Powerlifting as a coach and athlete for the better part of 2 decades. Having trained under legendary coaches Ivan Abadjiev and Steve Gough for weightlifting and alongside the likes of Mark Bell for powerlifting, Max’s experience and knowledge is extensive.
Max is a masterful coach who has studied Soviet training systems extensively, and has coached National Record holders in Weightlifting (such as Alyssa Ritchey who recently set the US record in the 49kg category in Olympic weightlifting) as well as All Time world record holders in Powerlifting.
One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed is chatting training with coaches of various disciplines, in general physical preparation, track and field, baseball, swimming, and in this case, Olympic weightlifting. A quote I like is “not being able to read the label while you are inside the bottle”, and by that I feel that by not talking with coaches processes outside our own particular field, we lose insights our own field may not have considered due to contextual restrictions and habituation. By talking to expert coaches of all individual sport disciplines, we can better understand the global training process and Max is an incredible coach we can all learn from, regardless of our corner of the field.
Although many coaches would look at a chat regarding Olympic lifting in terms of potential transfer to non-strength sport athletics (we do talk about this on the first 1/3 of the show), this episode is really about Max’s training process for Olympic weightlifters, his periodization, and how he approaches special and maximal strength. For those familiar with this podcast, and/or, Soviet training methods, the Bondarchuk influence on Max’s system is significant, and concepts from Max’s training organization can be carried over to any sport process.
On today’s episode, Max talks about Olympic lifting in context of training non-strength sport athletes, the use of the Olympic lifts (and any other non-primary sport movement) as a tool, what Max has learned from the Bulgarians and beyond, as well as the nuts and bolts of his own training design and sequencing.
This podcast was recorded in person at Max’s Gym in Emeryville, California.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points
- Max’s description of the Bulgarian system
- The hardest training time period Max has gone through
- How Max would approach utilizing (or not utilizing) the Olympic lifts in a non-strength sport environment
- Exercise sequencing and selection for Olympic lifting and subsequent principles for training any athletes
- What Max has learned from training with the Bulgarians and what his training looks like currently
- What Max’s periodization for his Olympic lifting program looks like
- Max’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the Bulgarian system into his own training process
- The importance of rest and recovery in Max’s system
- Max’s thoughts on the squat-weight bias in the Western training world relative to other sport skills
“Coaches biggest problems is that they construct a framework around their thinking, and then try to fit situations into their framework”
“You (some elite athletes particularly) can get away with an enormous amount of unproductive work”
“(In the aftermath of Bulgarian style weight training) Now my perspective is how can I do less, how can I maximize training to be the most effective it can possibly be”
“Some people are trying to fix things all the time, but they are not even in the right (athletic) position”
“If you just try to pull the bar as high as you can or go as heavy as possible, you might get benefits from that in the short term that seem productive, but they are not because you are not developing a motor pattern or a skill-set that is the same as the actual competitive movement”
“When you put your feet down firmly (in the Olympic lifting catch) you are going to tighten up the muscles in your foot and legs faster”
“I could front squat more than I could deadlift for a while… ultimate specificity”
“I think the best definition of the Bulgarian system is that is a brute force method”
“My system now is a system that is focused on process rather than results; I’d rather see someone develop better processes, better practices, better technique… focus on the execution of what you are doing”
“Out of 42 exercises we did a week, 18 of them were squats…. The (Bulgarian) system was very heavy on squat your way to a big total… while that obviously is effective on some level, I found I changed a huge percentage of that as time went to be.. you look at the percentage of squatting by the best lifters I have, it’s much lower”
“How do I do less training, and make the training I’m doing now even more effective”
“If we can’t compare what we did this last cycle to the previous one, we’re dead in the water; you have no historical data to base your troubleshooting process on”
“Shouldn’t phase length be tailored exactly to the rate at which a person adapts?”
“Now what I look at with training, I look at landmarks. We are going to continue to do this training stimulus until we see this result… such as getting an extra kilo of bodyweight on you”
“If you have pre-constructed phase lengths, you are not in the place where you are making this an individual program for somebody”
“No longer do any of my athletes, nor do I, train at near-maximum weights”
“Another thing that changed was time off…. taking a month off after big competitions.”
“All of my squat training for lifters is based off of their clean and jerk… it adjusts the training based off of those who are really strong squatters or really weak squatters”
“Weak athletes trying hard to increase their squat are the ones that suffer the most from it”
Show Notes
Clean Catch Drilling at Max’s Gym
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxDkMZrn5Fx/
Transcripts:
Max Aita: I could walk in the gym and probably not do anything and I’d be good at squatting, right? I was always a strong squatter. I could squat as hard as I want. I mean obviously I did, so I would squat harder than I wanted to, and I would get better at it. And I could do almost no accessory, nothing else, and I would still get better at squatting. But the people that are not necessarily built well for squatting or don’t improve a lot when they do a lot of squatting suffer from it because it becomes so fatiguing and it produces so little result for them even if they did increase their squat 5 kilos or 10 kilos. It may not have any transference to weightlifting because it’s required them to become a completely different kind of lifter. They become slower because they’ve done so much squatting, they’ve done so much volume to get so much bigger, whatever it is, all those mal-adaptations are just detracting from being a good weightlifter.
Joel Smith: That was Olympic weightlifting coach Max Aita speaking on drawbacks of chasing numbers in the squat in an Olympic weightlifting training program. You’re listening to the Just Fly Performance Podcast.
Joel Smith: Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster. SimpliFaster is an online athletic performance technology shop distributing items such as the Freelap Timing System, GymAware, kBox, 1080 Sprint, and the SpeedMat. I’ve gotten many of these items from SimpliFaster and can confidently say that they make today’s best training technology available to everybody. The Freelap Timing System has revolutionized both my practices and my athlete assessments, allowing me to look at the 10-meter fly capability of dozens of athletes in a matter of seconds. It is wireless, compact, portable, and incredibly versatile.
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(2:32)
Joel Smith: Welcome to episode 149 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast. I’m your host, Joel Smith. On the show today we have Coach Max Aita. He is the head coach of Team Juggernaut, and is making waves in the weightlifting and powerlifting community as a masterful coach working with athletes who are setting records in not only Olympic lifting but powerlifting as well. Max himself has been involved with the sports of weightlifting and powerlifting as a coach and athlete for the better part of two decades. He’s trained under legendary coaches, very well known for training under Ivan Abadjiev in the Bulgarian system where they would lift eight times a day working the different Olympic lifts and squatting, and Max himself ended up squatting eight times a day at one point and actually putting an immense amount on his own max doing that. That’s a really cool story if you haven’t heard that in the other podcast. Very well known for that.
Joel Smith: So it’s actually really cool to be able to sit down with coaches from all corners of the field. I know a lot of you listening are strength and conditioning coaches for non-strength sports as well as track and field coaches, but I think that listening and talking with coaches of strength sports, which is again, the barbell being a huge tool used in the conditioning and preparation of athletes these days, is extremely valuable.
Joel Smith: Max has an incredible passion for his sport. He is a guy who has absolutely studied the edges of his field. Has pored over Soviet training manuals, has huge Bondarchuk training influences. As I mentioned before, has trained with a number of legendary coaches, and as you’ll find out in our conversation today, is really holistically integrating the best the field really has to offer in his own system, as well as his own experience from other coaches.
Joel Smith: So sometimes I think about is this podcast a physical preparation podcast or strength and conditioning podcast, is it a speed and jumping type podcast? I feel like exploring all corners of our field is really a requirement to paint the deepest picture in what it means to train athletes. To be an athlete. To be a coach. One of the things that I … A quote that I heard recently was “You can’t read the label while you’re inside the bottle,” and I feel like sometimes as coaches, whether we’re a track coach or a soccer coach or a basketball coach or a swim coach or a physical preparations strength coach, whatever it’s called these days, we can learn so much by talking with coaches who are outside of our specific sport, and I know I’ve gotten that experience through talking with track coaches in context of being a strength coach, or talking with swim coaches, and it has made me better at what I do, immensely.
Joel Smith: So I’m super stoked to bring you guys this podcast which was recorded in person with Max at Max’s gym, and it’s all about one, we go into the concepts of Olympic lifting, training for athletes, because for those of you who are strength coaches listening I’m sure that’s an area of importance and people debate it a lot. So Max is going to give his take on that. And before we actually shot this, Max was teaching me the Olympic lifts for the better part of an hour. Probably over an hour, and the time absolutely flew by.
Joel Smith: Just all those specifics that go into the competition lifts are really, really incredible, and sometimes I think we take them for granted if we are implementing those lifts in an athletic performance program. So that’s what the first about third of the show is all about. The last two thirds of the show is just an absolute dynamite bit on how Max has taken a holistic approach into training his Olympic weightlifters, and that’s after being through the Bulgarian system, and everything that he has learned and experienced as an athlete and coach, and what it has filtered down to.
Joel Smith: And the awesome thing is a lot of it you will see, if you’ve listened to this podcast, and the ideals of Bondarchuk, and training transfer, and special strength, you’re going to see how Max is using that in a method that is building national record holder level athletes. And it’s just really cool to hear him talk about his system. I know after this podcast and then even listening and editing it the second time around, you better believe I was watching the way that Olympic lifts, my athletes were doing Olympic lifts a lot more closely and just being a lot more scrutinizing in why I had them in the program as well as why I had anything in the program, to be honest.
Joel Smith: One of the beautiful things is Olympic weightlifting is a strength sport, but the way that Max even talks about something like a squat in context of building his athletes makes us all think. Max is also, he’s going to talk a lot as well about his I don’t want to say phase potentiation, but his periodization plan, and compare it to what like the Bulgarians were doing which wasn’t much of a periodization plan, but how he scales periodization and planning, and Max is going to chat a little bit about rest and recovery, and then finishing with thoughts on squat weight in context of training Olympic lifters. It was an honor and just a whole heck of a lot of fun to do this podcast with Max, so let’s get onto it. Episode 149, with Coach Max Aita.
Joel Smith: In the world of, I feel like weightlifting as opposed to maybe track and field sometimes, like gnarly workouts, like just s*** that is just out there and crazy and unbelievable. I feel like … I mean track there’s some tough stuff in the 400, or maybe distance running, and you hear how many miles the Kenyans are doing, but to me it just really doesn’t get close to like some of the things I’ve heard like the stories from you and then some other people, and even something that makes German volume training seem kind of mild-mannered and tame, you know?
Max Aita: Yeah, you know like all the Bulgarian stuff I did, went training with the Bulgarians, even before that, my first coach, like, those workouts are different. I think like there’s no way I could run a marathon. There’s no way I could. You could hold a gun to my head and I’d prefer to die. Even probably a 5K.
Joel Smith: 5Ks are rough. 5Ks are rough.
Max Aita: The endurance aspect of that stuff is way more … It’s a different kind of pain, I’m sure. But the … I don’t want to say grinding. I hate the word grinding. The day-to-day having to deal with feeling as awful as you could possibly feel and still having to train, and train at this pace and this level that’s just like unbearable where every day, every lift, is maximum intensity, and trying to maintain that keep it going day after day after day, week after week, it’s brutal. And so it’s a different kind of uncomfortable or pain or whatever you want to say, but then I would think any kind of single hardest workout, you know, where German volume training is like, your ten sets of ten is awful that day, but you don’t come back the next day and do it again.
Max Aita: You don’t train your legs six days a week that way, you train them once a week that way, right? So the super, super ridiculous squatting every single workout, five, six times, ten times a day, whatever it is, is just a totally different level or really uncomfortable state of mind or state of being, I guess.
Joel Smith: What’s been the toughest? Like you’ve done almost probably everything imaginable in the world of lifting. What’s been mentally, emotionally, the whole package? What’s been the hardest lifting workout you’ve done?
Max Aita: I think hands down … I’ve thought about this question a lot. I don’t think there’s ever been a “the hardest workout.” I can think of the hardest time period was definitely when I was training with the Bulgarians because it wasn’t so much that like it’s the most training I ever did, it’s that there was no reprieve from what you’re supposed to do. There’s this demand placed on you of like you’re going to train. You go to maximum today every exercise, and that’s just every day. You already know exactly what tomorrow’s going to be. You know exactly how you feel. You know how bad everything is every single day. But there’s nowhere anyone cares about how you feel. There’s no … The coach doesn’t care. There’s nothing. There’s no sympathy. There’s no like “I’m just going to take it easy today.”
Max Aita: It’s like every day is just that’s what you have to do. The same thing again and again at this extreme level where it’s like you know that Saturday is the worst day of the week because it’s the sixth day of training and it’s two sessions, eight exercises. There’s no let up. So that was I think the hardest time was actually being with the Bulgarians and training that way. More so than anything else. Any one particular workout doesn’t stand out as being the hardest. Doing super high volume stuff like the eight sets of eight and stuff is really bad, but you do that maybe once in a week or something like that.
Joel Smith: Yeah, what was the eight … Was that like Gironda like eight sets of eight or … I’m trying to …
Max Aita: No that was just keep adding sets of eight each week. We were just overloading and I started at like five sets, and maybe after like four weeks got up to about eight sets. It was hard, and it’s a really hard workout, but it just takes a long time and you recover a little bit and do another set and then do another set.
Max Aita: Those workouts just were super boring to me. I couldn’t stand doing sets of ten or something like that. It just was so mind numbing to me. I’d rather just do three or four one really, and then do a bunch of those, and just keep coming to the gym and doing them again and again.
Joel Smith: I did German volume like one time in my life. I’m like “I got to give it a go. I have small legs and I need to get big.” And it’s like oh yeah, and it’s a 202 tempo or whatever Poliquin put on it when I was reading the Poliquin article. I think it was on T Nation or whatever.
Max Aita: God, that sounds awful.
Joel Smith: Man, it was … This was in my apartment and I didn’t have a rack, so I cleaned it, and then did the ten sets, and it was like on every minute or two, two minutes rest …
Max Aita: Oh my God.
Joel Smith: I remember I lied on the floor, I was just lying on the floor after that, and for like five minutes, I don’t know, just looking up at the ceiling, and I was like “Oh wow that really sucked. I am so done. That workout, I hated it.” You know, compared to being a jumper and elastic and the complete opposite of everything that I do. And then I’m just sitting here the days after kind of waiting for the recovery to kick in I guess you could say, I’m like finger quoting it. And it was like I don’t think it ever. Like my body was just like “Screw that. I don’t want to do that again.”
Max Aita: You know Adam Nelson, we did a podcast with him. He was telling us about workouts that were just unbelievable. Like insanity where it’d be like ten sets of ten on back squat, front squat, leg press, leg extension, in one day.
Joel Smith: Oh geeze.
Max Aita: And it was just like … The fact that the guy was explosive at all afterward is a testament to his insane genetics. Had he trained differently maybe he’d been even more powerful, but it was just like … There’s definitely people out there that have done these nutty, nutty workouts, but then none of that I think probably compares to having to run interval 400s or 800s or something, that is ridiculous right? Where it’s just got to hurt so bad. It’s a different kind of pain, I guess.
Joel Smith: Yeah, it’s a different pain. Even like working with swimmers. It’s amazing how like I’ll make them do some of Jay Schroeder’s extreme iso. It’s like three-minute iso lunge or something like that. They’ll be like “That was so hard.” It’s like I’ll jump in the pool and swim. This is hard. This is ridiculous, and you guys are going this like machines. And then you’re doing something on land that’s apparently … It’s just to me it’s all, the perception is always so interesting. What’s hard and how you accustom yourself to it. Or take like a Kenyan marathoner and put him in the Bulgarian system. Something like that. How contextual it is. Because those guys just love running. 120 miles a week for them. Okay, cool.
Max Aita: Yeah, s***. I mean that’s insane.
Joel Smith: I was going to … So, one of the things … Well I do want to jump into some of your … And I know you’ve talked about this on a lot of podcasts, and I know a lot of people have probably heard about it so I don’t want to get onto that forever your time actually in the Bulgarian system, but before I get too far, I just know for everyone who … Modern strength and condition. Olympic lifting is such a big part of it.
Joel Smith: What’s your take on if you were training athletes, like things … The time spent in Olympic lifting for training a team sport athlete. How worth it is it? Is that something you would do? Is it …
Max Aita: I’ll preface this by saying I don’t actually do strength conditioning, so I can’t claim to be … I’m a weightlifting powerlifting coach. That’s my primary thing. I’ve been asked this question a bunch and Chad and I have been to different universities and facilities, and I actually was an intern at Montana State for a while in the strength conditioning department, and one thing that I would say is different in my approach if I was going to do that, I probably wouldn’t spend a lot of time on the Olympic lifts. And it’s not that there’s any kind of negativity towards them. There’s a million different arguments people have one way or the other. It’s too time-consuming, it’s dangerous, blah blah blah.
Max Aita: For me it would be more a matter of from my experience what I’ve seen in these places is that I would spend the limited energy and time I’d have with the staff and any of that stuff working at the most basic stuff. I have weightlifters that hold international records, that hold American records, and we still spend time working on the mechanics of doing back squats and front squats. And still spend time working on basic things.
Max Aita: So knowing that these people who spend their entire career working with a barbell and doing these movements still need to spend time on basic movement stuff, that’s probably where I would start most of the things I would be doing in that setting. In the collegiate strength setting.
Max Aita: I’ve seen so many times been in the gyms where people can’t squat right. They can’t squat correctly, they can’t do certain things. There is so much to be had from that low-hanging fruit that that’s where I’d start. Not to say that the Olympic lifts are not necessarily a good option, but I think a lot of that’s going to come down to being what is really the best investment of your time and your energy?
Max Aita: And as a coach, it’s easy to kind of pick something and think that that’s going to have a big transference, but really what we’re doing in that setting is general training anyways. None of those people are practicing their sport in the weight room. So anything you do in that general preparation arena has to fit the criteria of being safe, being effective, and being manageable. And I think probably weightlifting, you know, snatch, clean & jerk exercises are low on that list. They’re probably higher on that list than doing like reverse band bench presses and reverse band back squats and who knows what else other terrible ideas there are. But they’d probably be lower on my priority list I think.
Joel Smith: Yeah, I love how you mention the reverse band. How different pieces of this whole world we call strength, like this huge spectrum from kettle bells to power lifting to all the corners, and it just shows up in training athletes because it’s like … It’s so haphazard. It’s like if the coach says like “Oh I love this discipline and so I’m going to do it,” the cool thing is talking to you it’s like well you were awesome at the Olympic lifts, but at the same time, if you were coaching athletes, that wouldn’t be the choice. That shows a thorough thought process.
Joel Smith: I don’t think, just like to me, my evolution as a coach has been that thought process of okay, why are we doing this with these athletes right now? What am I trying to get out of this? Is it just something we do, or even how we were just spent the last like hour and a half, and that time flew by. I looked up at the clock like holy cow, and hour. You just showing me some nuances of the Olympic lifts, and I’m like holy cow. My tendencies as an athlete are so different than what it takes to be an elite level Olympic lifter in the classical lifts where the bar has to go over your head and three white white lights or whatever, and it’s very different like in a lot of levels.
Max Aita: I think it’s funny you mention that too because I think that’s a lot of people’s coach’s biggest problems are that they construct a framework around their thinking, and then try to fit situations into their framework. And this is a natural thing people do, right? They create an identity system or an identity structure environment for them to live in, and then they try to find the reality around them that fits into that. So whatever that is for any endeavor in life, but in coaching a lot, if you’re a weightlifting guy, you try to fit everything into the spectrum of what fits into my thinking of weightlifting and how weightlifting is the most important thing in my universe. How does it apply to all these other things, and how you’re always trying to make these connections and draw these conclusions from things that are just not correct. It’s just easy to do because your limited scope is formed by your passion for the sport.
Max Aita: Like you said, you see a lot of strength conditioning coaches that are basically just powerlifters or weightlifters that are, you know, or a fan of those things, that just try to put a square peg into a round hole, and you end up in this like, it’s just not right, you know? And you see that even more and more nuance as you get into any one field it gets even probably more closed off where weightlifters there’s different factions I guess you’d call of weightlifting coaches that have very specific sets of belief, or very specific belief systems that are designed around certain ideologies of the sport.
Max Aita: So you have like the Bulgarian system people, and the Russian system people, and the Chinese system people, and it’s like none of these people are really looking at … The people that get really into it that identify an entire structure of training by one word. It’s the Chinese system. What they’ve done is they’ve basically closed themselves off to the fact that there are ways to measure everything, and they’re not quantifying these systems by measurements that are metrics like volume, load, training, stimulus. They’re not identifying technique with mathematics, they’re just saying it’s the Chinese system, and they cram everything they can into that, and then they throw that into it, and that’s their identity system.
Max Aita: And so you end up with like this ridiculousness where no one can compare anything or discuss anything or talk about anything because each system comes with its own set of jargon, each system comes with its own preconceived kind of things. When you say “I do the Chinese system,” it triggers these five or six concepts in everybody’s mind that is the Chinese system. “Oh, they all do like these weird kind of snatch pulls, or weird kind of this or that, or these things,” and it’s like well anyone can do that, it doesn’t make it a Chinese system, it’s just these people happen to do these things.
Max Aita: I think the Bulgarian system probably got the biggest … Probably owns that the most of any system because it’s so easy for people to say “I do the Bulgarian system.” Then every single person in weightlifting can tell you what that is. “Oh, it’s max out every day.” And I can tell you from my experience that it’s probably not as much that as you think it was because I had … I mean Abadjiev made me do a set of ten in the clean pull. Very different.
Max Aita: He had me do clean grip overhead squats. Not to say that, okay, so then what is the Bulgarian system? If it’s not this identity, this kind of image we’ve created, this symbol of what it really is, what is it? Well it’s probably more that we’re assigning a name to something like the Bulgarian system, and neglecting that it’s the coach. It’s Abadjiev’s system. That’s the guy who made this. He was successful there. It just happened to be that he was Bulgarian. Happened to be that he was successful in this era.
Max Aita: And so I think people get really dogmatic about that, and it’s unfortunate that that kind of invades weightlifting on this minute level. It definitely invades strength and conditioning and track and field and everything I’m sure where there’s these conflicting ideas that are not necessarily grounded in measurable quantities, they’re grounded in feeling, in emotion, and sort of like identity systems.
Joel Smith: Yeah. I think with Olympic weightlifting particularly it’s like, you know as we were going through like even some … It’s almost like … I look at like the outcome of the ultimate Olympic-style lift versus what a lot of athletes exhibit, and there’s probably some benefits too, like I look at like myself as an athlete with no Olympic coach. I just did the Olympic lifts because it was in the program. And over time, a significant period of time, it’s like my, because of how you just saw me lifting, my back erectors got a lot bigger and stronger, and I think my glutes and hips were like bigger, but my legs were still the same.
Joel Smith: Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing if you’re a high jumper, but now you’re a high jumper carrying an extra five pounds of muscle where you probably don’t need it because of how you we’re throwing your head back on Olympic lifts and stuff like that. That’s just stuff people don’t … I mean you can get away with it obviously, but that doesn’t mean there’s not better things to do or better ways to approach the problem.
Max Aita: Yeah, and that’s actually … The idea of getting away with it I think is one of the biggest things for me as a coach that’s evolved since the Bulgarian stuff. When I trained as a weightlifter I was not a good weightlifter. I didn’t lift really great numbers or anything. I wasn’t successful at big competitions.
Max Aita: But what I learned probably most about it is that you can get away with an enormous amount of unproductive work. I was squatting, and I told this to Chad years ago, and it was like okay, so I squatted eight times a day, and I had let’s just say a 600 pound squat. That’s great. I know guys now that have 600 pound squats, they’re 19 years old. And they squat twice a week.
Max Aita: The reality is that you can get away with an enormous amount of stuff that is ineffective, but still be alive, still recover, still be training, and just be doing so much useless wasted time and effort that your training is just completely inefficient. Now my perspective is always a matter of how can I do less? How can I maximize training to be the most effective it can possibly be so that …
Max Aita: The best analogy is that the Bulgarian system is the sum of the parts are almost the whole. And you just got to keep adding a little bit. Maybe it’s actually 5% less than the whole. Whereas the system now we have, and the way of training now is that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. Everything we’re doing is much more effective than it was. Less training volume, less work, less stuff is being done that’s unusable or unnecessary.
Max Aita: And so that big shift from “Yeah you can get away with tons of things and do things wrong and you can do cleans in a way that makes your back bigger and stronger and that’s not as effective but you can kind of get away with it,” now it’s a matter of “Well, how do we avoid all those mistakes and have this really directed, really really well-tuned system that produces the result we want with the least amount of work?”
Joel Smith: I always am thinking about like yeah, this balance between mal-adaptations. We have X amount of time in the weight room, how do we make everything maximally beneficial without getting carried away with things? My workouts have definitely been chopped down over time and a lot of things spent towards the back half are more like some of the extreme isometrics in the Jay Schroeder world. Stuff that’s not as, it’s very simple, but just done for a lot of just like just basic muscular non-compensation length purposes.
Joel Smith: And so I’ve definitely done less overtime myself. One of the things, before we get into, because I want to talk to you about like, basically, before you spent time with Abadjiev, after, how that has impacted you in the whole, in the parts, and how much is too much. We were both even talking jumping a little bit ago, and it’s like well how much of that is good if this is your sport?
Joel Smith: But in terms of the Olympic lifts themselves, because I did want to kind of kick off this with like okay, you are doing Olympic lifts, or I am using Olympic lifts for my athletes, and there are those things like with just me, like I’m throwing my head back too much, or you were trying to get me to really get into the ground more.
Joel Smith: So like what are some core components of a good Olympic lift, just from a human body functioning the way it should, using the legs, and not overusing other parts?
Max Aita: The biggest components I would say are, you know, the major factors in weightlifting that are really important and from a technical model would be, the first thing is position. You have to have your body and the links of your body in the right position in order to maximize force production and anything else.
Max Aita: If your knees are bent too much, your legs are too straight, your back’s whatever position, until those positions are as close to ideal as possible, you shouldn’t really worry about moving to the next stage. The next stage would be tempo. The tempo of moving. What is the pace at which you apply force? What is the pace at which you actually execute the pattern of the movement? Basically, at what speed are you moving from one position to the next?
Max Aita: Once that’s maximized or really where you want it would be essentially the timing of the lift. When are you applying maximum force? Not so much the tempo, but when is it that you actually exert maximum force in the lift? Are you doing that accurately?
Max Aita: People, this has been studied well in weightlifting, especially in the pull, there’s a distribution of force. If you imagine that the first pull and the second pull are two separate things, which one of those comprises more percentage of force production? We know the second pull is, but what is the tempo and pace at which you execute those? Some people execute the first pull with much more force than they execute the second pull. Or they execute the first pull much faster than the second pull in the sense that they are applying more of that force early on in the lift versus later on in the lift.
Max Aita: And so you know what is that? Are you balancing that correctly? Are you applying force at the right time in the lift? So once you have position down, once you have tempo down, once you have timing down, the final thing would be speed. How fast are you actually trying to move through the movement? And that’s something that comes with time as you lift because you become more and more unconscious in your execution of the technique. You’re not focused on actually moving my body into this position, controlling the speed I pull, timing when I’m explosive. Your speed will come as those things start to become ingrained, then you start to become faster, and faster, and faster.
Max Aita: Those four key things are where we start with lifting. With good weightlifting in that you’ve got to be good at the first one before you move to the next one. And even in any one training cycle that’s how you would practice with a lifter is you start from the most critical most basic stuff and work from there towards the final product at the end of the cycle. Before I would say some people get kind of focused on trying to fix certain things all the time. They’re trying to control this and that and this and that but they’re not even in the right position, right? So that’s where I would say is the kind of fundamental bedrock of weightlifting stuff.
Joel Smith: And working with you just the last couple hours it’s like I love seeing all these parallels into other aspects of sport and performance, and I always love looking at these pieces that apply to everything and like the position first thing I think is so important. You’re doing like the Jay Schroeder … All the isometrics, and just being able to hold a proper position before you get to anything else.
Joel Smith: But what blew me away, and I really liked, was the timing. I’ve been learning a ton through sprint coaches, like my mentor Adarian Barr how a lot of coaches in the sprint world or jump world a lot of times don’t pay attention to the timing in jumping and sprinting. It’s just apply force as fast as possible to the ground in absent of looking at the greater parts, and it’s like as we were going through this, the timing of when I pulled was a really important part of the equation.
Joel Smith: It was interesting though because we talk about where things can differ and where Olympic lifts it’s like everything can be a poison and a medicine. Like for me if I was a high jumper, to be a good Olympic lifter, if you’re going to coach me, I need to be more patient. But the high jumper in me wants that impulse to come really fast, and if I was to train formally in the way an Olympic lifter’s supposed to … Well maybe I’d be a better football lineman. My legs would probably get stronger and that’s good, but like I’m also probably going to be hurting another sport skill that’s really critical to me before I’m going to lick that.
Max Aita: Absolutely. And I think that understanding that principle, the specificity, really is huge because if you understand that, you can utilize any other training mechanism to achieve the goal you want, right? If you want a lifter to become more fast or more explosive, then you have to apply methods to them that develop that.
Max Aita: And maybe they’re transitory in the program, they’re not in there all the time, but they are in there for a short period of time. And we were kind of talking about this jumping, and that’s something that makes a lot of sense is that you’re not necessarily training a jumper. You’re training a weight lifter. But jumping and those kind of exercises may have a big impact for a short period of time, and they may be really well utilized at very key moments in the program to augment the qualities you want to augment, much like maybe a high jumper or somebody might early in the general stages of training may benefit from weightlifting in the sense that yeah, they’re going to develop certain qualities that impact them positively later on, right? But understanding that is a big, big key, is that it’s not bigger squat equals better football, right?
Joel Smith: Yeah, exactly, yeah. There’s going to be a point where that taps out, and even like if I’m going to high jump this season, even just training the way we were just for a few months would be cool in the sense of learning to not just … To me, not to throw a new extension in and overuse my back and everything. To be a little more core-centric. Get into my legs. To make my legs stronger for a period of time. But ultimately, the wiring can’t be that way. Or eventually like just Tendo it and everything’s just fast.
Joel Smith: And that’s kind of where I’m headed. It’s like okay, we are going to Olympic lift for explosion or velocity. Well now, how do we at least do that as well as we can? Otherwise it can be just Tendo on the bar. Just go for it. But now we’re going to make a lot of mistakes too, and there is some good, but there’s also some potential bad like you were telling me not to like use my lats to pull the bar in too close because I’m sure a lot of people could put a Tendo and not, and just like elliptical it over the top.
Max Aita: Right, right, right. Or just throw it, yet.
Joel Smith: Or overthrow themselves backwards like they’re throwing a shot behind their head or various things. That would solve the problem of being to get the Tendo as fast as it goes, but there’s some poisons that can accumulate along the way.
Max Aita: Yeah, for sure. For sure. That’s something too that’s interesting, like the idea of the Olympic lifts. You know we talked about this too, is that there’s an architecture to the lifts that you’re trying to replicate, and something that we try to do is all the special exercises we do have to mimic the competitive exercise. The same with any sport. There’s an architecture to that that is unique to weightlifting where it’s not always a matter of the most. You don’t necessarily want the highest bar velocity all the time, or the highest relative height of the bar. You want to have similarities. You want to have something that looks the same, that’s congruent with the sport itself.
Max Aita: And so exercises need to take on that role where they mimic the exercise that you’re competing in to the degree that it actually has transference. And if you have … You know if you just sit there and you’re like “I’m just going to do … Try to pull the bar as high as I can, or go as heavy as possible,” you might get benefits from that in the short term that seem productive, but they’re not, because the reality is you’re not developing a motor pattern or developing a skillset that’s the same as the actual competitive movement.
Joel Smith: Yeah, it makes me think about like how Bondarchuk would like cycle in and out that stuff. Like it would never stay in forever, because then it’s not the competitive movement. It shouldn’t be in here forever.
Max Aita: Exactly.
Joel Smith: Probably eventually find something else to do.
Max Aita: Yeah. Yeah. That’s something that’s been a really big change for me too is the idea of exercise sequencing and exercise selection, and how to apply that, and how to create a standardized system, or an algorithm really, for how that works. Because that’s something that I think is sort of lost a lot of times, especially with weightlifting coaches, in that there’s thousands of exercises in the repertoire of weightlifting coaches, and how many really are necessary or get used, right? 15, 20, 30? Right? That are really productive.
Max Aita: It’s sort of like chic to use these like weird exercises, or like pick something this way or that way, or make a complex that is just pointless really, where it has no bearing on the classic exercise, but it’s cool, so it’s-
Joel Smith: Looks good on Instagram. If it gets likes, it gets likes.
Max Aita: Yeah, right, that’s really what we’re getting at is the Instagram fame, right? But yeah, so it’s … Bondarchuk is I think amazing at that, and pioneered a lot of stuff in that regard that we can draw from as weightlifting coaches.
Joel Smith: Yeah, I think Abadjiev’s system probably wouldn’t have gotten a ton of Instagram fame outside just the lift numbers, you know? Like maybe the culture, like the ambiance, you know.
Max Aita: Maxing out all the time might have been cool, but yeah. No one’s going to be all … It’s going to be the same video every day.
Joel Smith: After a while. For the first two weeks it’ll be awesome, and then it’ll-
Max Aita: That was always the joke when we were … We’d go into the gym to train, [Nikolai 00:36:43], the super heavy who was there, he would always say “What are we doing today, bench press?”
Joel Smith: That’s awesome. I think you have to make jokes to mental your way around just doing the same thing over and over again. One of the things I really love when we were just working together too I like you were saying it’s all the pull is all the same if you were in a competitive Olympic weight lifter. The pull is always at the same speed roundabout, just like the same if you’re a swimmer, you want to know how many strokes you’re going to take to get … It’s always the same, and then just do it better, it’s going to be heavier, whatever.
Joel Smith: And I thought that was really cool with that end goal in mind, but then I’m like “Wait, okay in this, how do I get to be fast?” Because I’m sitting here like “Oh I got to be patient.” But then the drop is really fast, and how you stack those plates up to the sides of my feet to make me … Like I’m like now that lights all my [crosstalk 00:37:34] all explosive like “Yes!” Like this is, that will lift me up man, like to basically do a clean, and now I’ve little half-inch bumper plates, three quarter-inch bumper plates on the side of my feet that I have to lift my feet, land on, and catch the bar, and I’m like “That’s fast.”
Joel Smith: And so could you tell me just a little bit about like … Yeah, basically like … And obviously for those coaches who do Olympic lifts with athletes and are trying to get more out of it from an athletic perspective, tell me a little bit about like the feet, and the feet if they come off the ground, coming off the ground, landing, how do you get that part of the lift, that squat under that catch to be better?
Max Aita: Yeah, so I mean a big thing, and this is something I talked about in the first book I wrote, The Technique Triad, was there’s basically three components to the lift that are essentially exist within all weightlifting movements, and that’s the relative height of the bar, the trajectory of the barbell, and the time to fixation. And time to fixation is what we’re talking about here in that how fast does a lifter move from exerting force on the barbell to receiving the barbell in the catch position?
Max Aita: With the feet and how the feet actually interact with the ground … When your foot interacts with the ground, you’re still applying force to the bar. As soon as your feet leave the ground, you can no longer apply any force to the barbell. So what we do in weightlifting, what we’re really concerned about with foot movement, is that we’re able to maximize the time we stay on the ground, and the speed with which we replace our feet back on the floor.
Max Aita: And so that drill we did with you where we put some bumper plates next to your feet … What you were doing was … You even coined it “the Michael Jackson,” where you’re basically staying on the forefoot forever after the bar has left your thigh. So make contact with the bar, bar leaves your thigh, but your feet are still on the ground. Your toe is still on the ground.
Max Aita: And what that does is basically it doesn’t allow … Maybe it’s more that you’re staying on the ground because you don’t know where to put your feet, or exactly what to do with your feet. So you’re not going to maximize that aggressive return to the floor, which subsequently augments your time to fixation because you’re going to be more aggressive in moving under the barbell.
Max Aita: So the drill we did where we put bumps on the side of your feet and forced you to jump onto them really just rewires your thinking to be “Move my feet aggressively and plant them on the floor.” You already know you’re moving into a squat position, right? It’s a natural reaction to go into a squat. So the idea of being aggressive with footwork, and forcing you to be aggressive because you think “Well if I don’t pick my feet up, if I don’t move them, they’re not getting on these bumpers.” It helps you to augment that time to fixation because now you’ve impart all the force you can to the ground, there’s no delay in moving under because it … There’s a panic. General sense of getting your ass in gear to move your feet and stomp on the floor, or stomp them on the bumpers in this case.
Max Aita: So what we want to do is try to maximize those things. Those real like transition points between applying force to the ground, picking your feet up, and then replacing them quickly. We don’t move our feet in weightlifting, especially the snatch or the clean, for the sake of moving them. We move them to accomplish something, right? We pull from a little bit narrower position than we receive the weight. When we move our feet aggressively it helps us also …
Max Aita: When you plant your foot on the ground, it helps to … I guess the terms would be to like to recruit more fibers. When you put your foot down on the ground firmly, you’re going to tighten up the muscles in your hips and your legs better and faster. You’re putting yourself in a position to actually receive the weight with some type of intent rather than just having your feet stuck to the ground and falling down under it, and the bar lands on your hard and collapses you.
Max Aita: So that drill accomplishes a bunch of things. It teaches you to pick your feet up after you’ve done pulling. It teaches you to plant your feet down firmly, which then also teaches you how to receive the weight in a better position, and then so on and so forth. So in weightlifting when we’re doing stuff with footwork, we want to focus on achieving all those goals, and that drill I think is a really easy way to do that that doesn’t, you know we talked about earlier, doesn’t really cost any volume. It’s pretty easy to just kind of incorporate.
Joel Smith: It’s built in to the system, yeah. It reminds me of like track and field, like they run over like the little … Sprint over the little mini hurdles like to … Basically, it helps you pick your feet up faster, but it’s subconscious, or my master’s thesis research was like doing a depth jump, if you put a like a hurdle or barrier in front, you get off the ground faster. So it’s like the presence of something that has to be … To go over makes the impulse quick.
Joel Smith: And that’s one of the things I do think about when I think of Olympic lifts and athletes is like how fast is the impulse going through the foot? Is it coming later than what your sport would demand? Like high jump the impulse has to go really fast, and if I’m being too delayed or too much back it’ll screw up the impulse or whatever, and like …
Joel Smith: So it just opens up the nuances of well what do we need to accomplish, and then, but I also think about like that you watch those really … With Olympic lifters it’s like there’s the pull, and that impulse is just, the impulse and that switchover so fast. That drill just was awesome. I loved it.
Joel Smith: So I did want … I know you’ve talked about this like a million times. So feel free to go into as little detail about that experience as possible. I’m sure people could listen to many of the other podcasts you’ve talked about this, but I would just love to hear about what your philosophy was on weightlifting, specifically like for the person Olympic weightlifting before your time within the Bulgarian system, a little bit about your time with the Bulgarian system, and then how you’ve kind of ran with that. Obviously that being fueled with drugs, and a bunch of very [crosstalk 00:43:17] how have you ran with that?
Max Aita: So before I didn’t actually have a time period of training before I did the Bulgarian stuff. When I started lifting I was … I found a coach, and he was really big on the Bulgarian system. This is you know, late ’90s, and he was like “That’s what we do. That’s what I do here.” That’s actually kind of funny because transitioning from him to Abadjiev was seamless. We actually had trained, I think, more than when I met Abadjiev. But it was always just maximum singles, always heavy, every single exercise was heavy. Super narrow band of exercises, six exercises at most. Maybe five.
Max Aita: I had done a 500 pound front squat before I had done a 500 pound back squat. I could front squat more than I could deadlift for a while. It was ultimate specificity, right? The system was about … When I started training I had no idea how anything worked. I didn’t really know anything. I just knew that if you trained hard you got better. There was definitely a period of time when I first started lifting where I did have access to pretty good literature, all the like translated Russian texts, and I actually read through those hundreds of times.
Max Aita: But I always read through it … You know as an athlete too, I understand that it was important for me to buy into and believe in my coach. And in Montana when there’s one coach, you don’t really have the option of like “Well, I’ll try something different.” So I read it and I understood for the most part what that stuff was talking about, but I just discounted it as “Well, the Bulgarian system’s better,” right? Because they had six champions and Russia only had five, or you know, whatever stupid reason it was.
Max Aita: Not really thinking because I also had no experience with it. I had never done any kind of Russian style of training. I hadn’t done any principle-based training before, I had just done “Go heavy all the time.” So then when I actually met Abadjiev and trained with Abadjiev it was the same thing or the same idea. Abadjiev was super aggressive in the sense that there was no reprieve from training. It’s just every day is the same. You know what you’re going to get into. It’s going to be brutal. Always pushing forward.
Max Aita: I think the best definition of the Bulgarian system is that it is a brute force method. Push as hard as you possibly can to achieve what you want and just … If you’re going to get better at snatching then just keep pushing snatches. Maximum all the time. Only a very, very narrow band of things that you are doing. Really, really heavy weights. Really limited exercises. High, high frequency. No variation. No fatigue management. No phase potentiation. There’s nothing going on outside of just applying this one stimulus to the body over, and over, and over, and over again.
Max Aita: And then as I trained with him and trained with the Bulgarians and finished that and ended up moving on with my lifting career and whatnot, as a coach, I really changed my model of thinking to be … When I first started coaching I applied that stuff to athletes, and I was like “This doesn’t work.” And I started to realize probably the biggest benefit to me in all this was becoming a professional coach because as soon as you start making money at it and living as a coach, you realize really quickly when something doesn’t work people stop paying you for it.
Max Aita: So you had a system that just wasn’t effective. It was not producing results, it was just not good. And in addition to that, probably me as a coach when I started I just wasn’t as good a coach as I am now. But getting into the changes I’ve made over my career after the Bulgarian system, it really started to become everything that wasn’t Bulgarian. So it went from being “Okay, Bulgarian system is super-specific, really, really heavy all the time, focused entirely on results. On numbers.”
Max Aita: My system now, and the long transition that that was over years is a system that is focused on process rather than results. It’s grounded in the idea that we improve the process. That I would rather see someone develop better and better processes, better and better practice, better and better technique. Focus on execution of what you’re doing rather than the outcome of what you’re doing.
Max Aita: And then it’s based in principles. Based in the scientific principles of training, you know, specificity, overload, fatigue management, variation, phase potentiation, individual differences. These things are really just the principles … Sorry, the program is just the expression of these principles for any one particular person.
Max Aita: So specificity is something we are always concerned with, but how does it manifest itself for Joel, right? In your program. Okay, well, we have this many snatches, this many clean & jerks. This exercise benefits you. We have whatever phase we’re in. We’re doing different kind of training. Whereas the Bulgarian system is one size fits all. It’s apply this to everybody and the ones that can do it will be weeded out, and they’ll be the ones that go forward.
Max Aita: Outside of that, I moved away from the idea of the brute force method where Bulgarian system is interesting because a lot of people look at it as it’s all snatch and clean & jerk, but the reality is out of 42 exercise sessions a week that we did, I think about 18 of them were squats, which is a huge percentage of training devoted to accessory movement. So the system was very heavy on the idea that you’re going to squat your way to a big number, a big total. You’re going to push the squat up as hard as you can, and the bigger that is, the more you’re going to snatch and clean & jerk.
Max Aita: And while that obviously is effective on some level, what I found is that I changed a huge percentage of that as time went on to be, you know, if you look at the percentage of squatting done by the best lifters they have, it’s much, much lower. When I started too it was high. We did a lot of squatting. Not just maximum squats. We did lots of high volume squatting. We would do all sorts of different squat programs and these kind of things, and create these things that were focused around the idea of building up a giant base of strength and then just praying that that was going to turn in-
Joel Smith: It’s going to transfer. It’s going to pay off. It’s going to pay off.
Max Aita: Just squat an extra ten kilos and you’re clean & jerk that PR. Fast-forward even til last weekend. Actually, not even last weekend. Tuesday of last week where my lifter Alyssa Ritchey just won the Pan Am Championships. Made a lifetime PR clean & jerk of 107 kilos at 49 kilos body weight, and her front squat has improved 1 kilogram the last training cycle. But her clean & jerk improved too. And her clean & jerk has improved 7 kilograms in competition over 4 months ago. So that’s a 7% increase in performance with almost a negligible increase in squatting strength, which I think is the pinnacle of excellent programming and training simply because you’re achieving the highest rate of return on the things you’re doing.
Max Aita: To kind of cover the gap there between where I was and where she is not is is a lot of it was just a matter of looking at what are the variables that are necessary for me to understand and track, and then how do we manipulate them to get the results we want? Right now the program is basically focused entirely on the improvement of increasing the overload mechanism … Sorry. Increasing overload through the average weight.
Max Aita: So we look at what is the average weight of the barbell in training? We add up all the sets and reps of snatch and clean & jerk, we find the average weight of that barbell. If it’s say for her, 68 kilograms, we know that if we increase that 68 kilograms to 70 kilograms and do a similar amount of volume, a similar training structure, use the correct exercises, and we program this in a way that is logical from a fatigue management standpoint, she’ll make progress. And it’s been proven. It’s been shown now several times with big PRs for her.
Max Aita: So having a system now that has … We have a definitive goal we’re looking to improve. We have an understanding of how specificity applies to that. We have an understanding of special exercises that work for her. We have an understanding of technique that works for the athlete. Applying all these things and coming at the problem from an efficiency standpoint rather than a brute force standpoint of “Well let’s just throw more training at her.”
Max Aita: Let’s find the things that are most effective that work well and exploit them over, and over, and over again to get the result we want, without causing injury, without over training, without doing anything that could potentially throw this whole process off. So that’s really where the program is now. It’s very much around “Let’s be as intelligent as we can with what we’re doing and apply things as correctly as possible and as best as possible.”
Max Aita: Now I look at training from a totally different lens, it’s not “How do I get more training out of her?” It’s “How do I do less training, and make the things I’m doing now even more effective?” And that’s kind of one of the things you know I was talking to you earlier about. Jumps, adding in more training for this, because I think that that could potentially be some kind of augmentation to the process that would be a very minimal addition of total training load. It’s still going to have an impact, but it might be that we can get away with less squatting or less of this exercise or less volume in the clean or the snatch or something in exchange for this method that may have a really profound impact. Or it may just be that it’s more training that does impact her really positively, or an athlete really positively, at the right time.
Max Aita: Everything now, my whole thinking versus the Bulgarian stuff back in the day is around “How do I make training more effective,” and more effective training is defined as basically getting more for less.
Joel Smith: The biggest bang for the bucks as possible.
Max Aita: Right.
Joel Smith: And when you take the drugs out of the system too, like that’s just become even ever more present and powerful too because that could mask … Just do more, just do more. And then the culture of that too …
Max Aita: Oh, very much.
Joel Smith: … I’m sure the culture of that training system too, it’s like how could you not be thrown in there at least … Just go along with the wave. I mean I guess-
Max Aita: One of the things that was interesting to me with the Bulgarian stuff is that, and this is probably true of every system, and like I talked about earlier with people like finding an identity system, there’s a set of excuses that comes with every training system. There’s a set of justifications and rationalizations that comes with every style of training. And you probably see this too, but you know, every Bulgarian style of training expert or coach out there that does that has the same set of excuses as the other ones.
Max Aita: It’s like “Oh, I didn’t perform because you know, I just got to, you know, you got to just try harder, you got to do this.” There’s just all these … For every system there’s a built-in rationalization for why it works or why it didn’t work. My whole thought process now is to have none of those identity systems involved in the the process. To have none of those excuses built in. To always have data. To always have numbers, and to say “Okay, let’s look at the actual data and the numbers and see what happened. Was there a downward trend in the average weight of the bar? Did we actually reduce the overload too much? Did we do too much volume? Were we doing not enough?”
Max Aita: If we can’t compare what we did this last training cycle to the previous one you’re dead in the water. You have no historical data to base your troubleshooting process on. So you’re sitting there just picking things out of the air, and they’re generally things that always kind of strike at the emotional cords of people, right? Like “Oh you just didn’t hard. You need more heart.” Or “Oh that lift was really close.” I think honestly you can dissect all of this stuff down to use mathematical formulas to determine why you’re not making progress, what’s happening in your training.
Max Aita: You can look at the data and say “Hey, these things are right or wrong. This is more or less than it was.” Your technique can be defined with mathematical terms like the angle in your hip and knee and the speed at which you moved and what was happening is not right. It’s not the same as it was the last time when you were successful.
Max Aita: So that’s where my goal with training is to get to the point where you’re not making excuses for yourself, you’re not living in this places where as a coach you have a … “I just dumb. I do a Chinese system.” Right? Where it’s easy to be like “I just adopt this totally vague concept and I throw it out there and I just … It’s cool because the Chinese guys do it and they’re cool, right?” It’s actual evidence-based grounded in science, grounded in principles, and grounded in numbers.
Joel Smith: Yeah I like that. It’s so interesting. It almost is a program that kind of absolves the thought process if it’s just like a periodization based system, like let’s do this big squat base and it’s just going to go over it. Or you know this group of people does these auxiliary, so it’s going to work for you too. The ultimate, and I do think like the Bondarchuk throw system is this ultimate … It’s like it’s all about the main thing, and then how could I manage that really, really good? And then all the stuff below it’s just tools and there’s a time and a place and they’ll go in and out …
Max Aita: That’s something that was always interesting to me too about periodization in that it’s so funny when we talk about periodization. We always talk about certain phase lengths and like oh, it’s a general phase, or a power phase, or hypertrophy phase. It’s going to be eight weeks long. And it’s always funny to me because like why eight weeks? Why would every single person’s hypertrophy phase be eight weeks long? Shouldn’t it be exactly tailored to the rate at which that person adapts or makes adaptations? And that should be an individual thing I would imagine. Probably the most individual thing within training is the rate at which people adapt to training. And that’s going to be dependent on a lot of things. The amount of training stimulus, their genetics, all these factors.
Max Aita: So it’s funny that periodization becomes this framework where we start, which is “Oh, this guy is going to do eight weeks of hypertrophy training.” That may be the perfect amount for him. It may be five weeks shy of the perfect amount. Whereas now what I look at with training is I look at landmarks. It’s “Okay, we’re going to continue to do this training stimulus until we see this result from it. Until we get to this landmark. And that landmark may be an extra kilo of body weight on you or whatever. And so it’s like it makes more sense to me that the phase length and training cycle length should be very independent or very individual things, more so than it’s just you know, the old eight weeks of strength, eight weeks of peaking, and you know, whatever it is. It’s just funny to me that that in and of itself is not something that is really talked about much, that the length of any training stimulus should be directly influenced by the individual.
Joel Smith: Yeah, 100%. As you’re talking I’m like “Bondarchuk program …” Like you know like because that’s … Instead of … Yeah, because it’s, I mean, how easy is it just and like, eight weeks, eight weeks, eight weeks, oh cool, nice round numbers. For instance, it’s like the Bondarchuk system, you’re just waiting til the peak adaptation, and then …
Max Aita: Right. And then you move on.
Joel Smith: … and then move on. It’s just like as pure as it gets, right?
Max Aita: Yeah. I think that’s the ultimate training. That kind of concept really belongs in any training system because it is the ultimate individualization of the program. If you have pre-constructed phase lengths, you’re definitely not … Unless it’s for the same athlete, you’re definitely not in this place where you’re making the program an individual program for somebody.
Joel Smith: Yeah, right on. It’s so cool to hear this from where … Track being my background, but seeing this in weightlifting. And like I just … It’s like you think about like the global dynamics of coaching and how it’s all coming together. I did want to … I am curious though. Like so obviously Bulgarian system, it’s like lift eight times a day or something like that. How have you kind of cut that down in your process to refine the risk/reward and obviously absence of everything that went into that culture?
Max Aita: Yeah, so the first way is that if you imagine the Bulgarian system, the Bulgarian system, the loading that exists in it, which is basically one range of intensity, one intensity zone, which is like 90% and above, that’s where most of the work is done. Your warmups are essentially irrelevant because they’re so low-volume they’re only single repetitions on the way up.
Max Aita: And then the frequency exists as a byproduct of that I believe, because if you’re only doing single repetitions, you’re not getting very tired. You’re not going to generate a lot of fatigue. So you can do that multiple times a day. You have to do it multiple times a day in order to maintain fitness levels, because at some point, a reduction in training volume, even with a huge spike, an increase in absolute weight on the barbell, or relative intensity, there’s a limit to that. You just can’t train at 100%. You’d have to do no warmups, and only maximum lifts.
Max Aita: So at some point we get to this logical endpoint of there’s no way to make this training heavier. There’s no way to do more volume because if you increase the volume by repetitions per set, you generate so much more fatigue that you wouldn’t be able to get to that high intensity, so the average intensity would come down.
Max Aita: So what happens is the system basically becomes this default where the only way to maintain results is to train with less and less volume. The only way to accomplish enough volume to maintain fitness is to do higher and higher frequencies, and then as some point, you only have so many hours in the day and so much training.
Max Aita: So it’s the ultimate plateau. The Bulgarian system is the ultimate plateau system where you basically have this one … You might start it, and this is probably a common occurrence for a lot of new weightlifters, is to come in and start a Bulgarian system, weeks one through six it’s like amazing. “Oh my God, this is … I figured it out. I’m just making PRs every week.” And then you get to week six where you’ve reached the endpoint of that. You can’t intensify training more because it’s already the most intense it can possibly be. And you can’t increase volume so you can’t make fitness or any other … The magnitude of the stress improve, because you can’t do more of it otherwise you induce too much fatigue, so you just stop.
Max Aita: But you’re always able to do enough training to maintain your results within let’s say a five or ten percent range. You can always kind of hit numbers that are close to your best which gives you this misleading idea that “Oh, I’m really close to a PR.” Or like “Ah man, you know my PR is 100 kilos and I did 95 like every day this week. I know a PR is around the corner.” It’s not. It’s not. You’re literally on a plateau. You’ve done the exact same numbers for an entire week. The definition of a plateau.
Max Aita: So knowing that that’s the system and figuring that out, I went backwards in the sense that okay, well, if we want to improve results, there has to be the ability to overload. There has to be the ability to go from less intense training to more intense. So if we have to overload then we got to start with less than maximum. So the first thing was a huge reduction in overall intensity.
Max Aita: No longer were we training, no longer do I or have any of my athletes trained at near maximum weights. So much so to the point that Alyssa, the lifter I have that was at Pan Ams, she the heaviest snatch she did … And this would probably be more like the idea of concept of like peaking, but the heaviest snatch she did was in the whole training cycle was 82 kilos. She did 83 at the meet. But she did 82 kilos 23 days before the meet. That was the last heavy snatch she did.
Max Aita: She would snatch up to 90% several times in between that maximum and the meet, but there was no super aggressive training at any point in the training cycle. Her average intensity in the snatch is around 68 kilos. So she was doing most of her volume at 68 kilograms, and was able to produce an 83 kilo PR snatch. Which to me is like super effective.
Max Aita: So the overall intensity of the program comes down. Because it comes down, we now open up the door to have a lot more volume in there. And the volume allowed us to basically give us … The volume is basically the measure of how much magnitude the training stimulus is goin to have. 100 reps versus 1000 reps, for the same intensity, 1000 reps going to have a bigger magnitude, right?
Max Aita: So we’ve reduced the average intensity, reduced the absolute intensity to the point now we open up the program to have more volume. We incorporate more volume to a point that it benefits the athlete. So the goal is to go from … An athlete starts training with me, to slowly grow their total volume, and we keep track of these numbers very, very closely. We’re growing the total volume from month to month, year to year, to a point that it basically levels out.
Max Aita: And that point that it levels out is going to be determined by essentially how heavy the athlete is. Bigger athletes are probably going to do a little more volume because they need to maintain muscle mass. There’s like a give and take with everything so I say they do more, but the reality is they probably do less because they’re also bigger.
Max Aita: But understanding that like there’s a bell curve here. The lightest athletes are going to do the most volume because they’re small and they recover. Heaviest are doing less. But as time goes on the athlete is doing more and more volume so that they can maximize their body weight class. So they achieve this volume cap.
Max Aita: Then from that point, this is maybe like four or five years, that point, the volume starts to decline in exchange for an increase in the absolute intensity. And this process is the longterm training process that’s different than the Bulgarian system where it was basically starting out at that point and just trying to use drugs to basically augment that position all the time.
Max Aita: The cycle … Cycle to cycle training cycle would just have a phasic structure now. So we go from periods of general training that we didn’t have in Bulgarian system where lots of varied exercises are used, lots of remedial exercises are used, and what I would call supplemental lifts where I think there’s so many different jargons and terminology people use for this stuff where I would refer to like fundamental loading as the exercises that have a high correlation. So snatch clean, powers, different variations. And then additional loading, which would be like body building stuff. The curls and pull ups and those kind of things.
Max Aita: We have the training goes from being general with more volume to additional exercises early on to help augment any kind of weaknesses we have or adjust for imbalances or corrections and those kind of things. Things we really need to work at to keep the athlete healthy, and then we transition and slowly change that distribution from mostly additional to mostly fundamental as the cycle goes on.
Max Aita: Very much any kind of periodization, standard periodization where there’s multiple phases and each one has a less specific going to more specific towards the meet. But the biggest thing is tracking these metrics and thinking about how we can reduce intensity and lower volume in exchange for better results.
Max Aita: And obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m trying to do as little training as possible, I’m trying to do the right amount of training. I’m trying to get the most out of it. Whereas the Bulgarian system is just this idea of exploitation all the time, just constantly push, push, push. That’s the biggest change I think. That’s where I went from Bulgarian system being always going, you’re stuck in this plateau, to now it’s big valleys, big peaks.
Max Aita: Another big thing that I think changed a lot that is very uncommon in U.S. lifting is time off. Is taking extended periods of time, multiple weeks, month off after competitions, which is not a popular idea in Western weightlifting. I think there’s a fear that if you take time off you’re reduce your potential to make progress. And my experience has been the opposite in that when a lifter took a month off or multiple weeks off, and I mean “off” as in we’re not training the Olympic lifts a lot. They might be doing crossfit or some whatever, your transitional training.
Max Aita: It has two big benefits. One is that allows for recovery and allows for the athlete to spend time on things that they wouldn’t normally do, and it re-sensitizes them to training volume again. So that re-sensitization comes back, they can have a shorter, more aggressive, more intense amount of training leading into a competition, and not have the fear of injury looming because of chronic over-training, or chronic things coming up, chronic overuse stuff coming up, because the short training block. It’s a short training cycle, essentially.
Max Aita: And so that’s been a huge benefit I think in the sense that that’s where I … Really the Bulgarian system is completely devoid of any kind of transitional periods.
Joel Smith: Yeah and those are so critical. Like I see like even when like my swimmers come back after they’ve had a month off and they start lifting again, they get really strong really fast in like three weeks. It’s like crazy how quickly it’s like I’m always so … The rest is so key.
Joel Smith: When you do those general training periods, is there like … When do like kind of those you know the KPI markers, like the things you’re trying to hit before the end of the cycle, is that exist in the general, or do you kind of wait, do you wait until you get into the specific to start kind of getting those markers going?
Max Aita: Probably more into the specific. A lot of times with the general stuff it’s … The unfortunate aspect for us is that the weightlifting calendar year for the higher level lifters is very crammed. It’s very crowded. There are so many competitions they have to do to qualify that those periods of time are generally unfortunately shorter than I would like them. But you might have at maximum like I think Alyssa’s probably only going to have at maximum three weeks in this transition, which is unfortunate because like a month would be a month, five weeks would be way better. But a lot of stuff is probably just more in the latter part of the training.
Joel Smith: Gotcha. And then like the phase, or the classic periodization element, it’s more about just the general, lots of movements. Just not specific. Not like “This phase is to get your squat up, and then it’s …” Like it’s just a general multilateral …
Max Aita: No, and that’s actually one thing that the squatting I do, and this is probably another throwback to Bondarchuk, but my whole concept of squatting has changed from the traditional model I think in American lifting is that the squatting is the third competition lift, and it’s something that is to be given this like holy shrine that we have a squat, we have squat programs. I’ve never seen a push press program, I’ve never seen a snatch pull program, but squat programs are the most common thing in the world.
Max Aita: And much like what Bondarchuk’s research showed that I think is brilliant in the fact that throwing … Let’s compare the bench press and the shot put to the squat in weightlifting. Yeah, he showed this correlation up to about 60 feet with the bench press being a really positive indicator, and then above that it was almost like a negative indicator, right?
Max Aita: The squat is one of those things where it’s very, very easy to make the connection and the rationalization, the justification, and the belief … You go to the squat temple every Sunday and pray to the squat gods that like if it just comes up five more kilos we’re going to have this PR.
Max Aita: I even did it myself the other day, but the idea is like okay, have a big squat program, then it turns into big lifts. And there’s this disconnect between those. What you see with like throws, and we know that like there’s a really high, a really positive correlation in the transfer training between throws with lighter implements and heavier implements. And in weightlifting, with squatting, the way that I dose the training for squatting is essentially what is a low intensity, lower transference squat, and a higher transference squat?
Max Aita: And that comes down to this divide in the intensity zones at about 100% of the clean and jerk. So all of my squat training for my lifters is based on their clean and jerk. The first thing that does is it frames squatting, when I talk about with other people, it frames squatting in the correct light. It frames it in the sense that it is an accessory movement. It’s something that’s done to augment the results of the clean and jerk. It also adjusts the training volume correctly for people that are really strong squatters and really weak squatters. If you’re a really weak squatter, basing it off your clean and jerk is going to right away put it in perspective. It’s going to right away make the training slightly more aggressive. Slightly harder for you. Which should help to bring up those lagging indicators.
Max Aita: Then with people who are really strong, it’s going to reduce wasted energy and wasted time. If you’re squatting 110% of your back … If you’re doing a back squat with 110% of your clean and jerk, that’s probably about 80%, maybe lighter, of your best … If you’re a really balanced lifter, of your best back squat. But if you’re a really strong squatter, it’s probably like 75%. So you’re going to be in a place where you’re just not wasting as much energy on squatting. And then when you’re talking to coaches, it helps to get them on the same page so they understand that.
Max Aita: But what we do then is say “Okay, we have this line, this 100% clean and jerk. We move from squatting below that line to above that line. We shift volume, total volume of squats from just below that to just above that as the training cycle progresses.” So rather than sit there and say “What is our giant squat program where we’re just crushing people with squats and huge sets and tons and tons of work, we move most of our volume from just below the clean and jerk maximum to just above it. And as that number starts to move above it, as they shift from …
Max Aita: Let’s say they did 100 reps below 100%, the next cycle they did 100 reps above. We know that there’s going to be an increase. We know there’s a positive increase. And the best example would be Alyssa where her front squat didn’t really improve much beyond a few kilograms, and that was an indirect thing. We weren’t even chasing after that. It just happened because the process was adhered to.
Max Aita: But her clean and jerk came up tremendously. A year ago at the same meet she missed a 100 kilo clean and jerk. She missed the clean at 100 kilos. And fast forward one year later a seven percent increase is remarkable. I think that’s one of those things where like it’s super-important to dial in correct training and apply it correctly.
Joel Smith: I love the “Let’s go and squat on Sunday and pray to the squat gods and hope it …” But I always looked at like it’s almost like the really powerful just like built up horsepower of an athlete, it’s going to manifest itself into a big squat. It’s just like your engine kind of. And it’s like if you don’t have that engine, you taking on heavy squatting almost turns you into something different than you’re trying to be.
Max Aita: Yeah. Very much. Yeah. We athletes that are trying to increase the squat tend to be the ones that suffer most from it. Because with me, I mean I could walk in the gym and probably not do anything and I’d be good at squatting. Like I was always a strong squatter. And I could squat as hard as I want. Obviously I did, so I squat harder than I wanted to, and I would get better at it. And I could do almost no accessory, nothing else, and I would still get better at squatting. But the people that are not necessarily built well for squatting or don’t improve a lot when they do a lot of squatting suffer from it because it becomes so fatiguing and it produces so little result for them. Even if they did increase their squat five kilos or ten kilos.
Max Aita: It may not have any transference to weightlifting because it’s required them to become a completely different kind of lifter. They’ve become slower because they’ve done so much squatting, they’ve done so much volume to get so much bigger. Whatever it is, all those mal-adaptations are detracting from being a good weightlifter.
Joel Smith: I love this conversation because it just I mean … This is weightlifting. The core of strength. And all these other sports that aren’t even themselves strength sports, it’s like, it just frames us to look at strong and transference in a different way.
Joel Smith: I tell my athletes a lot, it’s like, “Look, like, I want your lifts to go up. I want your squat to go up. But I want it to go up because you’re a better athlete. I want it because you’re faster in the water, I want it to go up. Not because you came in here and bashed your head against the wall and had to beat your buddies and there’s Metallica,” like that’s not necessarily the goal. Like we want it to be the other way around, and that’s what … Or a more athletic frame.
Joel Smith: Max, man, I could, this could be a long form like Joe Rogan … I could talk to you for three hours. But I know it’s Sunday so let’s … I guess that’s all I got for the day.
Max Aita: Cool.
Joel Smith: But man it was just awesome talking to you about this world, being in your gym. Thanks for having me here, and I appreciate you being in the show, man.
Max Aita: Yeah thanks for coming. I appreciate it. It’s great to be on here.
Joel Smith: Thanks for tuning in with us today. I hope you enjoyed that show, and I think we can all take those concepts to whatever end of the field we are in. It’s just fun to talk with someone who has been through it all and is getting awesome results with his own athletes.
Joel Smith: As always, if you enjoy the show, please don’t hesitate, leave us a rating or view on iTunes, Stitch, or whatever you’re listening to us on. We’d really appreciate that. Also don’t forget to visit our sponsor simplifaster.com, suppliers of high-end training technology. Great blog as well as leading class sports technology and data collection, as well as training tools in their online stores such as kBox for that timing system, GymAware, they have force plates, contact grids, muscle stim, and just an all-around great products for you as coaches to get the most out of your athletes.
Joel Smith: All right. That does it. We’ll see you again, be back next week with another great guest. Have a good one.
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