Program Articles

I get lots of people coming on the site asking for a program check. Actually thoroughly checking a program is an involved process and it usually requires more information than the poster supplies. What’s more, it turns out that “is this a good program” is actually a bad question. Yes, there’s science and some hard rules when it comes to planning training. But there’s also a lot of art to it. So posting a program and asking if it’s good is kind of like posting a picture of a painting and asking for a critique. You can critique some stuff, but how you paint isn’t going to be the same way I paint.

With that in mind, I decided to write the General Intermediate Program. This is a simple 9 week program for people to use and use as inspiration for their own programming.

When I get a new athlete for coaching, I first gather a lot of information. This keeps me from making assumptions during the planning process and helps me to write effective training from the first training day. In an instance like this, I’m building a generalized program, so there isn’t a person to provide those details. That means they’re left as assumptions.

In order to be as clear about my assumptions as possible, I’m going to write this program for an avatar. That means I’m going ...

One of the people I respect most in Powerlifting is Dr. Fred Hatfield. He is a lifter who not only was very strong and talented, but was also willing to engage his brain and commit to his craft in a way that not many (any?) other lifters can duplicate. The guy went and LIVED in Soviet Russia so he could learn more about they trained athletes for cryin’ out loud! The result of this unprecedented blend of physical and mental work was a lifter who was far ahead of his time.
One of Dr. Squat’s standby routines – one that he recommends all lifters start out with – is the 80 Day Cycle. If you have never seen it before, you can see it in its original context here. What I would like to do is take the 80 day cycle that Dr. Hatfield has written and use it as a basis for an RTS program. You can use this program in your own training or use it as a tool to learn to better program your own training. ...

by Jeremy Hartman

Moving back to my parents’ house during my summer break from college, I decided to change my training at the request of the gym owner I was working with while training for the USAPL Teenage Nationals. I started to eliminate box squatting and focused more on free squatting after realizing my total weight should be increased ...

I talk quite a bit about long term planning because in my mind there are so many ways to do it right. As far as training goes, most of us understand that it is both art and science. We’re after producing effects for the athlete and that’s what matters. If you get good effects, then you did it right. If you don’t, then you did it wrong.
There are usually good sets of rules and guidelines to go by when designing an individual training session or even a weekly template. But planning several weeks of training is more ambiguous. It’s difficult for lots of people to understand what’s going on or how to do it themselves.
What I have suggested in the past is to take a Sheiko program and use it as a planning template. The reason ...

by Jeremy Hartman
The USAPL Teenage (18-19 year old) 220lbs. national deadlift record was 705. The meet I had picked out in March was literally the day before I turned 20 years old. I had been reading and talking to other powerlifters who were good deadlifters about doing weighted abdominal work. When I talked to Louie Simmons about this, he suggested static ab work, in which a person holds certain areas on an abdominal exercise for 3-5 seconds. Luckily my fitness class, that was required for my Physical Education major, was scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday so I decided to treat those ...

by Josh Rohr

Michelle Stark was an All-American Hammer and Weight Thrower for Ashland University under the watchful eye of her coach, 4x Olympian Jud Logan. She graduated in 2009 and decided to give powerlifting a try. In only her 4th powerlifting meet ever, she became the 2010 IPF Junior World Silver Medalist in the 90kg class, barely missing her 3rd deadlift of 512.6 lbs for the win.

Michelle came to me after she graduated college and said she wanted to give powerlifting a try. She had experience with the squat, bench and deadlift because they were performed frequently in Coach Logan’s program at A.U. She was already really strong but her technique was not optimal for a powerlifter and we would eventually modify all three. When she came to me about powerlifting, it was only about 6 weeks away from the meet so our preparation time was limited and changing too many things was not a good idea. The first meet she wanted to do was the 2009 USAPL Georgia and Southern States. Her initial goal when she came in was to go to Women’s Nationals and try and make the Junior World Team. Because of this, we decided to basically train though the meet because she was strong enough coming in to hit the qualifying total without getting in gear.

The training template for this meet was high frequency, medium volume, low intensity because we needed to spend a lot of time performing the lifts to IPF standards. This allowed her to Squat/Bench and Deadlift frequently without overtraining. This also allowed her to put her focus on doing certain things right like pushing the knees out, sitting back, driving her legs in the bench etc. without having to get too focused on the ...

by Jeremy Hartman

Part 2:
I was now full immersed in the sport of powerlifting, leaving my wrestling career behind, but never forgetting the lessons I learned to ...

by Jeremy Hartman

I first was introduced to the deadlift when I was a sophomore in high school. My high school wrestling coach showed me a conventional way to deadlift ...

by Brady Stewart

Tim Thomas
Age: 53
Occupation: Sales/Recruiter
Sport: Powerlifting - Bench Press Specialist
Hometown: Belleville, IL
Training Location: The Belleville Weightlifting Club (BWC) (Belleville, IL)
Competing in powerlifting since 1998 in the USAPL and non-sanctioned events, but is currently a Bench Press Specialist
Best Competition Total: 1590 (2004 Ozark Open)
Best ...

By Brady Stewart

This is the second article in the series titled Case Studies in Powerlifting. In this article series, I will discuss some of the programming for lifters that I currently train with, the Belleville Weightlifting Club, and some other ideas that we have implemented involving training and training for other sports. We have seen some great individual successes ...