Training with Gym Closures
by Mike Tuchscherer, 16 March 2020
With many gyms around the world now closing for the next several weeks due to COVID-19, we’ve had several of our lifters suddenly without a place to train. Over the last few years, I’ve often found myself on the road for various reasons also without a training facility — just making due with what I could carry in a suitcase and do in a hotel room. In the case of my move a few years ago, I kept this up for basically a couple of months. While this isn’t the same thing as what lifters are facing now, I do feel it’s given me perspective on what a powerlifter could do in a situation like this to make sure this bump-in-the-road has minimal impact.
Read more…Optimize Your Training Paradigm to Optimize Gains
By Mark Robb 02 February 2019
In the quest for strength, it seems that I (we) sometimes lose sight of the big picture, and the importance of various factors unconsciously shifts, without notice. This may not be an issue for some, but I think that I can safely theorize that anyone that is goal driven, that has numbers in mind, is susceptible to what I’m about to explain. If you’re a competitive athlete, this probably includes you.
Read more…Peaking with Emerging Strategies
IPF Classic Worlds 2018 is underway in Calgary. We have 16 lifters competing this year — a point of pride among RTS coaches and athletes. As such, this seems like an ideal time to write in a bit more detail about how we taper for competition.
Emerging Evidence For Recovery Techniques
I recently came across this review article: https://www.
I quickly noted that they ranked massage as one of the best recovery modalities around. And if course then I remembered that I wrote an article last year saying that (n=1) I got no real results from it. You can read that article here: https://articles.
Why I Don’t Use Prilepin’s Chart
By Mike Tuchscherer 28 February 2018
Bottom line up front: It wasn’t developed for Powerlifters and will have limited direct applicability. A much better way is to extract the useful information from it and apply the principles rather than the chart directly.
The Effect of Fatigue in Training
By Mike Tuchscherer 14 February 2018
Bottom line up front: measuring fatigue helps you make useful training choices, but will not help you to decide whether to go for a PR or not. Read more…
Should You Use Heavy Singles In Training?
by Mike Tuchscherer, 10 Jan 2018
In 2013 I met Boris Sheiko at a seminar he was conducting in Vicenza, Italy. It was quite an enjoyable time and we had several interesting conversations that day, particularly over lunch. I’m sure it’s no surprise and probably goes without saying that we generally agreed on most things coaching related. But one thing that we didn’t agree on was particularly interesting. He feels that working with 90%+ loads are especially taxing to the lifter. I do not. Coach Sheiko (or whoever runs his social media accounts) recently posted about his opinion, so I wanted to weigh in with mine.
Recovery and Training Throughput
by Mike Tuchscherer, 27 December 2017
Doing a lot of training volume doesn’t matter much if you can’t recover from it. It’s not about workload, but rather the workload that you can recover from. Now from there, we can spout generalities usually in one of two varieties. We can say, “Most people aren’t working hard enough, so most likely you shouldn’t worry about it and just work harder.” Or we can say, “Recovery is the critical factor. Better to under-train than over-train. So keep training on the conservative side.”
Deloading Effectively
by Mike Tuchscherer, 20 December 2017
Deloading is taking an easy week every third or fourth week, right? Well… That’s a caricature of what effective deloading looks like. In most standard cases, deload training is intended to reduce accumulated fatigue and facilitate adaptation to future training cycles.
Log Your Training!
by Mike Tuchscherer, 14 December 2017
Back in 2008, we had a training log app on the RTS website. For many reasons we had to shut it down and rebuild it. We relaunched it in 2016 and have been packing it with features ever since. What’s more, it’s free for anyone to use with any style of training you want.