Part 6 of our series on Konstantin Rogozhnikov.
On heavy bench day, Rogozhnikov has you choose an exercise that is very competition-specific. You could pick a straightforward competition-style bench press, but you also have a few other options. You could try floor presses or a slight incline press, and if you have experience with chains, you could also try that. Experienced powerlifters will be familiar with “board presses,” which limit the range of motion by placing a stack of 2×4’s on your chest. In America, geared lifters do a lot of these to strengthen their triceps, and if that’s your thing, Rogozhnikov recommends a 3-4” board height.
But surprisingly, Rogozhnikov also likes board presses for raw benchers. And for them, he advises a board height of a whopping 4-6”. That is huge and restricts your range of motion greatly, but Rogozhnikov wants you to gain the experience of pressing your competition max for reps. It will help accustom your nervous system to very heavy weights by teaching it, in effect, “I’ve supported this weight before and it didn’t tear up my joints, so I guess it’s safe. I’ll let him continue and won’t hit the emergency shutdown switch.” Rogozhnikov also likes these board presses because they spare you from benching heavy weights off the chest too often. He thinks that you strain the ligaments in the chest with that full stretch and overtax your recovery abilities.
Just how heavy are these weights? That’s what is surprising about Rogozhnikov’s heavy days: They are pretty tame compared to what many other barbell athletes would do. Rogozhnikov’s counterpart in America, “mad monk” of powerlifting Louie Simmons, would have his lifters doing maximally heavy triples, doubles, and singles on days like this. (And as we will see next time, he prescribes these workouts more than twice as often as the Russian.) And Russia’s other powerlifting mastermind, Boris Sheyko, assigns his lifters relatively moderate poundages, but they lift almost every day of the week in punishingly high volume.
By comparison, Rogozhnikov’s usual set-rep scheme on heavy days looks like it belongs in a high school weight room: just 3 sets of 5-6 reps. On this day he wants you to stomp the gas pedal all the way to the floor. But to most advanced powerlifters, a six-rep set is so much that it seems like bodybuilding. And you are supposed to choose your working weight just conservatively enough that you can handle it for all three sets. They should be hard sets, and the last one should take all that you’ve got. But this is still a more cautious and modulated approach than, say, an American lifter who plans to work up to a max single or double or one of Boris Sheyko’s lifter who squats for ten sets a few times a week.
As always, Rogozhnikov prizes recovery and shelters and nurtures his lifters’ recuperative energies as tenderly as if they were muscly bonsai trees.
Tomorrow, Rogozhnikov’s heavy days for the squat and deadlift.