TRAIN LESS TO LIFT MORE
Forget what you know about strength. Going heavier with the weights means you can enjoy a few shortcuts THE TIM FERRISS SHOW
Sprinting coach Barry Ross once sent me a picture of an exercise he refers to as “the torture twist”. The model was a seemingly average teenager who weighed about 60kg. He nonchalantly added on the phone, “Oh, and she deadlifts 180kg for repetitions.” That, my friends, is my kind of strength: relative strength. The student was not a powerlifter. She lifted once or twice a week for less than five minutes of total time under tension. She’s also not an exception – nearly all of Ross’s athletes can pull three times their bodyweight. He manufactures mutants on demand. I met Ross through Pavel Tsatsouline, chairman of Strongfirst, a worldwide school of strength. Tsatsouline, a former physical training instructor for Soviet special forces Spetsnaz, is currently an advisor to the US Marine Corps, Secret Service and Navy Seals. He has three fundamental beliefs. The first, “Strength is the mother quality of all physical qualities,” and the second, “Strength is a skill, and as such it must be practised,” are equally important. But the last, “Lift heavy, not hard,” is particularly so. For maximal strength (not simply size), I believe that you want to feel better after your workout, rather than before. There should be no burn, no panting, no racing the clock.
Based partly on Tsatsouline’s research, Ross developed a deadlift programme to create world-class sprinters. (One of his early prodigies was Olympic gold medallist Allyson Felix.) His protocol involves partial range of motion and no lowering phase, which may decrease the likelihood of hamstring and lower back injuries. After all, strength training should be used to achieve two key goals: injury prevention and performance enhancement. The technique? Deadlift to your knees, using a sumo stance to keep your back straight, and then drop the bar. Perform two or three sets of two or three reps each (above 85% of your one-rep max) and then follow each set with plyometric exercises; for example, 10-20m sprints, or six to eight box jumps with minimal ground contact time. Then rest for at least five minutes. Do this twice a week. The total time under tension during sets should be less than five minutes a week. When I followed this plan, I added 54kg to my max deadlift in eight weeks (up to 215kg without straps) and gained less than 5kg of mass. For relative strength, I’ve never experienced anything like it.
Think you’re too old? Tsatsouline’s father took up this lift in his seventies. He pulled more than 180kg just a few years later, setting several records. In a world of ‘more is better’, sometimes it’s the minimalists who produce miracles. When in doubt – in strength and in all things – remember the maxim of Henk Kraaijenhof, coach of Merlene Joyce Ottey, who won more than 20 medals at the Olympic Games and World Championships: “Do as little as needs, not as much as possible.”
“Sometimes it’s the minimalists who produce the miracles”