Thread: Interview with Charles Poliquin

Interesting topics and ideas in the interview.

Part One:

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=555096

Part Two:

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=559121&pageNo=0


From Part One:

TC: Since we were talking about rep schemes, there’s a big push in bodybuilding to do a lot fewer reps than what was traditionally advocated. I’m talking about 8 sets of 3 and typically, according to what you used to say at least, that was more or less for strength and not for hypertrophy. What are your thoughts on that?

CP: True, when you’re prescribing it for a short time. You can definitely hypertrophy on sets of three, it just takes longer. But the advantage is you get strong at the same time. The thing is that most bodybuilders don’t grow because they’re too weak. If you do 8 sets of 3 or do cluster training or whatever, you use maximal weights, and your body will learn to recruit high-threshold motor units.

Let’s say if a guy can do 250 for 8 in the bench press, and his pecs are at their limit. He can then go on a strength cycle. Let’s see, if he does 250 for 8, his max should be about 320. If he goes on a strength cycle and gets his bench up to 360, then when he does his sets of 8, he can now do 280. And because he can use 280, his pecs are going to grow. Because then he has used enough weight, long enough, to stimulate growth.

But look at Olympic lifters, they never do more than 6 reps, but they have huge thighs and traps, because they’ve done it long enough. What people don’t know, the reason muscle hypertrophies is that it’s easier for muscle to hypertrophy than it is to recruit more motor units. It’s basically the body’s laziness, so, if you go and tap into new motor units and go back and do sets of 8 with your new max, you will grow.

Conversely, the opposite is true. You have guys, for example, who go into the weight room and they lift every day, and their lifts have not improved since Jimmy Carter was President, Well, I ask them, "What’s your best for 8 reps?" and they say, "I don’t know, 250," and I say "Try training with only 8-rep sets and get that max up to 270, and then go back to heavy training."

So if you haven’t gained strength in a long while, you have to hypertrophy the fibers.


More:

TC: Probably the most popular article I’ve been associated with in any way, shape, matter or form, was your article on German Volume Training about 10 years ago in Muscle Media 2000. Have you come up with any new techniques that you use on your guys that might have the same sort of impact on the weight-training world?

CP: Here’s one thing that I figured out, I’ve been reading a lot about Chinese medicine for the last 10 years, and in Chinese medicine they always talk about the elements. If you look at it, it actually applies to athletes.

They used to say, in the early 70’s, there are two types of guys who can train; you have a guy who reacts to volume, and a guy who reacts to intensity. And then, Anatoly Bondarchuk, who used to coach elite level hammer throwers, in fact had Olympic Gold medalists for at least 20 years in a row, said, no, there are three types of athletes: volume, intensity and then there’s a variation type of guy who responds to changing things around. His training system produced the top 6 hammer throwers of all time.

And me, who’s trained people from biathlons to bobsleds, what I’ve found is that there are five types of people, and this is where it ties into Chinese medicine. There are people who need extremely high volume, and even though it sounds paradoxical, they can handle high intensity at the same time, so the average guy like that, could handle 10 sets of 3, and every set of 3 would be at 90% of 1RM. That’s what we call the "Fire" type. These are guys like Adam Nelson who would be very good at the shot put.

The next element is the Wood guy who needs to train high intensity, but doesn’t tolerate volume really well. This is a guy who loved the first two workouts he did with me, but then complained of achy joints, fatigue, mono, etc. after the third. What we do know is to identify the type of person they are, and change their loading parameters before they get overtrained.

Then there’s a type that we call a whore type, that basically....

TC: Excuse me. What do you call him?

CP: Whore (laughing)

TC: Is that one of the Chinese elements?

CP: No, no, basically, he can do anything; a guy who can do high volume–you can beat the hell out of him with volume for 3 weeks, and then beat the hell out of him with intensity for 3 weeks. And the other two elements are wimps and they’re not worth training. I should not call them that, but they are not suited for power sports; they’re suited for swimming, etc. They have a very low tolerance for strength training. For most of the readers of T-Nation, they fall within the first three types.

We can figure all this out with a computer. For example, we have a guy who is 242, 17% body fat, football player, and once we figured out what he was, he showed up at training camp at 266 at 6% body fat. And that’s the first time he’s gotten those results. All his teammates were asking him if he were training for the Mr. Olympia, blah, blah, blah.

And actually he had low Testosterone. The way we trained that guy was one workout was at 100% of volume; the second workout was 80% of volume–reducing the number of sets but increasing the intensity–and the 3rd workout, 40% of volume. So for this guy, only two workouts out of three are somewhat hard.

I did a search to see if the interview was posted before and I didn't find anything, so I thought I would post it. Perhaps others may benefit from it in some way. With all the different methods and various approaches to training, it never hurts to learn something new.