Dose of Testosterone 8: Jacked Olympic Lifters

     As I have said before, I used to be an Olympic lifter. I enjoyed Olympic lifting way more than following a typical bodybuilding routine. The trouble is that most OL routines aren't geared toward hypertrophy. So you can get quite strong and still not look like you lift. You do put on some muscle, but most of it is in your thighs, glutes, traps and erectors. You might also get a little development in your shoulders and forearms. So you might look athletic if you take your shirt off, but most lifters never develop a physique that screams "Holy crap!!! I'm not messing with that guy!"

     That being said it is inspiring to see lifters that are jacked. In fact, for those of you who have difficulty maintaining the motivation to hit the gym, try this; take some caffeine, put on some music that gets you pumped and start looking at pictures of people with physiques you admire. Within 30 minutes, you should be ready to set some new PR's.

     To that end, here are some pics of lifters with physiques that I admire. They aren't your typical bodybuilder physiques, but I like them and I think most ladies would too. Oh and I'm sorry, but some of these pics are old and thus of low quality. They look this way regardless of how big or small I make them. In spite of this, the people in said pics are jacked enough to merit inclusion in this post.

270 kg (595.25 lb)

I think this is Sergey Arakelov.

David Rigert

3x Olympic Gold medalist Pyrros Dimas.

75 kg European Champion Lidia Valentín.

Gennadi Ivanchenko

I have no idea who she is, but her legs and butt are nice.

The Beast known as Klokov.

     Well, that's it for this post. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Check back in a couple of days for another post.

The Bulgarian Weighlifting System Part 1

     So I used to be an Olympic lifter. For those who are unaware, that doesn't mean that I was in the Olympics. I wasn't. I rarely competed. It just means that my training revolved around the Snatch and the Clean and Jerk.

     In training for the Olympic lifts, there are basically two systems. There is the Russian System, and there is the Bulgarian System.

     Well, now there is the Chinese system. And judging from what I read on the internet (which is always true) the Chinese system is an amalgamation of the Russian and Bulgarian System.

     It probably isn't that polarized, but from way over here in the United States it seems accurate.

     I've used both systems in my training. They both have advantages and disadvantages.

     Today we'll be talking about the Bulgarian System.

     The system was developed by Ivan Abadjiev. According to Wikipedia, he won Bulgaria's first medal in weightlifting at the 1957 World Championship. In 1968 he became the head coach for the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation. He brought with him his new system of training. It was this new system that transformed Bulgaria into arguably the most successful weightlifting team ever.

Ivan Abadjiev

     The system can basically be boiled down to this; train heavy all the time. For the professional lifters in Bulgaria, training is a full time job. They lift 8-9 hours a day. And that training revolves around the snatch, c&j, back squat and front squat. If they have a light workout (and in this system 80% of your max is considered light.) they may do power snatches and power c&j's instead of the full squat versions. So you have 8-9 hours of training dedicated to only 6 lifts.

     Oh, and did I mention that they train 6-7 days a week? Because they do. Abadjiev believed that taking a day off increased your chance of injury.

     The day's training would be broken in to little mini sessions. So you may start the day with 45 minutes of snatching and work up to the heaviest weight that you can manage. Then after a 15 minute break you would C&J for 45 minutes. Again, you would probably work up to the heaviest weight that you could lift. Then you would take another 15 minute break before moving on to squats. And again you would probably work up to the heaviest weight you can lift.  See the trend yet?

     And that's just what you would do before lunch. After lunch you would come back and repeat the whole process again. A lifter may have as many as 3 snatch sessions, 3 C&J session and 3 squat sessions in the same day.

     This system has produced World and Olympic Champions for Bulgaria, Turkey and Qatar.

     John Broz helped helped bring this system to the awareness of many non-olympic lifting types (people I refer to as sub humans). It was then further popularized by Matt Perryman's website mysosynthesis.com and then his book Squat Every Day (<---You should click that Amazon Affiliate link and buy the book. Doing so helps support the site.)

     Some people say that you can't do this type of training without the use of steroids. I have read on the internet that Abadjiev has admitted this fact. I have also read (but did not confirm) that at least one of the John Broz's lifters failed a drug test. Even though drug free lifters can't follow the exact program of professional athletes, doesn't mean that we can't learn anything from their programming.

Well, that's enough background info. Check out the video below. Next post I'll go over some of the mistakes that I made with this program and show you ways that you can modify Bulgarian training to make it work for you.

5 Reasons You Should Bodybuild

I used to be a strength athlete. I was moderately strong. I could snatch 100kg and C&J 120kg at a body weight of less than 85kg. I didn't max on squats but 150kg was my workout weight, and 170kg was the heaviest I ever lifted and it wasn't very hard. And that was done with no special prep. 

For most of my time as a strength athlete, I had an elitist attitude to towards bodybuilding. I turned up my nose at anything that wasn't strength oriented. I rationalized my view by saying to myself that strength training is inherently functional and thus carried over to real life, or something like that. Bodybuilding as I saw it, was just exercising for vanity.

As I have grown older, I have also grown somewhat wiser. And I have learned that there are plenty of reasons to train for hypertrophy. 

1. Big muscle keeps trouble makers away.

In case you are unaware, criminals and other assorted bad guys profile before they engage in their nefarious activities. Now every one knows that size does not automatically mean that you can fight. The bad guy knows this better than most people. He's probably been in tons of street brawls and knows first hand that while size can play a role in the outcome of a fight, it is not the sole determinant of success. So when he sees a swole sucker walking down the street, the criminal's ego won't let him believe that he would lose. But he does a quick, mostly subconscious, risk/reward calculation & then decides that others people would make better victims.

Your enlarged musculature will be even better at dissuading average Joes from starting trouble. We've all seen it: two guys are at a party. Maybe one guy A accidentally bumps into guy B. So guy B turns on his heels ready to kick the crap out of guy A only to find that Guy A is jacked to the max. Guy B loses his courage and nearly pisses himself. The worst part is he also loses face.

Again it doesn't always turn out like this, but it does help stack the odds in your favor.

2. Other men will look up to you.

This idea goes back to Jack Donovan's book The Way of Men (<--- by using this link to buy the book, you help support the blog.) In the book Mr. Donovan makes a compelling case that men's job in society, historically speaking, has been to "defend the perimeter". As such, anything that you do to help raise the status of the group, also raises your status within the group. So by becoming larger and more intimidating you help raise the image of your group and thus your peers will hold you in higher regard.

3. Women like guys with big muscles.

We've all heard women say how they don't like huge muscles. The trouble is, every time one of these women finally sees a large muscular male in the flesh, one hemisphere of her brain shuts down, leaving her standing there, knock kneed, with her mouth agape and her tongue hanging out.

Having big muscles significantly increases your attractiveness to women. There is something about being big that elicits a primal, visceral reaction from women. And based on what I've seen, they are helpless to stop it. If I had to guess, I would say a guy who is a 6 could raise his attractiveness to women maybe as high as an 8 if he put on enough muscle.

Women also like to be with men who are esteemed by other men. So having big muscles increases your value to women, but you get another increase in her eyes because other men look up to you. So you get double bonus points for doing one thing.

Could you imagine how that would change your life? If you're single, imagine knowing that wherever you go you'll be able to meet women who will want to talk to you. Or if you're in a relationship, imagine how much better sex will be because you partner doesn't have just a mental attraction to you but she has a primitive, subconscious "OMG! I want to that hunk to pump his superior genetics into me" kinda of attraction to you?

4. Increased strength

There is this belief that floats around the internet, especially among third rate strength athletes, that training in the higher rep ranges doesn't make you stronger. Nothing could be further from the truth. Training in the 8-12 rep range just doesn't transfer well to a 1 rep max. This is because heavy lifting in the 1-3 rep range is neurologically different from training in the 8-12 rep range. (For more on this, read an article called Grease the Groove by Pavel Tsatsouline.) 

This means that if you had been training in the 8-12 rep range and wanted to enter a powerlifting competition you would be well advised run a special training cycle geared more towards strength. I think in the Russian training system this is called transmutation. There are a couple of different ways to do this, but that isn't the point of this post.  

The point is, training in the higher rep ranges does make you stronger, which like point #1 will cause you to be admired by other males.

5. Self Esteem

Finally, and maybe most importantly, being jacked will help your confidence.Being intimidating to other men, envied by other men and alluring to women is bound to give you a healthy dose of self esteem. It is hard to imagine an aspect of your life that would not benefit from this added self esteem. 

You wouldn't sit around despondent because you're single. You'd just go out and get a date. A healthy self esteem mixed with the fact that you're looked up to by other guys means that you probably won't have problems making friends. This self confidence would probably help your career too. You wouldn't hesitate to ask for a raise or a promotion, so you would probably have more money. 

Don't misconstrue this article to mean that I have attained swoleness, because I haven't yet. I have simply realized the error of my ways and intent on fixing them. For all you younger guys out there, I suggest that you learn from my mistakes.

That's it for this post. See you guy next time.