A while back, I read one of your articles named ‘The 1 Rep Max is Dead’ and after that ‘How I added 100 pounds to my deadlift in 2 weeks’. And I’ve been digging into the conjugate method lately.
Now my question is: I am looking to be athletic: fast, explosive, big, conditioned and very strong. Would you recommend doing dynamic effort for this purpose (like traditional Westside set-up), or focus on getting a 2/3/4 RM’s on the all main lifts weekly and do work next to that to focus on explosiveness?
Thanks in advance coach! Pumped about your new site!
I now the program and it is on my list of things I want to run, but this is not just about running a program, this is also about being able to create programs based on principles long term
Dynamic days are verrrrrrry important to west side. It’s where you will get most of your strength gains. Max effort gets you acclimated to handling heavier weights. If you want to run west side do it the right way and don’t try to improve it. If you don’t like the set up then don’t do it and find a different program.
I’m not trying to improve westside, I’m trying to run a program that uses the max effort and are in doubt about how to set it up. Westside is just a way to set it up.
What also makes me doubt: I’m not sure if it is true, but I read some articles that suggest dynamic effort came forth out of need, not because it’s especially great for building strength: max effort was suggested to be the best to build strength (intra-muscular activation, synchronisation, etc.) and dynamic effort was there to give more practice because the body couldn’t take more maxing out.
By that logic, it might be better to max out more times a week, yet use 2/3/4/5RM’s to not burn out the CNS to much.
Look at my Bulgarian Simplified training. I don’t believe that you can do max effort 4 days a week unless you are genetically gifted or un drugs… well you might tolerate it for 4-6 weeks, so as a shock program maybe but certainly not as a training system. I’ve done it myself in the past and because maxing out is what I like to do the most I found ways to justify doing it and not see the negatives that were happening. But you WILL crash on it.
In my Bulgarian simplified program you go hard twice a week but on more lifts. This is likely manageable for most (especially since you mostly do 2s and 3 and it is to a training max, not an all-out max). I’d rather have more max effort on less days because you can’t have 4 neural days in a week an not crash.
Athough Christian responded perfectly,let me add my 2 cents
There are benefits to high volume work that cannot be provided by just maxing out.These are work capacity,muscle mass and better recovery
Also unracking the bar 9-12 times,sometimes even more,and going through the movement probably helps with technique too
Lastly,since you said you wanna be explosive,both explosive strength and maximum strength are better trained fresh,so again you better have seperate days for each one of the two