How To Progress From Beginner To Elite In Weightlifting - Kevin Simons

KEEGAN: Kevin Simmons, you got the t-shirt on, I got the t-shirt on.

KEVIN: Yeah, I like it.

KEEGAN: It was pretty good.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I think we've done one video already so I think guys can get a bit more of your background, CrossFit, elite gymnastics, and weightlifting yourself, I want to jump straight into it today, if that's cool, discussing knee pain, is that how you came across ATG?

Was it solving knee issues or was it something else?

KEVIN: Yeah that was pretty much it.

So I had an athlete who came up in the sport really quickly, she was a gymnast before and was just always dealing with knee pain and about a year into lifting, it was just getting worse and affecting her workouts.

So that's kind of when I started looking for other options.

I heard Ben on my buddy Travis Mash's podcast.

I need to dive deeper into this.

So knee pain is… it's probably the most common injury in weightlifting.

So just because the amount of squats that we have to do to be strong in the sport, like most athletes are squatting three or four days a week on top of the snatches and the cleans and everything else, so that's kind of how I found out about you guys and I tested everything on myself because that's been my biggest limiting factor as a weightlifter as well.

So about two years ago, I squatted 250 kilos, it's like 550 but then I found myself walking down the stairs sideways one step at a time.

I’m like “what am I doing?”

So it's been really helpful and I didn't do any regular back squats for the last year, just been doing the ATG program and just finally started getting back into squats about two months ago and I’ve been really happy with it.

Surprisingly I have not lost a ton of strength, I still feel pretty strong and nothing hurts anymore and my athlete, her knees are way better.

Sometimes we'll still have flare-ups but it'll just be one day where they hurt instead of five days.

So we're able to still get in lots of quality training.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I mean at some point, it's always going to hurt again.

There is some level of volume or intensity that it's just going to be too much for the tissues.

The game is to have tools to push that point further along so that you can train with more volume, more consistency, and more intensity.

If you can keep doing that then there’s so much more chance of the numbers going up versus feeling inhibited in the movement and being tentative and not looking forward to training because of the pain that you're going to go through, it's a huge challenge.

KEVIN: It's really hard to have any intensity if you're dealing with pain every single rep.

You can kind of try to grind through it but you're not going to be as explosive, you're not going to have that same neural drive and it just kind of sucks.

I try not to have my athletes train through pain at all but you have athletes with big goals and they generally want to keep pushing.

It's always me trying to reign them in and hold them back a little bit.

KEEGAN: Yeah, 100%.

So how much different has it been since you've been implementing ATG?

Everyone was trying to solve knee pain before as well right but it's just a different system, what difference has it made in terms of the way you're able to program?

KEVIN: When it was really bad we were squatting twice a week and once was heavy because she had to and we couldn't do a full back off because she's making the US teams and we can't just not squat.

So before we were able to do basically one heavy squat session and then basically one light swap session and her legs just had plateaued, I mean she was clean and jerking, got 80, let's see say about 85% of what she was back squatting, very efficient but no real leg strength and adding in all supplementary exercises.

She's able to back squat heavy three times a week now on top of all the ATG movements and so as her back squats come up, her clean and jerk has come up.

So it's really helped that athlete and then for myself I’m not really… I don't care to compete anymore.

But for me, it's just nice because I can enjoy training because every rep doesn't hurt anymore and I started back down around probably 65% of my back squat but it's like every single week I’m adding five or ten kilos and it's feeling good it doesn't hurt anymore.

KEEGAN: I think it's a good feeling as a coach as well to kind of not feel as though you're inflicting pain or putting someone to a place that you don't want to go.

I think that's a much better feeling as a coach as well.

KEVIN: Yeah, absolutely. I don't want my 18-year-old athlete to deal with what I’ve dealt with my knees because I was just kind of a meat head and I was just gonna push through anyway.

So for me, I was squatting four days a week for 33 and then basically squatting four days a week since I was about 15 years old.

So 18 years and four times a week without hurting half of those sessions.

Yeah, my knees were bad two years ago I don't want her to go through that at all.

KEEGAN: Yeah, so is that one of your top lifters that's had those issues, or is it?

KEVIN: Yeah I have two athletes who have a shot of making the Olympic games in Paris so that's one of them, she's 19 now and then I have a 17-year-old who's real good too.

KEEGAN: Yeah, so it makes a huge difference.

I want to go through… I appreciate you sharing there around knee journey and the impact it's made.

The first couple of months or the first few months of working with weight lifters, you worked with these juniors, what's your focus in the first few months when someone says they want to get into weightlifting seriously with you?

KEVIN: Are we talking like a brand new person who's never touched a barbell or someone who's got some strength training background already?

KEEGAN: I guess it's probably interesting from both perspectives if they've come from like CrossFit or gymnastics but I’m probably more curious for the other perspective of someone who… they've done some squats and deadlifts, they've been in the gym a lot but not necessarily done weightlifting like what do you focus on initially for that sort of person?

KEVIN: In the beginning, most people don't have the requisite mobility so we're doing a lot of positional work in the very beginning.

I want to make sure they can actually get into the movements.

For a snatch we want to be working on making sure they can do a decent overhead squat and then challenging that with maybe close grip overhead squats or soft presses, just to press in the bottom of the squat make sure they're getting that mobility in the beginning.

I do a lot of work for that just so they can actually hit the right positions and aren't building bad habits and then from there, we just work the positions very slow like from the top down.

So someone's learning to snatch, we start from the very beginning like from the top and so I’ll have them warm up overhead squats and then they're going into a, called a tall muscle snatch.

So they're just starting tall, no leg drive just practicing getting the elbows up and turning over, getting that arm movement down, and then once that's pretty much automatic we go into a tall snatch which is where you're starting with the bar in the hip and then just dropping straight underneath the bar.

So basically a snatch with no leg drive, no hinging at the hips, we're just starting straight and just dropping straight down.

Because most people, in the beginning, don't understand how to pull themselves under the bar.

You see people using their arms to elevate the bar or what I’m looking for is I want the person basically using the inertia of the bar to pull themselves straight under and then from there then I start adding in a little bit of leg drive.

So just vertical torso just bending the knees, driving straight up with the legs pulling under, and then we just work each position down.

Usually, for most people, they're probably not going to get past the hip snatch on week one.

Week two we do the hip snatch and start learning to take the bar from right below the knee week of that.

Next week we start taking it down a couple of inches.

So it's like they probably won't do a full snatch until week three usually, maybe week four but what I’m looking for in the beginning is I want all those positions to become automatic.

I want the person, when the weight gets heavy to their default needs to be in the proper positions because that's the only thing that the only movement pattern that they have where they've done so many reps at a fairly lightweight not like empty bar light but fairly light.

I want so many reps that that's the only movement pattern that they know.

We want to get to a point where the athlete doesn't really know how to do it wrong, that's the main goal.

So in the beginning, we just treat like, I’ll write in their program snatch practice, 45 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is and it's just that.

I just want them practicing and I let them put a little bit of weight on but I’m looking for perfect reps and then with their strength program.

Again it's mostly just about positions.

I don't really care about the weight on the bar too much in the very beginning.

Pretty much everybody is doing an ATG squat on the slant board because by far the most common fault in squats is the hips shooting back behind them which to me is just your quads just aren't strong enough and I would much rather have an athlete that is quad dominant than hip and hamstring dominant for weightlifting because in weight lifting we want that torso as vertical as possible just to decrease that moment arm and just keep everything in position.

So we really focus on perfect ATG squats and once they're able to get up to pretty high volume, maybe 10 sets of 10 with decent amount of weight maybe 50 body weight then we push them over to the barbell.

KEEGAN: So yeah, you really want to like focus completely on the positions, on the technique, the weight is really secondary until they kind of earn and are prepared for that.

If you had someone's program with 45 minutes snatch technique then they would know that those are the drills like what you've just walked us through in terms of the sequence.

KEVIN: Right, I’ll write down the drill.

So if someone on maybe week three, we're gonna do three sets of five tall muscle snatches, three sets of maybe four tall snatches, three sets of three from the hip, three sets of three from below the knee, three sets of three from the low hang and I’m watching them and usually start with the empty bar for the tall muscle snatch and then we might just add a small amount of weight for each set from there but it's just like 45 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever it is for the person.

That's the cut-off but these are the basic drills I want you working on and I’ll tell them what weight to use.

So by treating it as practice, then people are kind of getting a different mind state where they're just working on the technique instead of just trying to make the weight.

I think that's important in the beginning.

KEEGAN: So you take in the competitive or ego kind of side out of it as much as you can and just getting quite a lot of practice.

I see if you're doing that there's quite a few drills, there's quite a few sets.

So it's going to be fairly up-tempo training.

I was thinking… that was something else that I wanted to talk to you about, like with the CrossFit background.

I’d imagine that you're not going to have people sitting around for five-minute rests when they're doing technique work…

KEVIN: No and the reps are gonna be quite a bit higher for a beginner than for a trained athlete because for a beginner often the second rep is going to be better than the first, the third rep might be better than the second because they're not limited by their strength or the fatigue really because it's light enough.

They should get better just by making minut changes from rep to rep.

So beginners might be fives on snatches, which is something I would never ever have a competitive athlete do because they're going to get better, they're going to make those small changes from rep to rep.

Whereas my athletes who are really efficient, we rarely do more than two reps of a snatcher or a clean or a jerk in a set because if I have them do threes… sometimes we'll do threes early in a cycle but generally that third rep is going to look way worse than the first rep and so if you're doing three reps and one of them is bad every time like a third of your reps for that workout probably made your technique slightly worse.

So it's a big difference in just the training age of an athlete, how many reps we do, and because it's not that fatiguing, when you're first starting.

KEEGAN: Yup, so it's less and less like the feedback of technique because they're not going to be making big adjustments from rep to rep as an advanced athlete, where the beginner athlete, you're trying to get them to feel the difference between the reps and they're getting feedback from their body on each.

KEVIN: Right, whereas an advanced athlete that's kind of where complexes come into it.

So if my athletes are doing doubles, there's usually kind of a specific reason for it.

So maybe I have an athlete who is not meeting the bar well in their clean.

So the bar is getting higher than their shoulders and crashing on them.

That's where usually on their lighter day, we might do something like a hang snatch which really forces you to be fast under the bar, it might be like a hang snatch with a slow eccentric and then drop the bar and then do a clean.

So we're doing a drill that really makes them focus on one thing and then they try to replicate that same movement with the full lift afterwards.

So that's where you can kind of improve from one rep to the next because the stimulus is higher for one specific thing that you're focusing on but for just snatches from the floor, it's pretty rare that we're gonna do doubles and if we are doing doubles, we're usually gonna do it as a cluster set where you do one snatch and then I’m counting ten, nine, eight and when it gets down to when they do their next one because I want them to be able to do something under a little bit of fatigue but I don't want that fatigue to be so great that it negatively affects their form because for weightlifting it's mostly about getting as many perfect reps in as you can.

It's about getting that movement pattern so strongly ingrained that when the weight is at its maximum you're always going to default to the proper technique.

KEEGAN: So you didn't mention power variations in your introduction there, do you use power variations at all or do you keep them out so that your default is that correct pattern, like the pattern that you want?

KEVIN: Now when we're learning would generally have people catching a power and then ride the bar down slowly to the bottom of the lift because I want people focusing on finishing their pull.

There's kind of two thoughts in weightlifting.

There's one thought which is… you always try to catch the bar as high as you can and just generally as the bar gets heavier, you're gonna catch it lower and lower.

And then there's the other thought that you should be trying to catch the weight at the same point no matter what the weight is.

I personally want the person, for the most part, trying to catch the bar high because I want them trying to finish the pull as long as their timing is where they can still meet the bar wherever it's at.

So to a point, because if the weights too light obviously, you can't put as much power as you want on her, it's gonna fly away too high.

But once we get to above 75 or whatever your max power is, you should be trying to catch that bar high, it's just gonna get lower and lower.

So I would generally have people catch relatively high and go slow on the way down and over the months as they get more efficient they should be able to catch it… catch a heavier weight lower and lower.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I think for a lot of people transitioning, who are not as serious transitioning from power to full snatches, they'll feel more comfortable making the full snatch.

I used snatchers quite a bit with the rugby players that I worked with and they weren't capable of full and a couple of them eventually did something like a full snatch by accident almost like what you're talking about but it's for people who are less familiar with it.

That mid-position catch can be really difficult as well and I think if you've had knee pain like I know for myself, it was either catch really high or catch really low with the two positions that kind of worked for me and in the middle, I didn't really have the strength.

But I think it's great if you are training that way and then you're kind of forcing yourself to be able to receive the weight quickly in every position.

I think that's a healthier…

KEVIN: Yeah, I mean a lot of people are just not strong in the middle of that range on their squats and how that manifests as people… the bar crashes on them a lot because they're not able to resist the bar in that middle portion, especially on a clean, it's either high power or it's a rock bottom clean and that means they're not pushing through that middle portion.

For that, I really like early in a cycle doing slow eccentrics to build that strength to the full range of motion, and then in the next cycle, we'll often do an isometric at the hardest point and it'll usually be something…

Maybe it's like one of my girls right now, she's doing just three sets of three with a four-second isometric at the hardest point and then we move on and do her regular stuff because I don't want them to be just using 70 or 65 or whatever it is forever, I want them still getting that stimulus for their legs but I think that is really beneficial the eccentrics and the isometric through that middle point.

And then when athletes are doing powers making sure that they are catching in that same position.

A lot of coaches don't like power snatches because most athletes are going to catch their hips too far behind them and I really don't program power snatches very often at all because of that reason to make people catch their butt way back behind them and their chest down because they feel stronger there.

But when people are learning the lifts, I want them to be able to stop at any position.

The weight's light enough that they should be fine.

I want them to catch and freeze in that middle point, be able to freeze right at parallel, and feel the freeze at the bottom.

I think that really helps with being able to resist the bar.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I definitely think that's something important that I should have worked on and I think even just for people who aren't interested in necessarily weightlifting.

I think if with squats as well if you can't freeze at any point with a 70% load then there's probably something missing, 80% load maybe.

I think that was a huge thing that Charles Poliquin was an advocate for, the 10-second eccentric in an early phase of periodization.

10-second eccentric singles so that every part of the range had some strength.

It makes sense and I’ve thought quite a bit about having that big gap in the squat strength where weight accelerates on the way down is not necessarily ideal.

I guess close to competition time, you just have to make the weight.

If you can make 20, 30% more with that gap then power to you.

You just got to make the weight but you should still work on it in training to fill that in…

KEVIN: For sure, especially with the way that most weightlifters squat because we are practicing catching the bounce in the bottom of the clean.

It's a pretty hard bounce.

We're getting the stretch reflex.

We're getting the bounce of the hamstrings off the calves and also the actual oscillation of the bar.

So weight lifters are getting a ton of bounce up out of the hole and carrying that moment through.

So I think especially early in a macrocycle, it's really important to build that strength through the middle and the reason we do that is because we're trying to make our squats simulate a clean as much as possible, trying to make it very sport specific but farther from competition it doesn't need to be that specific and people would probably get a lot out of slowing things down and adding long pauses and just doing more variation as well.

KEEGAN: In building the foundation with the slant board squats.

And the split squats is probably going to mean less people will have that issue, I think…

KEVIN: Yeah, I think so too. I know that when I started back squatting and front squatting again, I could see that my torso was a lot more upright just because my quads were finally stronger and my VMOs are getting stronger.

I’m an athlete where all the mass in my legs is up high and there's nothing really around the knee.

So actually targeting those VMOs can actually stay a bit more upright and I feel like I am stronger through that middle range too.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I’m having all the same sensations just with much smaller weights and much less competitive history but I feel like we've got some similarities other than the weight on the bar.

Are you planning to do more snatches and clean and jerks?

I know you're saying you don't want to compete again but do you see yourself getting some numbers on those again or…

KEVIN: Yeah, maybe, right now I’m just trying to get strong.

I just want to add a bit of mass up top and just get strong right now.

But if I’m able to keep squatting and knees still feel good, I probably will snatch and clean and jerk again.

It's my favorite thing to do really.

The good thing for me is I’ve done it for long enough that those movement patterns are pretty much set.

Before I took this break, I would do other things and then I would do snatch and clean and jerk generally for 12 weeks every year, and every year I’ve been able to PR by a couple of kilos.

Like last time, I actually was doing triathlons.

So I came from triathlons back to weightlifting and that one was 14 weeks and I hit all the time snatching clean jerk PRs.

So now that I’m healthy, I feel like I could probably do that again.

KEEGAN: That's crazy.

So you hit better numbers since your competitive CrossFit days.

You've hit bigger numbers without doing anything like that kind of training, I mean like specializing in weightlifting after CrossFit.

KEVIN: I’ve honestly never really competed in weightlifting too much just because I’m coaching and so if I have 15 athletes during a weekend that I’m coaching, the last thing I want to do is compete myself.

You're just on your feet all day and the adrenaline is spiking for every lifter for each lift.

If I care about their lifts about as much as they do and by the end of the weekend I’m just exhausted from the thought of trying to compete myself, I just don't really have a desire honestly.

Yeah, I’m just to the point in my career where I like working out because it's the best two hours of my day.

I just enjoy it but I care a lot more about my athlete's endeavors than my own.

I’m happy with my career. I don't have anything to prove anymore. I’m just working out for fun and if the mood strikes me to get back and snatch and clean and jerk, I probably will but it's not that competitive fire like it was at one time.

KEEGAN: Makes sense, what are your best numbers?

KEVIN: I’ve snatched 137 and clean and jerk 170.

So it's a 300 snatch and a 375-ish clean jerk.

KEEGAN: Yep, some serious numbers, 250 back squat or…

KEVIN: Yeah, 250 back squat, 275 deadlift, 178 bench press.

KEEGAN: You enjoy bench press? I guess the gymnastics background would have taught you a bit more or made you maybe love the upper body strength work more than the average CrossFitter.

KEVIN: Yeah, probably I’m still kind of just a meathead at heart.

Upper body day is still my favorite. I like going and just getting that pump and going big.

Yeah, like we used to do. I mean obviously in gymnastics a lot of upper body work.

When I was a kid, we had a period of a year where we would do a dip contest at the end of every night of practice, five days a week, who could do the most dips and I think I got up to a set of 107 dips when I was like 14.

Never won. I was always second or third place.

I was always pushed to try to get the most dips and then with all the ring work and stuff my upper body was real strong.

So my first day in high school weight training, as a freshman, I weighed like 125.

First time I touched a barbell, I benched 185 for six, that's just from all the gymnastics work but I still love that, it's still my favorite.

KEEGAN: Yeah, that's serious and some really big numbers there.

So if we're transitioning from those first few months of training, talking about you've had this experience of volume training with gymnastics, volume training with CrossFit, how does the volume evolve for someone who's got their technique down?

I mean obviously, there's always going to be minor adjustments but let's say the movement is smooth, how are you gauging or where are your targets in terms of the training volume, number of sessions, number of reps, how does that evolution look?

KEVIN: So generally, I think you want to use the lowest amount of volume that you can get results with.

So if the person is still making progress on three days a week, I’m gonna keep them at three days a week and if they're making progress with only four sets of squats, we're going to ride that out as long as we can because you always want to have some more tools in the arsenal to keep going so that you move from three days a week to four days a week when they have to when they're not making progress with three or where their workouts are just too long with three days a week, then you can start moving to four and then you move to five.

I think it's a big mistake to just do as much volume as possible early on because then you have nowhere to go, you can only train so many sessions per week and so many sets of squats a week and everything.

So I try to keep the volume generally fairly low, it's as high volume as they need to get the practice on the snatching, clean, and jerk but for the strength work, just in the beginning especially we're mostly doing linear progression and just adding more weight to the bar each week and then just look when they need to, we'll just drop 10 or 15%, build up again.

Once they kind of tap out on that which is usually a couple of months, maybe five or six months in then we get into more of an intermediate type program, which is four-week mesos, four to six weeks mezzos for an early beginner, and then start building from there.

But for the volume, try to keep it fairly low and make them a bit more neurologically efficient and then when they need to… six months in, we can start adding in some more sessions, more sets if they need it but just kind of monitoring them week to week and not making any big drastic changes, I think is important.

KEEGAN: Yeah, is that for injury prevention or to try to avoid the stagnation or the feeling?

There's a big… making it overly stressful for them or what's the logic or the focus of keeping it relatively similar week to week.

KEVIN: I just think that the changes should be fairly small week to week.

I mean we're gonna change exercises when things get stale and stuff but I just don't want to get people injured.

I want their body to be ready for what's coming or if we do make a change, we make it real easy and then gradually build from there but also just to avoid stagnation because I want to make everything I can out of three days a week before someone goes to four and make everything I can out of four before they have to go up to five.

My top two athletes right now they're doing, seven sessions a week and that's if I could make them progress just as fast on five, they'd be doing five but they've been training long enough and hard enough that they have to do seven now and eventually they might have to do nine to keep pushing up.

So it's just keeping tools in the arsenal and not giving someone something that they don't need yet if they're still making progress, I’m not going to change things, I’m going to change things when that progress stops.

So you just come up a few percentage points each week, extrapolate that out two or three years and they're gonna be amazing.

So just not getting things that people need before they need them, I guess.

KEEGAN: Yep, in terms of the progression of the repetitions, you gradually working towards singles, where in the journey do these tend to go to more like singles focusing in terms of their snatch, I guess that clean and jerk as well, you kind of move towards singles?

KEVIN: I don't have anything exactly set in stone but when the athlete is ready for it.

But that's not usually in the first but usually in the first four or five months really.

Because in the beginning, it's just that they're just still in the skill acquisition phase and it takes thousands of reps for them to get to the point where every snatch, for the most part, looks pretty much the same.

So we're usually doing triples for a couple of months and then doubles for a couple of months.

Generally, the first exposure to singles people have is still high volume but it's like sets on the minute.

So they might do 15 or 20 snatches each minute which gives you enough time to recover.

The local muscular fatigue might have a little bit of systemic fatigue which just kind of forces you to be more efficient and then I just… to go up and make people earn it.

There's usually some type of requirement.

So maybe they're doing jerks, it's all right.

You have to stick the jerk and you have to be able to hold it three seconds and if you're able to hold it three seconds without wobbling, recover, I’ll let you go up two kilos each set.

And so if you're doing 15 or 20 sets, it gives them the chance to get really heavy but they still have to make the movement pretty close to perfect to earn that and that's most people's first exposure to singles and the lifts.

KEEGAN: Yeah, that makes sense, that's a really good way to grade people into it.

So if that was on the snatch, would it be a 70, 80% kind of single, and then if they don't move their feet, if it's a clean rep, then they add weight and can end up hitting a max or is it kind of capped where they're not gonna get towards their top best weights.

KEVIN: In the beginning. I don't know. I guess it just kind of depends on how it's looking, if it's looking fast and sharp and looks like a snatch and they're able to stick it not take steps and it still looks good, I’ll let them keep pushing but then as soon as they miss, we're usually dropping back down.

So you have a miss or maybe two misses, then we're gonna come back down 10% or so and finish out the rest of the reps of that weight.

KEEGAN: What percent?

KEVIN: So my more advanced athletes, we usually start like 75% for a cycle and then go 80, 85% the fourth week, 75, 80 easy week, and then 85 where they're allowed to build on that performance week but then because most athletes are gonna be PR by a lot.

So we're not gonna do that, generally let them get up to something that's heavy and then they come back down to whatever weight they can perform the rest of the reps pretty close to perfectly under duress.

So whatever that ends up being, it's usually like about 10% from wherever their top set is.

KEEGAN: Yeah, so it's kind of like one shot at the peak like they've got to be really consistent.

If they have two misses, you can see it's like really getting towards their technical limit and come back to weight they're going to be comfortable and they just have to finish out the reps there so they build their confidence and consistency.

It's not like everything at that adrenaline kind of place where I don't know where they're gonna hit it or miss it

KEVIN: Right, and the sets on the mirror are kind of nice too because you're not spiking your adrenaline every three or four minutes for one big attempt.

It's kind of your adrenaline just kind of comes up with the weight, it's like a 20-minute thing, where it's felt like a workout but there's not enough time to overthink it.

I love singles on the minute, that's my favorite way to do singles in my CrossFit background but it works really well.

When I’ve yarned my snatch before it's been the 15th rep on the minute.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I had a goal of 100 kilos snatch before I went to the Klokov-Poliquin event and I’d done a bit of weightlifting but I was getting into it a bit more and I had this target.

I said I’m not going to go to the event unless I snatch 100 kilos before then and I think my snatch was about 80 kilos at the time and I just actually went to a John Bros workshop in the US.

I know he's friends with Travis Mash, I don't know if you've had much to do with him but I went to his workshop in Rhode Island and it was kind of that Bulgarian mentality of just go to the top weight and just keep maxing out.

At least that's what my brain took home from it 10 years ago.

KEVIN: Yeah, very John Bros, I like John.

I’ve been on a trip or two with him, I think our methodologies are about as far apart as you can get though.

KEEGAN: So yeah, I was doing that for a while and it's like every training session was a war.

I was just missing weight over and over again and he talks about making a snatch on the 45th attempt and whatever.

So I was sort of training a bit like that and then I went like “This is not working, it's not smart.”

I started doing five singles on the minute and that was kind of my thing of if I get it five times in a row then I can go up in weight and if I don't then I have to do that again and that's when I actually got there and the day that I hit the 100, I did 87 and a half for singles on the minute and then I ramped up in weight after that.

Sort of similar to what you were talking about, my experience is kind of similar to what you're talking about there.

I love that because I think the big thing with that was consistency for me.

So it sounds like you're the same, you're not wanting to have athletes hitting and missing and being erratic, you're really training that consistency.

KEVIN: Not so much you only get three lifts on the platform.

So it's like you're only making half your snatches, 50% chance to make your opener, and then it doesn't give you much room to go up.

Generally, the people who win competitions are the people who make the most lifts and that's not always the person who has the highest one rep max.

You have to take consistency into account too plus longevity.

I mean it's like maxing out that often, it's hard on your body, it's hard enough lifting an average of 80% through a training cycle, if your average is in the 90% some technique degrades, and the weight's just heavier.

It's not the way that I think is smart to train all the time but I will say the way that John trains is closer to our competition prep.

So not maxing out all the time but twice a week because they're taking it to about the heaviest thing they can perform for the day and they might have a few more misses in there but that's because I’m intentionally trying to beat them up.

I want them to feel systemically. I want them to feel kind of crap about 10 days out from a competition.

They should feel pretty bad by that point because if I know my athletes right and I can time it correctly, I get them feeling absolutely horrible about 10 days out and then we deload, they super compensate and they should be ready to hit all-time PRs for the meet.

KEEGAN: Right, you got a pretty good idea of the numbers that they're going to hit I guess as well based on if you've put them through that before the 10-day period, that gives you a good idea of what numbers to aim for as well, I guess.

KEVIN: Yeah, for sure. Generally with their programs.

I change it up a little bit each cycle, and make my new changes with their competition prep.

Those last three weeks I use the program that's worked the best for them.

A program where they've gone six for six and hit PRs on both lifts and we copy that program over.

They're gonna do the exact same three weeks every time they compete generally.

Based on what they hit in that prep cycle, I have a pretty good idea of what they're capable of on the platform.

KEEGAN: Yeah, do you have kind of predictors all the way through of looking for correlations between well they're back spotting this at this time and now they're back squatting that?

And are you tracking?

I guess for some people in weightlifting, the Russian kind of mentality is deeply analyzing every number and the ratios between everything.

KEVIN: Yeah, I mean most athletes are going to have roughly some percentage of their back squat that they're going to clean and jerk, and then some percentage of their cleaner jerk they're going to snatch.

So an example athlete might… if they can back squat 100 kilos they're going to clean and jerk 80 and they're going to snatch 64 because generally, snatch be about 80 of your clean and jerk, and if you know the percentages for an athlete then you should kind of have an idea as their back squat goes up.

Because early in the cycle, the squat's going to come up more than the snatch and clean and jerk but if you kind of have an idea where their backs want to get a 10-kilo back squat PR.

Hopefully by the end of that 16-week macrocycle, their snatch and clean and jerk will come up to eight and six or seven respectively.

So you should have a pretty good idea.

But it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes an athlete's squat will come up and then they're snatching clean and jerk will lag behind for a few months behind it but we do look at that.

I use a velocity tool and so I’m looking at the bar speed as well and so if I’m looking I’m like “Alright, so this athlete is snatching. She's snatching what was 90% and moving at 2.1 meters per second and that 2.1 meters per second correlates with what she was doing 85% with.

We're probably on track to get a nice 5% in the next few weeks when she's prepared for it” The velocity tool has been really nice to gauge progress and also adds a lot of motivation in the session because the athlete might not be a day where they have the chance to PR their back squat for weight but they can PR for speed.

It's the fastest I’ve ever moved 80% and it's motivating.

We do track all that and that's been really cool.

I’ve really enjoyed that a lot.

KEEGAN: Which device do you use for the velocity?

KEVIN: My buddy Will Fleming, he hooked me up with his company rep one and I liked that pretty well.

It's one of the cheaper options. It was a little under 400 bucks and the user interface and everything it's all right.

I wouldn't say it's amazing but it works well enough for what we do.

KEEGAN: Yeah and so I think we used it, my rugby teams used it.

Not all the time but it was definitely much more motivating.

It's like kind of playing a computer game, isn't it?

Punching the boxing thing, it gives you a score.

You have a bunch of guys in the room together.

It always makes them want to play hard.

KEVIN: Oh yeah, for sure and it's like I just see so much more intent behind the squats especially because the athletes like trying to move as fast as they can, they want to get faster in the last set or faster than the last week, and for weightlifting, that's super important.

It's not just about being able to express that absolute strength but we need to have some speed behind it because the back squat especially, the reason we back squat is to increase the speed of our pull on our clean.

The back squat drives the clean more than anything and the snatch a bit too.

The front squat is where you need more of the absolute strength just be able to stand it up and still have some leg strength to jerk it.

So for back squats, I generally don't want my athletes going below 0.4 meters per second because even below 0.4, that's not going to help a clean which needs to move at a top speed of about a meter and a half or 1.3 meters per second for someone who's super efficient.

KEEGAN: Yeah, that's probably a difference you would see between powerlifting and weightlifting.

Generally, weightlifters will complete the weight much faster even though they're going over a bigger distance, they'll train with higher velocity all the time.

KEVIN: Oh absolutely.

Well, yes weight lifters generally don't have… it's not just that weightlifters move it faster and we're just more explosive athletes but weightlifters don't have the ability to grind is what it is.

It's really rare for a weightlifter to be able to pull on a deadlift and have it take five seconds to stand up and that's just of quality that isn't needed so much for the sport and so it doesn't get trained.

And the big thing especially with deadlifts is that the stimulus-to-fatigue ratio is just really high.

Having a big dead probably would help us clean and jerk more but the stimulus-to-fatigue ratio is low, I should say.

So it would help a little bit but it's going to generate so much fatigue that our clean and jerks and our back squats and front squats are going to be garbage for three days afterwards and so it's generally just not worth it.

So that's why weightlifters don't deadlift very much because we just don't have time.

We can't. We don't have enough recovery to be able to fit it in and get a hard session of snatches and cleans and jerks and front squats, that's going to systemically fatigue us as much as one day of really heavy deadlifting.

So that's why we don't do it.

KEEGAN: Yeah, I was the same with the rugby guys and people would talk about it.

We did speed pulls because we did cleans in that as well but obviously, they're not as technically efficient but speed pulls with the velocity made a lot more sense to me and you kind of know what their 1RMs are, close enough anyway.

Yeah, if we have a deadlift it was before the Christmas break or something like that where it's like we don't care if you're in a world of hurt for the next few days.

It's a good thing. That makes a ton of sense.

So as we go out of that, the technical efficiency is there, you're progressing the volume as needed, and the back squat is probably that other big piece.

What are your keys or what are you looking for?

We've spoken a bit about the bar speed, maintaining that, and using that device for intent on the back squat but what's the… the progression on the back squat seems like probably one of the best predictors, right, of how much everything's going to improve?

So how do you improve the back squat?

KEVIN: I mean I’m looking for with beginners the same thing as with the competitive lifts.

It's like we're looking for the positions, first of all, it's most important and then the actual rhythm like the… controlled fast and then I want that speed on the way up to be faster than the way down.

So the position, rhythm, speed, if all those look good for beginners, we're just adding weight week to week, it's a pretty straight linear progression.

In the beginning, I like higher reps because I think people just need practice with it.

We'll usually do fives to tens in the beginning and if they make 10 and it feels good they can go up the next set, make 10, it goes good, they can go up the next set and we just kind of inchworm it up.

So five to tens for a couple months and then we'll usually get into fives because tens can just be really fatiguing.

Generally, tens and then fives and we'll try to get as much as we can out of them with fives, three to five sets of five and I don't know probably on average maybe six to nine months in people might be ready to start doing threes but lifting a heavy triple is a skill in a way that lifting tens isn't quite as much.

So I want that skill built up with those higher reps and then nine months in they can probably start doing some heavy triples.

And we just kind of go from there.

KEEGAN: What kind of rest periods do you use if you're on the 10 by 10?

That could take a while if you let people move at their own speed.

KEVIN: Oh, we're not doing 10 by tens for back squats, it's usually three or four sets of three or four sets of five to ten.

KEEGAN: Yeah, that was on the slant board, wasn't it?

You meant, did you mention that before?

KEVIN: Right, in the beginning, I have someone who's brand new at the beginning on the slant board.

Yeah, 10 sets of 10 maybe on the minute and a half something like that, maybe on the two minutes but that's generally…

I’ll have someone who's brand new coming in, just learning how to use their body for the first time.

We're doing slant boards and incline push-ups and incline bros and then we'll do hip extensions on the back extension machine and just learning all the basic fundamentals.

Mostly for students.

KEEGAN: Are you doing three to five-minute rest on the… if you're doing the tens and fives on the squats or is it…

KEVIN: When the person's recovered.

I mean I want them to have a bit of work capacity but I don't want them limited by their breathing or by anything else.

So yeah, I’d say three or four minutes.

Generally about right, maybe five three, or five.

KEEGAN: If you're not taking the sets all the way to the death then their recovery is a lot faster as well.

Right. If they grind their out-of-here wraps and have to stand there and breathe in between then the recovery is a lot longer versus… are you letting them stay long there in-between reps or are you kind of making it a strict…

KEVIN: I mean, we'll usually just stop the set when they get to the point where the positions are getting hard to hold or they feel like they have to stop the set.

Generally, we just stop there because it kind of goes back to that stimulus-to-fatigue ratio.

It's like okay so if you have eight good reps and those last two were really hard.

Alright, yeah, you might get marginally stronger from those last two reps but you're gonna be twice as beat up and I would prefer to just stop at eight, and then maybe we get a few more reps and an additional set if it doesn't feel like enough work and that's something that the velocity tool has really shown me because there's often a very precipitous drop-off, the person going .48, .47, .45 and then all of a sudden their last two are in the point threes and why do we need to do those point threes?

It's like the bar speed's slow there's not much power output, we could have just stopped, and added another set to get those last two reps from the other four sets.

So we just do another set of eight, they're all still high quality and it comes down to practicing the skill too, when you're under that max weight you want your body to revert to the proper form and not cave in or whatever it is just because when it's under a lot of duress, has been under duress in the past, that's what it's gone to.

It's like I just want lots of perfect reps and I want something that you can move fast and that's not going to produce a whole ton of fatigue for no reason and then you don't have to rest quite as long between sets either.

KEEGAN: I think it's such an important message.

I think there's so much stuff out there of “You have to train insane or remain the same kind of…” these kinds of slogans of “Just work hard, work hard” but it's about progress as you say.

So I love that message, the bar's going slower and the muscles are doing less work.

That's why it goes slow because …

KEVIN: They're not producing nearly as much power and for a sport, it's all about power but it just doesn't make sense, there are other movements that you can push it as hard as you want.

If you want to push that complete fatigue on a sled, absolutely go for it because it's not going to generate nearly as much systemic fatigue even though you feel exhausted while you're doing it.

So yeah, go crazy.

But for a back squat or something, just increase the risk of injury, you're not getting the type of adaptation that you want and it's too fatiguing.

We have other stuff that I want you to be able to put more effort into and you probably have to clean the next day so don't kill yourself on squats today.

KEEGAN: Yeah, exactly.

That's such a game of consistency and years of development.

These girls as you're talking about, you're thinking about years from now where they're going to be…

So there's no one rep or one day of work that's going to get them there.

It's the compounding effect of just quality.

I love the clarity of your message around that, really comes through and every weightlifting coach doesn't think like that, that's not the message that everybody is kind of talking about.

So yeah, it's really powerful.

I think we covered a bunch there.

I could keep going forever but I think we got a lot down there and it'd be cool to hear feedback as well.

The guys who listen back to the recording.

I know there are quite a few guys in the community that love their CrossFit, love their weightlifting.

I think there are a lot of gems in there as far as progressions go and yeah, I really appreciate you making time for us and sharing some of your experience there.

KEVIN: Yeah man, that was fun.

Thanks for having me.

KEEGAN: Appreciate it.