The third installment in our series on Russian coach Konstantin Rogozhnikov.
“Bodybuilding.” Use that word carefully around ironheads, who can get every bit as prideful and pedantic about nomenclature as any hipster subculture. In particular, if you should chance to call a powerlifter a “bodybuilder,” you commit a faux pas like speaking Japanese to a stranger who turns out to be Korean.
Yet Konstantin Rogozhnikov has his powerlifters spending over half their time bodybuilding! These are his famous “light workouts.” In their main lifts, the athletes rep out for 3 sets of 10-15, which is a paradigmatic bodybuilding pattern. You increase the size of the muscle but don’t stress the central nervous system, and you can recover quickly and leave the gym feeling refreshed. Rogozhnikov says one of his light workouts should feel “like a massage.”
But why do it all? Aren’t powerlifters the ones who pride themselves purely on strength, not their appearance, and pooh-pooh bodybuilders as oiled narcissists with spray tans? If you have hung around powerlifters, you have endured this sermon before, and you have probably heard that powerlifters mostly train in sets of between 1 and 6 reps. Everything over that is muscle-pumping.
But that is why Rogozhnikov likes these high-rep workouts. He says you are “priming the pump” for heavy triples, doubles, and singles later on by flushing the muscles through with fresh blood and nutrients. You can think of this is a kind of active recovery, a way of recovering from your really tough workouts faster than just lying around by doing something active but easy.
There is another reason too. Powerlifters are looking to get stronger by every means possible, and one of the many techniques is to grow a bigger muscle. Yes, there are ways you can improve your strength with just the muscle mass you already have—namely through better motor learning, improved technique, and good nutrition and recovery—but you can also just add mass.
In fact, to get stronger you do not even have to add muscle mass. That would be ideal, but it also helps just to get fatter. You get better intra-muscular leverages, I am told, and just get better padding. You can bounce out of the bottom of a squat with more weight on the bar if you have big calves and hamstrings and a belly to rebound off of. As the heavyweights like to say while laying waste to nachos and beer, “The bigger the pot, the bigger the squat.” And something similar also happens in the bench press, which is the most sensitive to weight gain or weight loss.
So in their training cycles, Rogozhnikov’s athletes get one of these light workouts with high-rep “beach work” before and after every heavy or medium session. On squat/deadlift day, they start with 3 sets of 10-15 in the squat and then repeat with the deadlift. On bench pressing days they repeat that set-rep scheme in the bench. They are told to lift “with a reserve,” meaning that they leave a couple of reps in the tank on every set, instead of squeezing out every rep possible. There will be time enough for that on heavy day.
After the main lift(s), they follow with just a little “assistance work,” supplemental exercises targeted to the possible weak links in their recovery and musculature. Rogozhnikov has very precise ideas about what kind of assistance work is right for his lifters. We will address them in a separate installment, because in this department what Rogozhnikov’s lifters need is almost certainly not what you do.