Back in the 80s, most of us were taught that you had to lift all out, every time. Boy, was that stupid. Not only were we courting injury, we were making exercise, which should be joyful, into a grim discipline. It’s a wonder that any of us still likes to train.
Everybody has to “cycle” their training by easing up regularly. No one improves in an unbroken straight line forever. And athletes cannot be at their strongest and fastest at every workout. If they try, they burn out or get injured. This is called overtraining.
That is why strength athletes “cycle”: They push toward a personal record (PR) and then ease up, and then push and ease up again, in a planned cycle.
Traditionally, powerlifters practiced long cycles of two to three months. (Our awesome friend and mentor Alexey Faleev uses 10-week cycles, which traditionally would have been considered a little short.) However, the farther you advance in your training, the harder it is to commit to a multi-month cycle confident that you will not be thrown off schedule by some minor injury or recovery problem.
Then lifters discovered they could get away with shorter cycles lasting just a few weeks. Pavel Tsatsouline, the groundbreaking teacher of “skinny strength,” even suggests cycles just two weeks long.
In the simplest form, you can accomplish the purpose of cycling—scheduled periods of “deloading”—if you just alternate heavy workouts with lighter workouts (or heavy weeks with lighter weeks) where you cut the workload down to 60% of what you did the last time. For example, if you squat 250# for 5 sets of five on a heavy day, then squat the same weight for just five sets of three on your light day. (This is a trick taken almost directly from Faleev.) Or you could keep the reps the same but reduce the bar weight to 60%. Or reduce both in sufficient proportions so that you lift just 60% of the total tonnage (bar weight times total number of reps for the day).
Or you can get slightly more complex and divide workouts into three types: heavy, light, and medium.
You can even link them together into longer chains. Konstantin Rogozhnikov likes to give his athletes a light week followed by a heavy week, then another light week and heavy week, and finally a light week followed by a medium week: L-H, L-H, L-M. After that he repeats the sequence (sometimes called a “mesocycle” or mid-length cycle).
In our next installment, Rogozhnikov’s light workouts (легки тренировки), which are the bread and butter of his system of training. You will like doing them, and you will like what they do to you!