EPT
Going to a daily maximum on these core lifts has rocketed my strength from a 100kg squat in October, to a 142kg squat just last week. My progress on the other two lifts has not been quite as dramatic, and that may be because I wasn't giving enough volume to those two exercises. Both of them only going up by 10kg to a 194kg deadlift and a 80kg press.
I wholly attribute this great progress to a sharp increase in the volume of my training. Each session starts with around half an hour of squatting and goes something like this:
- 60kg x 5
- 80kg x 5
- 100kg x 5
- 120kg x 3
- Daily Max x 1 --- 3-5 attempts
- 100kg x 3
- 100kg x 3
On some days when I am feeling weak I will do 80kg x 5 x 10 sets of front squats.
The daily max is whatever I feel comfortable squatting on that particular day. Due to long hours at work, and very frequent squatting, my strength on any given day can be as low as a 130kg squat and as high as 140kg. I typically only achieve 140kg on days I don't work.
What interested me was trying to figure out exactly how much and how often I should be training. Doing the above squat program five times per week would sound absurd to most gym goers. I have heard the cries of overtraining coming from everyone ranging from casual gym-goers, to bodybuilders, to powerlifters. The only person who seemed unphased by my programming was an old former Bulgarian powerlifter, who went as far as to say I should be doing more.
Now. How much more?
Eastern European lifters, and all lifters who follow the Russian school of thought famously train with huge volume and intensity. After reading Squat Every Day by Matt Perryman I became interested in finding out how much volume elite lifters dedicate to their training.
If you add up my daily squat routine you get to 2860kg of total lifted weight per session. Or 4000kg for a front squat day.
When Ilya Ilyin was preparing for the 2008 Olympics where he won the gold in the men's 94kg division; he was squatting 58,000kg per day. Now that he is competing at the 105kg class, he almost certainly does even more.
If I front squatted every day, I would reach 20,000kg per week. The reason I measure my squats directly to his full training is that in addition to squatting, cleans and snatches both have squat movements involved. I don't know how to clean or snatch, and I likely won't learn for at least 2 months unless I went to a crossfit box.
So for 2015, It is obvious that in order to continue my strength progress, I must increase proportionally to my strength my daily volume.
I doubt I will ever reach 58,000kg per day, but hopefully by the end of February I will achieve 5,000-6,000kg.
