It looked like he needed a lot of help from the meet atmosphere if he was going to hit it. 790 was there, maybe 795, but I think he was pushing his luck to try 800 at this meet. Sucks to have all of your eggs in one basket. I don’t see why he wouldn’t hit it by the next one though.
I know, for me, it takes a LOT of mental energy to prep for a max attempt, and I can easily burn all that out on a false start like that. With Julius only typically taking 2 attempts, I can see this being a big factor.
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When you’re holding the equivalent of a small moose over your chest, yeah a mishaps will fuck you up. Mentally and physically. Josh has said before that Julius can’t go more than two attempts in a day which makes sense due to pushing loads equivalent to most’s 1RM squat or dead.
I also saw somewhere he got injured and didn’t wait until the third flight to go, but I didn’t watch the live stream nor know him personally so I’m not saying this to be fact.
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Your max is your max, it doesn’t really make any difference how big that max is as far as it goes. If you think 800 is any different for him than Joe Bro going for 400, you’re wrong. Maybe it screws with his head too much, but the number is irrelevant. Personally, it would just piss me off and probably make the actual attempt better, but every lifter is different. I would be willing to bet that most lifters above “gym bro” level would block out the number mentally for the attempt - I don’t even like to have numbers facing me for serious attempts, I have the smooth sides facing in. His coach or buddy should have been checking the load for him - because he’s not going to look at the plates. Every time somebody throws up the actual number like it makes a difference it shows that they really don’t know what they’re talking about. All he did is unrack and rerack, which you get a lift off for. He simply wasn’t ready for 800 yet, but he was pretty close.
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Not sure how this makes sense as 400 takes a lot less toll on someone than 800, but I digress A lot of guys have hit 400, no one has done 800.
This isn’t an attempt at a local meet for shits and gigs though. This is a WR attempt at a weight most though literally impossible for people to bench raw.
He also had the intent of lowering the weight and treating it like he would the 800. When one side is loaded to equal 800 and one side is loaded to 745, I guarantee you would feel some type of issue from this. He didn’t just lower the weight in a weird fashion for show, it just started dropping fast and probably felt horrible due to it.
The risk for injury is so high at that level, it could have ended his career and he might have never hit 800 when he could have due to shitty loading. This could crush anyone mentally.
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Well, akkkkshually it is characterized by science that the closer to the threshold of world records a lift approaches, the more strain on the body the lift takes.
As we all know, basically why 6, 7 and 800lb deadlifters cannot train as close to their max regularly as someone who deadlifts 3, 4 or 500lbs.
Regardless, I don’t think he had 800 that day either. It’s also not a surprise given his 790 miss.
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Not sure most can squat plus dead what Julius benches.
90% is 90%, 95% is 95%. If your 1RM id 500 then 490 is going to be very taxing. And not particularly more or less taxing than 680 is for the guy whose 1RM is 700. In my experience anyway. An 850 squat wasn’t harder on me than 650.
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I hear people arguing both ways, I guess it just varies from person to person. But I do notice that few guys who squat 1000+ are squatting more than once a week, while a lot of guys who squat under 500 can handle 3-4 times a week.
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Yeah on the topic of “percentage feel and tax your body the same no matter how strong you are” I’m gonna have to disagree, with the caveat that it might be more related to how close you are to your genetic potential (sorry gents, genetic potential is a real thing). Two lifters, same weight, one with more experience, lower genetic potential, the other with less experience, more genetic potential, both squat 600 lbs. I guarantee that 5x5 at 450 lbs (75%) would be significantly more difficult for the experienced lifter than the newer lifter.
Think about it, the way you get closer to your genetic potential is by training your body to activate a higher number of muscle fibers during the lifter. If a lifter with shit genetics has to activate 80% of their quad fibers in a 600 lbs squat, but a gifted lifter with optimal joint insertions and such only needs to activate 40%, guess who experienced a greater muscular taxation effect?
Even Louis Simmons, who is generally an advocate of “the stronger you are, the more you have to do” mentality comments on higher level lifters needing to use lower percentages for their dynamic effort work. Yes, as you get stronger the weights you use have to increase, but the percentages of your max must come down as well.
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I agree with your write up. Other than I wouldn’t really consider anyone squatting 600 lbs to have “shit” genetics. Maybe not great genetics, but I have friends that would be luck to hit a 405 lb squat with 5 years of training. That is shit genetics.
Louie would Never mention quad fibers when talking about the squat.
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Just to qualify, I love these kinds of discussions and hope no one takes anything too personal. I feel like I learn from the opinions of other experienced guys who have given things some thought.
I can see how an experienced lifter may be recruiting a greater percentage of muscle fibres for a kift than an inexperienced lifter, and that the more experienced lifter suffers less Golgi resistance and is in fact using more of what he has than the new guy. I can see this as presenting a significantly greater CNS load and therefore being more taxing from that side of things and in turn requiring greater recovery. CNS has always seemed the real limiter to me anyway, not muscle. But in the case of an advanced lifter, percent of max should be much more even across the board regardless of genetic limits.
I don’t see the hand-off and rerack as being particularly taxing physically, he threw it back immediately and made no attempt. It let him feel the heavier load briefly which makes the jump “Feel” smaller for the actual attempt, and could easily trigger a helpful adrenaline response from channelled anger which could also be beneficial. In thos case I think it’s more about his psychology than anything else.
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I agree with the rest of what you are saying, but in this part here there could be a different explanation. According to people like Fred Hatfield and Josh Bryant, how many reps you can do at a given percentage depends largely on muscle fibre type. More slow twitch fibres = more reps and more endurance, more fast twitch = less reps and fatigue faster.
@hardartery I kind of lost sight of this all being in the context of misload debacle. I agree that I don’t think the misload unrack necessarily had some real physiological effect that caused him to miss the lift, and if it did I would think that would mean that 800 was really, really close to his true 100% capacity for the day. I think the percentage vs experience stuff I was talking about is more applicable to training volumes than to meet day performance. My guess, if he really did have the strength to bench 800 (which it looked like he did) the misload may have mentally thrown him off and caused him to miss a cue or something when he did go for the attempt.
@chris_ottawa do you think the decrease in ability to handle volume at a fixed percentage as experience increases is more from a transition of fiber types than fiber recruitment in general? For myself, that would make sense because I started as a super slow grindy lifter, but now I’m either relatively fast, or I miss.
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I don’t think the concept is that black and white.
I’ve always been a super explosive lifter, especially in my noob days, but nowadays I’ve put in so much work to build muscle, because my “CNS” drive, or w/e you wanna call it, combined with maximizing technical prowess is no longer providing me with gains in as high of a capacity as simply building more muscle is.
So, my reps lately have been slower, grindier, and more muscly. But I can instantly begin training more explosively as soon as I wanna prep for a contest. I will likely only be slow twitch fiber dominant for a short period of time until my body gets the used to consistently being explosive again.
I think it’s that simple. If you’re tired of being a slow grindy lifter, just change how you train for 6-10 weeks, regardless of your level as a lifter.
I also lift in an explosive way. I am trying to add muscle, so what I have been doing is slow eccentrics, with fast concentric. I figure I get the best of both worlds strength, and muscle building with that technique. Maybe I am wrong, but just an experiment.
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I’m not Chris, but I know there is conversion of fibre type as well as sub-type from training. I found that, personally, volume ability was also related to cardiovascular conditioning. Not fatness or size, but specifically my cardiovascular capacity/conditioning.
For clarity It was an underload, not an overload.
Nonetheless having a very significant discrepancy in a bilaterally balanced lift like bench would put a huge amount of torque through your whole body as you need to stabilise the heavier side without the ‘assistance’ from the other side.
As far as im concerned, a 25kg misload, under or not, would absolutely impact your ability, physiologically in addition to psychologically, to get the lift on a second attempt.
Im not convinced he would have got 800lb had they not fucked up like some people are, but there was a chance. But when you are at your absolute max, it doesnt take a big fuckup to take something from 99.9% of your max to 100.1% of your max.
The idea that he should just have ‘shrugged it off’ is a dumb take.
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I can’t personally explain it, there are some theories out there but nobody can really say for sure what. I think it probably has to do with some factors with the CNS that aren’t fully understood, there just isn’t a whole lot of research into this sort of stuff.
In my own experience, when I do more submax/speed work type of training then I have the same issue, either the lift moves fast or I miss, but if I regularly do hard, grindy sets then I get better at grinding and can finish lifts that otherwise would have just stalled and crashed. I notice this more on bench than anything.
In the end, it comes down to what gets you the best results. Look at Yury Belkin, all his lifts in training are explosive. On the other hand, there are plenty of elite lifters who regularly do sets at RPE 10. Scientific explanations aside, it’s a balance between speed and ability to strain and the only thing that really matters is finishing the lift.