Submaximal Training and Chinese Weightlifting Methods

and so lately what I've looked at too doing the weight lifting I kind of went from that American style and said well who has the most medalists in the world the Chinese so I went to a Chinese coach and I had a Chinese coach start writing my programming just because I wanted to see how they did it and what the difference in the way they lifted was and why it's so economical and so efficient one of the things i found was they do a lot of submaximal work like they do a ton of work but it's a lot of sets not that many reps in stupidly low volume and so we started to integrate some of that in which is like okay instead of going in and hitting like a three by three why don't you just do a ten by three and do it at like somewhere around like 60 to 70 percent and just use the volume to create the stimulus so you take the pressure off the joint so you take the pressure off the heart take pressure off the circulatory system we find that works really well it's just hard to get people to understand that you don't have to lift at like one two three rep maximums to progress and you you don't have to do a ton of stimulatory reps for that to happen you can overcome that if you give it enough volume and focus on your technique yeah yeah and i find so the hard thing with that like in that uh we we talk about is like uh i don't know what what kind of percentage you're talking about for 10 by 3 like 60 70 somewhere in there yeah but that kind of yeah like like four or five reps from failure something like that don't forget as well the percentages are a bit fucked up with weightlifting yeah yeah i'm talking more power to you but yeah because well part of it too is because weightlifting is faster your main vector is acceleration yeah the weight so then you have to kind of you start thinking we could throw about a bunch of stuff like looking at like uh velocity based training and things like that and saying okay well i'm going to focus if i'm if i'm a power lifter i don't want to relate to that i need to focus on moving the bar as fast as possible out of the hole right so then you get a push push band or you get a what's the new and i got the flex device you saw me using that in here that one time and start using that as training loads and saying well i'm gonna instead of using mass as my main vector i'm gonna use acceleration and try to equalize those two so that i take some of the stimulus off the joint stimulus off the heart and then just drive that into actually accelerating the bar and focusing on more technique based stuff for a while yeah because with our approach um with the palatine side obviously completely different we're not a speed sport yeah it's not a when i talk about skill with the power lifts usually i'm talking high end because getting under one arm is very different from getting under 60 but that yeah it might be an almost complete i would always categorize them different lifts like if they're the same fundamentals but there's no way you can challenge it in the same way it's definitely a skill to lift really heavy and uh my argument was always kind of like it's just not the same like it's not it's just not the same thing just like you and i have had talks about certain treatment modalities and and things you would do to make yourself feel better when you're not training but you can't do that when you put 300 kilos in your back it all kind of goes out the window yeah yeah right um but when we look at yeah well there's other attributes how do you how do you marry these two things up together right so it's like how many say how many total high-end work sets are you going to get in the workout like what's what's the normal that people would get just of the skill list of sbd usually just a few you know yeah so three top end sets or so yeah yeah if you're doing well so would you agree that i'd say not more than five yeah and you've got to look at that between what would a beginner do versus someone say at your level yeah yeah that's totally different right yeah because like obviously if they're heavy even if it is relatively easy for you if it's still heavy like it's going to accumulate a bit more fatigue and then once you get to a certain point of fatigue everyone's a little bit different but get to a point where you're a little bit and then you're not getting any more skill out of it just because you're like you're yeah 100 but if we look at something like you say somebody has rampant blood pressure what going to happen if they keep hitting 3x3 at say an 85 yeah yeah yeah you see so it like you might think well is it going to be conducive to try to push through it and just pray that my heart my blood pressure and heart rate goes down or what if I put two to three weeks of this in and I just say well I'll just do nine sets of three at say 75 instead of three by three at 85 let let my cardiovascular system catch up and then jump back in and see what happens because three four weeks is that going to make is that going to make anyone's max go down or their skill deteriorate no no i was also thinking a much longer period than that for sure in a lot of cases they do need longer periods depends on how bad you get it but if you if someone just kept marching forward and didn't insert those kind of least mode weeks as we'll call it or those least mode phases you could you could conceivably have um periods where you said okay i'm going to start let's say how long your cycle is going to be. Maybe you're doing 16, 20 weeks of a prep. And you're like, okay, I get in six weeks and all of a sudden I see my blood pressure changing, but it's not bad. But then by week eight, man, my blood pressure getting real fucked up and I'm feeling tired and I don't feel like I'm training. My joints starting to hurt. My heart rate's going, my sleep's all fucked up. I've got digestive issues or whatnot. I love the point. I do appreciate it, but it's like, is it going to derail you that much to say, let me just take two weeks and just work on skill development and just do a show. Yeah. And let everything try to catch up. There's a deload to people and they would understand that. Yeah. And that maybe that's the semantics we need to use is it, well, we're going to use a deload so that they don't think it's some type of pussy week time to slack off. Cuck week. Yeah. Cuck week. I reckon that's going to take off after this. For sure. Alternating periodization, cuck phase, fuck phase. buy my book yeah we've done similar like we've for us it was more uh like it's very similar the same overarching principles and and thought action just slightly different way of programming it is like um uh minimum effective dose of skill in an off season or during a restoration phase or whatever you want to call it with a lot more variation for joints and for all the rest of benefits that come with it um and inherently a lot less usually like a lot less weight yeah comes with that uh and usually we're using constraints like uh barb the front scores i don't know whatever it is to like limit that further uh and the volume dosing is much more in that way just like pure minimum and then lots of other stuff and then obviously like in a prep it'll be flipped it'll be like maximal recoverable sbd skill work stuff that's going to actually drive this forward and and then enough of just a small dosage of that other stuff to kind of keep you feeling all right. Yeah, 100%.