Barbell Shrugged - 1RM Back Squats 8 Times Per Day Everyday w/ Max Aita - 287

Episode Date: November 15, 2017

Max Aita is the head weightlifting coach at Juggernaut Training Systems. He has spent the better part of 20 years in the sport of Weightlifting and Powerlifting. He draws his training methodology and knowledge from the many great coaches whom he has personally worked with including; Steve Gough (USA), Ivan Abadjiev (BUL), Boris Sheiko (RUS). Max has produced over half a dozen senior national medalists in Weightlifting, Multiple All time World Record holders in Powerlifting, and has worked with CrossFit Regional and Games level competitors to develop strength and Olympic lifting technique. He also competed in Powerlifting himself. He's a brilliant guy with a ton of knowledge to share, enjoy! -Mike, Doug and Team Barbell Shrugged   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast and Barbell Logic. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Find Barbell Business Here: Website: http://www.BarbellBusiness.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellbusiness Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellbusiness Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellbusinesspodcast

I never had, I was never taught that. Yeah. To clap? Yeah, I got, you know, I got out in the world and I saw people clapping. We were home schooled until we were in like, I don't know, maybe like sixth grade, something like that. Yeah. Were you taught to clap though? I think it was just an innate ability. I mean, it's just, it's genetics, right? The length of my forearms is perfectly suited to clap with the perfect tempo. Leverage. Yeah. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson, Dr. Andy Galpin. We're hanging out here in Orange County with Max Ada.

Ada. Ada. Ada. Ada. Max Ada. We're here in Chad Wesley Smith's backyard. Now the training grounds for Juggernaut. You're the head weightlifting coach for Juggernaut Training Systems.

You split your time between NorCal and SoCal. Yep. I see. And you've been in the sport of weightlifting for 15 years, been competing in powerlifting, coaching people in both sports. You have athletes that are holding world records in both weightlifting and powerlifting.

That's a really incredible feat. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm interested to find out, you know, what it was like going from an athlete to a coach and then the process of improving as both of those things over time. Right, yeah. I'm really curious to hear your background with respect to weightlifting. A lot of people talk about, like, Bulgarian methods and things like that,

but most people have never really trained with anyone or met anyone that has, has that background. You trained with a very well-known weightlifting coach. One of the Bulgarian coaches Abidjeev and, and really, you know, for a decade or more train with those guys. I didn't train with them for a decade, but I was, I lived with them for a period of time. I lived with them. Okay. So yeah, I'm, I'm,

I'm curious to see like from the inside what that training really looks like. Yeah. Cool. I'm actually really interested in tapering and peaking for competitions and how you approach those last week, two weeks, three weeks, or however you go that because you have so many people competing at an elite level, how different those things go and what your approach is. Cool. Yeah. Max, where are you from and how did you find the sport? When I was, I'm from, originally from Montana, Bozeman, Montana. I, in 1996, I was like 12 years old. I saw the 96 Olympics, the highlights of the

Olympic weightlifting competition. Naeem Suleimanalu does his final clean and jerk. Yeah. Wins the meet. They showed, wouldn't even have been eligible for an Instagram clip. It was like two seconds long right that was all the covers they saw of weightlifting but the second I saw that I knew

like that's what I was going to do that's I was going to be a weightlifter like everything in my mind and body was that's my that's my track in life I found a coach when I was about you know 16 17 he happened to be the guy who was chaperoning Naeem at that competition and uh you know 16 17 he happened to be the guy who was chaperoning name at that competition and you know he believed in that system that Bulgarian system of training went through that train with him for years eventually he kind of found out that Abidjayev the the former Bulgarian national coach was coming to the United States to train got got involved with that program, lived with him for a period of time, trained with those guys, learned from Bulgarians, found,

you know, kind of learned the whole thing from the horse's mouth, directly from them. And then, you know, unfortunately got injured later and moved on from being an athlete to a coach. I did some powerlifting from maybe a few years. I was always a pretty good squatter, so I did well there, but I wasn't like an amazing powerlifter. I applied a lot of stuff I learned from that Bulgarian stuff into powerlifting. And then I kind of formulated my own stuff because I realized there were shortcomings from it.

When I would do those kind of workouts, it just wouldn't transfer the way I wanted to my results. You know, it always seemed like it was like there was pieces missing. And so I kind of went on this journey of trying to figure out what was the best strategy to develop, you know, as an athlete. And, you know, still today, learning how to do that stuff and whatnot. I've coached two different people to hold American records in weightlifting, two different people to hold all-time world records in powerlifting, so regardless of Federation, and then you

know a bunch of national champions, American Open champions, and then probably hundreds of other lifters, Masters champions, Masters World Games champions, so World Games champions, so pretty much all levels. And, you know, that was kind of where I'm at now and just trying to learn more and figure out how to get to the next step, right, Worlds and Pan Ams and whatnot. Yeah, great. The idea of training with the Bulgarian method and with people who are in full adoption of that sounds really interesting.

Yeah. And living with people who come from that world sounds sounds really interesting. Yeah. And living with people who are doing, come from that world sounds even more interesting. Yeah. What was that like in that environment? It's, so the main difference I would say in like with the Bulgarians, everything they did was always about like,

this is a job. This is your profession. We had a house. There was a garage that had the platforms in it. It was a gym. And the coach in it, it was a gym. And the coach, Abhijit, demanded that we live in the house with him. So he wanted full control of everything, 24 hours a day, everything was monitored. We couldn't leave the house Monday through Saturday.

One day out of the house, you could kind of leave, you know, but like, it wasn't like you're gonna go out for lunch. Like you're gonna sit there and have lunch with everybody. Eat everything as a team, everything together. Did you date much then? Yeah. Other weightlifters. There was not a lot of privacy either. I actually had a bed in a dining room.

Nice. It was interesting, you know. It was very close-knit, but very serious. Like every day was like this is the regimen, you know? Four hours in the morning, four hours in the evening, maybe two hours at night. Just to back up real quick, because I would love to hear the rest of the story, but for those listeners that aren't super familiar, Suda Monoglou is, I mean, arguably the best weightlifter of all time.

Yeah, hands down the best, yeah. Right? So he won, what, four gold medals? He won three golds in the Olympics, but he was undefeated for about 12 years. The first person to ever clean injured triple body weight it wasn't the first but he had the highest above so he had I'm close on my detail yeah yeah and then his coach of course because he was Turkish right and then he hurt he was Bulgarian moved to Turkey right and that whole story is pretty amazing he moved to Turkey because he was being oppressed by the Bulgarians

they had to change their names and stuff. And, you know, he him doing that actually caused like a migration of about 300,000 people to Turkey. He was a huge star. Extremely influential in that in history and also culturally there. Right. And so then his coach, Abidjav, is also what's his nickname? The butcher. You know, the funny story with that, he heard that for the first time when he was here, that people call him the butcher. There's a lot of manipulation and shit that goes on. Because you have to, I mean, if you spend any time in that culture, like growing up in communist Bulgaria, I'm sure there's a lot of, you know, you play the victim and

then you're actually the guy who's stabbing someone in the back. But he was like, oh my God, when he heard that term, like, that's not true. It's not true. I'm not the butcher. And yeah, well, of course,, when he heard that term, like, that's not true, it's not true, I'm not the butcher. And, yeah, well, of course, like, no one's gonna be like, yep, that's me. That sums it up. You know, he was, but yeah, he was like offended by that

and felt really like hurt by that name. Why do people call him that though? You know, so, I don't know if you guys know a lot about the Bulgarian system. I think a better term for it is the Bulgarian era. So there was a period of time, late 60s, 70s, and 80s, for all of weightlifting, where the results just skyrocketed. They got rid of the press in the early 70s.

Getting rid of that forced a new type of athlete, faster, more explosive, more athletic type of athlete, only the snatch and clean and jerk. Numbers came up a ton because all the training volume went to those, but even more so than that, the drugs entered the scene way more prolifically. So, countries systematized the drug, the doping routine. We all know that from the documentary Icarus and stuff.

That in combination with what Abhijayev did, he kind of pioneered the idea of of like eliminating anything that wasn't going to produce the results. So most programs away lifting, you have guys doing, you know, general training, squats and pulls and presses and bodybuilding, maybe some cardio and stuff. A whole bunch of complexes, lower repetitions, you know, or sorry, lower volume, lower intensities, you know, maybe 75 to 80% for technique work. And then, you know, maximum weights here and there throughout the program. Abhijay have just slowly whittled that away. And he went from having, you know, an arsenal of a hundred exercises down to about six was snatch, clean and jerk, power snatch, power, clean, jerk, and front squat. Maybe back squat sometimes. I heard him say one time that if I have an athlete

that's hurt or something and they need a corrective exercise, well he didn't use corrective, but something along the lines of corrective exercise, that we'd let them do something different like a back squat. So I, great example, yeah. So I was, we'd have the structure Monday, the structure for the day was always Monday, Wednesday, Friday, four exercises in the morning.

So you do snatch, you do squat to maximum, 30 minute break, snatch to maximum, 30 minute break, clean and jerk to maximum, 30 minute break, squat to maximum, 30 minute break, or sorry, squat to maximum, then you break for lunch, come back like four hours later. Same thing in the evening. When you got hurt, I once like tweaked my elbow or something,

all those exercises became back squat to maximum. So eight times a day, back squat 30 minute break maximum 30 minute break maximum 30 minute break for four days in a row I did that and all sunny elbow felt better I will say I think there's I think there's definitely some of that going on in the program right because you know how many times you get a guy who's in there training for 25, 30 hours in a week and be like, fuck this, I'm done. Like, oh, my hand hurts. Yeah, yeah. Like, okay, just squat.

I'm like, fuck, now my legs are going to hurt so bad, right? But, you know, like within four days, I put like 30 kilos on my back squat. What? Yeah, I mean, it was just like, it was awful, you know? I was like, everything hurt, but I learned a ton about that, that experience and where I had come from initially, because we use the same system. So when I got to Abhijayev, I already had a base of that. I understood, you know, heavy singles all the time, no assistance exercises, basically maximum is the only intensity that matters. Um, so it wasn't like super uncomfortable

for me to get involved in it it was just the the regiment was so serious it's like if you were a guy who does like you know you like to garden on your own and you know it's like fun you enjoy it it's like your hobby then you get working for a landscape guy and he's like hey you gotta work work work work eight hours a day you're doing it you start to hate it right right it's similar that's like if you're doing it as a hobby it feels great as soon as you got to work, work, work, work. Eight hours a day, you're doing it. You start to hate it. Right. Right? It's similar to that. It's like if you're doing it as a hobby, it feels great. As soon as you have to do it, every single session, every single exercise. And when you say no, well, you don't think of saying no because you don't want to hear the outcome of that. But when you think like, I just don't want to do this, you got to do this thing, this thing they would call Krushka.

Right? this thing this thing they would call crushka right so there's this Bulgarian sort of slang term crushka means to sort of like sandbag or or in some cases like you kind of bullshit your way through it like like best example is there's two good examples one is when we'd squat Abhaj would always sit in the exact same spot so you only look at one piece of the bar you only see the left side so we'd have guys they would put four bumpers on one side and two on the other so the total weight of the bar was 200 kilos but it looks like 250 and they do it they'd make it look they just step sideways so it was balanced and they make it look hard they drop it but oh god so most I can do and he'd be like

okay fine fine that's good for today another good example same thing with cleaning jerk I've seen thing with clean and jerk. I've seen guys snatch clean and jerk with crooked bars. We would sit there. We weren't allowed to have cell phones in the gym. So my friend, Martine, whose father was a bronze medalist in the Olympics, he would come in with his phone. He would dial the house number on the phone.

And he'd be like, you know, the phone would ring. He'd hide his phone. And he'd be like, Stasci like the translates to like uncle right it's like a it's like a term for respect like a respected you know senior person like the phones ring the phones ringing and he'd be like oh shit like maybe it's your daughter from Bulgaria maybe she's calling and he'd run out of the room he run the room Martine would jump up stand up go to the bar which is loaded with like 160 put on 200 grab the one side of it lift it up wait for him to come nearby and then slam it on the ground

and then stumble back like oh and abu jay would come and be like there was no one on the phone what did you do like i did 200 it was it was hard and he'd be like okay that's good for this morning we'll just go back. So there's a ton of like, there's a lot of that that needs to go into the story of what the Bulgarian is, right? Bulgarian system is, there's a lot of underlying things there. People kind of bullshitting their way through it and stuff.

But yeah. It's a hardcore system, but people will have to like navigate it and get creative. I mean, it's, I think that's the essence of the system is if I just throw, if I just throw everything at everybody, they'll figure out what they can do. And I know that the most specific exercises, just that five exercises we do is going to be the best exercises for them. If we dump a ton of training on them, they'll, they'll sort out what they can do.

And if we push them super hard and there's 15 guys in a gym competing against each other, you're going to get good results. Sure, people are going to get hurt. People are going to fall off the side. They can't do it. But that's not what we're looking for. We're Bulgaria looking to compete against Russia. It's not I'm a coach trying to make you the best you can be. It's I just need to win.

However I do that, these are my tools, my soldiers to do that. Because that was the primary impotence, right? Where, I mean, at the time he was favoring specificity, which is in direct opposition to the Russian approach at the time, the periodization approach, everything they were flying. So part of me felt like that was a major action specifically to beat them, right?

Yeah, I mean, that's something that's kind of interesting. People don't know the political scene then because Bulgaria hated Russia. Yeah. Bulgaria hates Russia. He was a figurehead in that, spearheading that. He told us that he had offers that the Russians came to him and said, hey, coach the national team here. They tried to bring him over.

They tried to do all this stuff, but he refused. So there was a lot of tension there between those. So that elevated the competition. If it's these famous rivalries in sports, those are where competition really escalates. If you just have one country, it's not because they did max out Snatch Klandrick every day that they were that great. It's that combined with the intensity of your enemy is Russia and you hate them. You have 15 other guys pushing you, there's every possible person in that room is trying to drive you to get better,

that's where you get these huge results. It doesn't come from the magic of, because I could write the system down on a napkin and snatch, clean, jerk, squat maximum as often as you can. There's really nothing special there. Yeah. As we've traveled around and we've interviewed a lot of different people

and we see the best in the world, the thing that we keep on finding is it's the training environment. Right. So often it's like, oh, there's this system or that system. And it's like, well, the system is, can be good or not great or whatever. But when you've got, like you were saying,

15 people all competing against each other, that's the magic. For sure, for sure. And you have like, you're like limited spots. So your team isn't gonna be one guy per weight class. You got like six here and that's it. And you got nine classes or whatever. So you're kind of screwed where it's like, okay, not all of us, so even the little guys are competing

against the big guys, cause there's only so many spots. So I mean, that's the essence of the system you know so you you left that house you left the yeah you weren't training with them anymore yeah i take it and then you moved on to what so that i i ended up moving back to montana because that just you know things were that kind of closed down that changed i moved back to mont and then I came back out to California to work at you guys know California strength yeah Dave was kind of the mastermind he brought in Abidjaev I came back out to help start that work there we worked there for a while we had a bunch of guys come through that was a very different scenario that was all kind of built up

as a like well what do we do now this thing's gone um i was training there i got injured got hurt and uh ended up kind of being booted out of an ath the athletic you know spot i was in focused on coaching after maybe like a year of being hurt um i i ended up walking to a crossfit gym one day and saw there was a powerlifting competition. And I had kind of been like, I basically had been like depressed sitting on the couch every night, like drunk, because I was just like, this is over, you know, I can't lift again. And then I found this powerlifting meet and I was like, you know, if I'm training and whatnot, I should go ahead and do something.

And so I squatted a bunch and trained for this and got involved in that. And it was fun. I mean, I met Mark Mark Bell Jesse Burdick those guys kind of helped me you know sort out some stuff and I did some training like that tried a bunch of different kind of training that hadn't done before because up until that point all I had done was you know back squat eight times a day and it just was like it's like at some point you kind of like you realize like well shit this doesn't work this doesn't really work in the long term.

And so I got in contact with a Russian powerlifting coach, Boris Sheiko. And he really was instrumental in helping me sort through the fact that there's a lot of different kind of training out there. A lot of different stuff you can do. Did a bunch of his programs, trained with him for a bit. Got a lot better, learned a bunch. And then I really started to branch out and say, you know, I gotta do different stuff. I gotta apply this stuff differently to weightlifters.

And that's where I kinda went down that road, you know, finding my own system, I guess, for different people. So if you're back squatting eight times a day up to your daily max, so to speak, like what does that feel like? A lot of people, they might max back squat a couple times a year, and when they put it on their back it feels really heavy does it does it

not feel heavy after a while because you're so used to it yeah you know there there would be a point so so a lot of it goes when you when you train with different volumes different intensities different repetitions you you adapt to those so there's adaptations that take place you do set to 10 after a few weeks of doing that you kind of are accustomed to what that feels like. The same with this, but if you just keep going with these heavy weights all the time, because there's really not a lot of fatigue from doing one rep. And you can kind of do that over and over and over again. You're gonna get to a point where you're sort of generally tired all the time, but you're very strong. There were days I could walk in the gym without warm-up at all and squat 600 pounds.

Just put it on the bar and do a squat. No, no, nothing. Um, so you get into that place where it's like, it's just routine. It's just this everyday thing. You don't even notice what's going on, right? It's just everyday feels numb and the same. Your legs hurt, your knees hurt, whatever it is. But after you get to that top weight, it almost feels like it's effortless it's kind of hard to describe it's like there'll be days without the J of first first thing in the morning you get a bed you can't bend your knee you stumble down the stairs you know like a penguin you go in the gym you put 70 kilos on and it's the most awful feeling in the world normally

you just quit right there mm-hmm you put 120 on squat that's a little bit better 170 still feels like shit 220 kilos okay it feels a little better your maximum let's say is 240 you go 230 and it feels like effortless it's just like wow that's great and then you try 40 or something and maybe you make it or miss it but that would be it i mean it was just like only the heavy weights feel good so all the lightweights all all those things were just shit. And you have to have the mental kind of fortitude to stick with it and just kind of gut out like,

okay, I know it's gonna be okay. I know I'm not gonna die. I know I'm not gonna get hurt. I'm just gonna keep going and get to these numbers. And then when you hit those, it was like, everything flipped over and it felt great. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's take a break real quick. And I'm glad that we've covered your athlete development here because I've never heard anyone go through anything like that. And it's been really refreshing. I think a lot of people who have been exposed to the ideas of Bulgarian methods or, you know, the Bulgarian era, that's been really cool. I want to find out on the second half how you're transitioning to a coach

and what that style is like now. Cool. We're back with Max Ada and in the first half we talked about your development as an athlete and the Bulgarian stuff was just so good to get into. And I'm curious now, you started developing as a coach and you were being exposed to other systems and you developed your own. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. So biggest problem I found with the Bulgarian stuff is that, you know, and straight from the horse's mouth, it just relied on drugs. And so when you're

not taking drugs, you're always, you're getting a certain amount of progress. Then you hit a wall and then it's over and then you're like, okay. And you just don't go anywhere. Maybe you back off. Maybe you get a little injury that causes you to rest you come back you make a pr it's like random reinforcement right it's like you're you're playing a blackjack at the table like and every now and then you hit you're like oh the next one's going to be good but it's just not there so so specificity is great for peaking but not necessarily development right and exactly there's no developmental phase it keeps you in shape at this this plateau for a really long time really well. You can always compete 99% of your best or 95% of your best basically any day of the

week, but when you need to excel beyond that, it's not there. My system changed a lot where I backed away from that. I looked at what lifters needed. I saw, okay, what's our general development for these guys? Do they have enough GPP? Are they strong enough? Do they lack different strengths in different areas? What other qualities we need to train? And then we built a program that had a phasic structure. So there's like a general phase that lasts a certain amount of time based on how old the athlete, how close to competition they

are, how strong they are. That's all basic stuff. High repetition movements, more technical work, more basic technical work. And then like a strength phase that's more intense, more directed at the specific technique that they do in weightlifting. So the exercises become more complex. And then a peaking phase that's much more designed to, you know, elicit the result that's better than you would have in training. So ultimately the Bulgarian system felt to me like it was the sum of the parts is equal to the sum of the parts, maybe even slightly less. This system, this phasic structure was the sum of the parts is equal or is greater than the whole. So, you know, different components trained, peaking,

trained strength, trained all to the point where at the competition, you do your best lifting. So that was a big change for my system. And I learned a lot of that from just different sources. The Russians, a bunch of different texts, just lots of different people I was getting information from. What are some of those texts?

So Dr. Isserin is an Israeli coach. He had a bunch of great information. Bondarchuk, throws coach from Russia really really good also Shako had a ton of great information on that stuff and then just talking in person people there's some of the guys that came here that's a lot more later like Vladimir Sasson Saffinov he's coaching some people here and then you know just other US coaches too that had good experience with learning different systems or coming from that side of the spectrum, right, more general, more phasic and structure,

and just kind of developing from there. If someone wanted to read those texts, like where would they go? Are they hard to find? No, those are easy. You can just Google them. I'm sure on Amazon they have some of them. On Bondarchuk's stuff, you might have to go to ultimateathleteconcepts.com. Might have it.

I don't know if that's where it is. Yose so joseph's got them uh but yeah those those are pretty readily available yeah so if you're if you're a gym owner and you're you're trying to make a living training people like volume of people in your gym right or somewhat so if you're doing bulgarian method like it it doesn't work well for training a lot of people necessarily compared to if you just need like a dozen folks to be world champions. Yeah, exactly. Right. If you've got if you got you three guys come to me and I throw the Bulgarian system on you, maybe one of you survives and does well. Probably not.

Not me. It's not going to be me. Mike's going to be hiding behind that tree. He's going to be Kreshka the whole day. So he's going to disappear, right? I can do it. What did you do today, Mike? Ah, 150.

Okay, good. You're done. I'm very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, Pounds! But you know, if you guys all came and say, Hey, what is it that you, you know, your body type, the way you move, the areas you're deficient in, here's the structure we're going to use.

Everyone's going to apply the same structure, this general, more specific, more specific, but your exercises are different than Andy's, which are different than Mike's, and then your volumes are different than these two. So it's a much more individualized program. How do you identify what to do for everyone? So, shameless plug here, I wrote a book,

The Weightlifting Technique Triad. That's not shameless at all. So in the book, what I do, I break down basically the technique into really simple components how high you pull the bar the time it takes you to get under the bar to receive it and then the trajectory of the bar those different aspects everyone's got to do everyone is in that same boat you all have the exact same mechanics you have to execute selecting exercises based on which one of those is deficient. You know,

are you slow under the bar? Are you not moving on the bar? Well, here's the exercises we're going to pick that are going to fix that, right? If you're, you know, if you are really strong, but you just can't get the bar in the right place, your trajectory is off. Then we have other sets of exercises that work to fix that. And then, you know, same here. If you can't pull the bar high enough, then, you know, you're squatting eight times a day. But in all reality, there's exercises for that. So I just kind of broke it down into, here's how we make this a simple process, the major components of technique that need to be worked,

and then how to apply what exercises to those components. If you have confusion as to like, what does a hang snatcher do versus a block snatch? This is what the book will answer. Do you have standards for any of those things? I don't have standards because it's difficult. People come to you from a totally different background. Your background in weightlifting

is very different than his. So to say you have to snatch from the hang 95% of your best snatch, otherwise you're out of balance, isn't really accurate because your body type is totally different than his. He might be at 100% of his best snatch from the floor. You know, it's not a good overall rating system to say it's got to be this percentage. There's no ideals.

We can say, though, that this exercise is going to make you faster under the bar. That's across the board, right? So you're just eyeballing it with somebody and saying, oh, it doesn't look like you're pulling it high enough. Here's some exercise. Yeah, so, you know, we have in the book, there's some equations that are kind of simple. If you take a video yourself, you can look how high you pull the bar relative to your own height. If you're a guy who power snatches or power cleans more than you can squat lift, right?

Like, right off the bat, you fall into this category. So you can just go from that and say, okay, I need this group of exercise to help me with that. Or if you're a guy who, like, I'm really strong, I got a huge squat, but I can't get the bar in the right spot, I always miss it behind, or I always miss it in front. Okay, you have these exercises, they're gonna help you. What are some exercises for trajectory issues?

Trajectory stuff, so. I imagine most people are lifting, the trajectory thing is likely one of the most common things. Right, and you're always practicing the lifts, so you're always gonna be practicing your sport to get better at it. The trajectory stuff is important, the trajectory stuff so you're always gonna be practicing your sport to get better at it. The trajectory stuff is important, or the trajectory stuff that you're gonna do

is stuff that puts a condition on the lift. So don't move your feet. Because as soon as you can't move your feet, you can't jump forward, you can't jump back, otherwise you're not gonna be successful. Eliminating a hook grip. So if you don't use a hook grip, you're forced into a position

where you can't get as much explosion out of you, you can't get as much power out of your hip, so you can't deflect the bar as much. I've done a, there was a point where you can't get as much explosion out of you. You can't give as much power to your hip. So you can't deflect the bar as much. I've done, I've done a, there was a point where I was doing no feet, no hook. Yeah. And yeah, things got really smooth. Right. And your trajectory gets really good. It's not the best at making you, you know, way, way faster under the bar. Right. A little bit.

Cause they, everything has a little bit of everything in it. That's why there's a triad with the little Venn diagram, right? It all kind of blends together. See? See, right? But, uh, I thought it was just a color picture. It's a great, it's a great cover.

But, uh, you know, everything blends together with everything else, but things are emphasizing that more. So if you do that stuff, your trajectory is going to get better and better and better. What about for jerks? For jerk? Same kind of stuff.

Things from behind the neck, put the bar behind the neck right away you're going to be reinforcing better technique because the bar is in the place you want it to be you're going to learn that final position also with a jerk a lot of times people mess up the start position so the start position the jerk is super important a lot of people just want to make things really easy and say okay shove all your weight back to your heels and just drive as hard as you can but that's not entirely accurate. The way I was taught to jerk by the European guys is a lot different than what I learned as a lifter.

If you're interested in improving your weightlifting technique, you can go to flightweightlifting.com to download for free our 54-page Olympic Weightlifting Training Guide. It covers the snatch, the jerk, the clean, all aspects of those lifts from first pull transition, second pull, the third pull where you're pulling under the bar, etc. We have videos attached to it. We have two weeks worth of programming. It's a fucking awesome, awesome, awesome guide. Go to flightweightlifting.com and check it out. You mentioned before the break, kind of quickly, but I thought it was really a sneaky smart comment about how intensity is not

really what drives fatigue it's really more volume right so that being said how do you manage people tapering and peaking for competition so so all we define tapering or peaking right we just want to have a result at a competition that's higher than it would have been had we not tapered or peaked, right? So some kind of super compensation. When we're tapering for a competition, it really depends what the person did prior to the meet. If all you did was train three days a week, working up to a maximum single, your taper is irrelevant.

You don't need a taper because you're gonna lose fitness too quickly if you do no work. If you've been doing- Welcome to my life. Right. You're always ready though, that's the key. Always ready. You're always tapered. Constantly losing weight. Five-year taper. Yeah. If you're... No, it's only been three and a half. If you're doing a thousand repetitions a month above 70%, I mean that's an enormous workload. Your taper is gonna have to be longer because the amount of time it takes to decay

the fatigue generated from that volume is longer than if it was less volume. Yeah, because fatigue's very transient. Right. Right. Right, so in the sense, everyone's different with a taper. Older, more experienced, stronger, more male or male lifters.

More male. Some lifters are more male, more female. Yeah, that's true. So more to that side of the spectrum is gonna be a longer, larger taper than a younger, smaller, female, less experienced lifter. They're gonna need less time to recover. And that's pretty given.

For the most part, the first thing you're gonna do is reduce volume. So most weightlifters are going to taper for about seven to ten days right that would really the actual taper and that's going to be if you plan back from the competition the day of the meet or the day before the meet you're going to do basically nothing maybe you just stretch out and move the bar around a couple days before that you have a really light workout that might be you know up to about 65 70 percent a few days before that a little bit heavier workout a that might be you know up to about 65 70 percent a few days

before that a little bit heavier workout a little bit more volume maybe up to 80 percent for singles or maybe even your openers uh you know for a few singles then maybe some squatting or pulling that's that's still low volume right under 40 or 50 total reps the whole workout before that you're going to have again a little bit larger right so it's like a wedge just gets bigger and bigger and bigger till you get close to where your original volume was for that training cycle for like a bulgarian system when you taper it's going to be very different the taper is really short and it's very very close to the meat because you're doing so little volume even though you're training all day every day it's all single repetitions right the the recovery curve on that is very small.

It's not going to take you very long to recover from a heavy clean and jerk versus recovering from five triples in the pull, five triples in the squat, and then, you know, 22 reps in the snatch and various snatch exercises. Make sense? Yeah, yeah. Main thing with a taper is that you decay fatigue as best you can without losing fitness. So if you're deloading or tapering and you come out of it and you feel like you're in worse shape,

you did too little, right? If you come out of the taper and you feel weak and not strong, right? Like kind of the opposite where you feel like you did, didn't do enough, you're still fatigued, you're tired, but you feel kind of strongish, then you gotta reduce the amount of volume you do during the taper.

And the taper stuff is very individual for each person. Some people recover really quick, some people less so. Some people who, like for example, people with kind of weak legs, generally struggle if you reduce the volume of squatting too fast, too much, because they're gonna lose fitness really quick. So those people might do a little more squatting volume in general during that period of time just to maintain fitness in the

legs. Is there much assistance work going on at any point during this continuum? Again, if the fitness or the assistance work, like we're talking kind of bodybuilding type stuff, is probably going to be done about six days, five days out. Again, it just depends. If you're going to lose a ton of fitness in your upper back or something from not doing your pull-ups you know it might make you feel off and technique and stuff you're just not going to do workloads that are disruptive so if you need to do like some pull-ups and feel your lats so they feel like you can engage them in the lift then by all means go ahead and do enough of that to keep that feeling and to keep that fitness there but if you do too little of it and you go into the meet

and you're like, my lats feel like rubber, I can't get what I want out of it, then you've kind of made a mistake. You're certainly not gonna do enough to be disruptive to the rest of the training, right? Well, what are some of the main non-Olympic movements? Like not snatch, clean jerk, or squatting, but what else do you typically throw into your programs?

For us, the main ones are gonna be a lot of pulling exercises, special kinds of pulls, where maybe a snatch deadlift, where you stop in a certain position, snatch pulls from different positions, clean pulls, push presses, snatch grip push presses, overhead squats, back squat, front squat, belt squats, things that really augment those muscles

that we're trying to develop in each person. The same kind of arsenal you see usually, probably a little bit more towards the higher repetition side of stuff. So we'll do sets of eight and 10, the squat, whereas that wouldn't really never happen with either of the other systems. That's kind of more of, I think, an American offshoot of training. But yeah, I mean, basically all the, all the different variety of pulls and presses and push presses and such.

Do you feel like people that are maybe, say, a year, they've been training for a year, maybe they've done one or two competitions, do you feel like they need more specificity in the movement or more of these hangs and different... So that's where I think the, if you look at the progression of a lifter, day one, they come in the gym, obviously they need to train and do all the general training.

So we're talking just weightlifting practice, snatch and clean and jerk. Maybe from different positions, from blocks, from the hang, but that initial period of time, you need to learn how to lift. And doing too much variety can hinder that right so you also don't need to do almost any like strength exercises it's beneficial to do less of that early on because you don't need a lifter becoming super strong when they don't know how

to lift yet early in the career it's going to look kind of like the bulgarian system not as intense but right lots of snatch and clean and jerk, a lot of technical practice, lightweights, a variety of different intensities so they learn how to apply force the right way. And then the intermediate, you know, years three to six or seven is going to be a little more strength stuff, a little more variety. Years three to six to seven. Not weeks. The first, yeah. First years, the first couple of years is mostly the lifts. We're talking like a kid, right? Yeah, sure. Because if you come in day one and you're Mike Bledsoe, day one, give me a 12-week program,

you might be skewed more towards some strength stuff because that's going to help you. Years three to six is going to be a little more strength exercises, more variety of technical exercises so they can learn the nuances of the technique. And then six years and on, it's way more shifted to high intensity snatch, clean and jerk, and very, very heavy on the strength exercises, right? So it's almost a pendulum.

As you started off very specific, then you got more general, and then you got more specific again. Exactly. What about for the 24 year old that came in, maybe played high school football, I'm starting weightlifting every year. So those guys are always an individual case. What what does this guy have what's his thing abu jay have had

a great this great analogy i like to apply this it's one more story about him um we were all sitting in the garage one day and someone asked him a question what's what's the best exercise for an athlete and he's like i don't understand he had a translator like i don't understand the question what do you mean he's like well let's say you have two people that are individual, two people that are identical people, right? And you give one guy this exercise, another guy that exercise. Which one's going to be a better athlete after? Which one's going to get more out of this?

He talks. This is great because he's Bulgarian, right? He speaks for like 13 minutes, just words and words when you're like, what is this answer? What's the answer? The translator turns around and says, he says, no, two people are the same. It was like straight off a movie, right? Because he's just talking and talking and talking. He's talking shit about you the whole time.

I'm sure, yeah. That is what he really said, you know? But to me, that was really eye-opening because here's a guy, 50 years of coaching experience, and his answer is like, I can't give you an answer to that because no two people are the same. Beautiful. As you coached world record holders, what was that process like? No two people are the same. Right.

What is the process that you took them through? What did you find in common and what was not in common the the the thing i found with with most record holders i've coached is mindset is huge they they are they put themselves first right so they're always a little bit they're gonna be on that edge of like this guy's kind of a dick that guy's kind of a dick right it's just the way it is because you've got to put yourself first because everything you're doing is focused on you making this huge performance. In powerlifting with the world records, the stuff they did, the people were very different. They're both women.

One lady was, as a scientist, super methodical, just insanely regimented, was eating out of Tupperware bodybuilding meals at 17 in high school for 30 years was doing that. So just like you're talking like OCD, but day in, day out, perfect, flawless execution of everything. The other girl, very different, same mentality, but much more energetic, much more like every day I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this technique down today. I'm going to fix this. I'm going to do whatever I have to to make that work. Programs were different.

One lady trained a lot lower volume, much more intense weights. Other lady trained much higher volumes, much more frequently. One girl was about 114 pounds, the other girl was about 165. And weightlifting, similar kind of thing, right? Very, very regimented, very, very organized.

Their training very like, this day is gonna be this workout, I'm gonna do everything to make this perfect. And then a fixation on the process. So instead of goal orientation, no one was focusing on the record. We're always focusing on the process. You come in the gym. If your workout is doing three sets of three snatch pull to the hip, every single rep you're going to do, you're going to put everything you have to make it perfect, right? If you're doing, if you're doing, you know, cleaning jerks, the same thing. Every single day, you're going to do, you're going to put everything you have to make it perfect. Right. If you're doing, if you're doing, you know, cleaning jerks, the same thing every single day, you're going to focus on making them better rather than I got to do this number. I got to hit 200. I got to hit 150.

Right. It's, it's the process is, is a huge thing. Same for the weightlifters. Same for the weightlifters, same for the powerlifters. Yeah. Other than living with Jiv and most of us, well, we can't get that experience anymore yeah right unfortunately he just passed recently yeah but other than living with a really developed coach uh what are other things that helped you develop as a coach besides those books and living with them you know the probably the two biggest things one is just experience just practicing just trying right um i mean? I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of unfortunate people have to be your guinea pig, but you know, when I started coaching, it was

like, whatever came through the door, that was what I had to work with. And I just tried to do my best with that person. And you learn along the way as you go, you're going to, okay, Hey, this just doesn't work. This, this system, as much as I want these answers to be right, it's just not right. So getting hands dirty trying it learning practicing and then the other is is really just making friends with people that are better at it than you right find coaches that are good they don't have to be the best they just have to be a little better than you and you have to learn from what they do right sometimes what better it's something else right overall better for sure all this coach just has yeah insanely good at this one thing yeah learn about

that for sure getting in touch with weightlifting coaches helped me in powerlifting and then vice versa. Powerlifting coaches gave me a very different perspective on the process for weightlifting. So those are the two big ones. I know. Max, thanks for joining us today. Yeah. I really liked the distinction you made

between Bulgarian system and Bulgarian era. Yeah. That helps, I think, put a lot of, a spin on it allows people to digest what's actually going on there nice thanks i like sharing how you classify lifters into people that can't pull the bar high enough they can't get under the bar fast enough or or they they have the the bar trajectory that's off and that's how you help select different exercises to help them become a

better weight lifter excellent i was really actually happy to hear the detail you gave on the tapering and peaking stuff so exactly what to do do, day out, three, four, five days out. That was awesome. Yeah, awesome. Max, where can people find out more about you? You guys can find me on Instagram, Max underscore Aida. How do you spell Aida? A-I-T-A.

There you go. You can find me on Facebook, and you can email me, maxjtsstrength.com, if you have questions on any kind of remote coaching we do, or online programming. And then you check out my book, The Weightlifting Technique Triad at store.jtsstrength.com, I believe. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah.

And thanks to Chad Wesley Smith over there in the corner. Yeah, yeah. Look at those beautiful blue eyes. Give it a little shake out here. Making his home available so that we can come and knock out some shows and hang out with you guys. Really appreciate it. Make sure to go over to iTunes, 5 Star Review, Positive Comment. And go over to YouTube, we've got tons of videos. Subscribe so you don't miss any of them.

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