Do any Bulgarians actually do their split squat?
Any French do the French Press?
Any Cubans pressing?
Russians twisting?
Turkesh getting up?
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I dunno.
I do know that an exercise is better when its from somewhere else though.
I love old lifting lore! I have heard about a few.
A Bulgarian guy who posted here said 1 Bulgarian coach (Angel Spazov) who really liked the split squat told some US dudes about it. But nobody else in Bulgaria knows about it.
2 Russian world champion/ world record hammer throwers, Bondarchuk and Sedykh really, really loved the Plate Twist to prepare for the hammer.
Charles Poliquin invented the Cuban Press to keep athletes’ shoulders healthy, but nobody wanted to do silly little corrective moves. He had to tell dudes that they were the super secret lift of some bad-ass Cuban lifter to make them seem cool.
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I still don’t know the answer to this.
I think the answer is to keep watching the video repeatedly until you forget the question
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Ok, good! Cuz thats what I did and thats the same conclusion I came to.
So theres consistency. 
I eventually realized that there is some writing, but it did honestly take a few tries.
I still haven’t read it though.
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Big Z does not do the Z Press.
Coach Smolov never existed.
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Sheiko templates are numbered the way they are because the numbers correspond with the number of the example in his book
Sheiko quotes and references Smolov’s research in his powerlifting book, so, I’m not sure this is true.
The Z press was around before Big Z was even born. I didn’t know that until a week or so ago. Was kind of a neat find. Not sure of the exact date of this photo, but sometime before 1924.
He sure does, yet there is no record of such an individual ever having actually existed or coached anyone. And the USSR documented frickin’ EVERYTHING. So either Smolov never existed, OR he was such an awful coach that he never produced a single athlete of any significance. So in either case, wanting to follow the instruction of coach Smolov over any other actually accomplished coach is pretty nutty.
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I just took a look at the book again to see where he talks about Smolov, and – inferring a bit – it looked like Smolov was mostly interested in the biomechanics of the deadlift.
Why anyone would do a squat routine from a scientist who specialized in studying the deadlift beats me.
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Yup. He was a pseudonym at best. Basically the Keyser Soze of weightlifting.
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Dead-weight lifting was called that, in contrast to lifting live weights.
The “continental clean” was a derogatory term by the British about the way lifters from continental Europe lifted the bar. It was very much not “clean to the shoulders”.
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I’d also really like to see the stats on the number of Preacher’s Curling… lol
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I saw something the other day on Reddit about K Black (Tactical Barbell) being a pseudonym for Jim Wendler. The next reply was something like “Wendler is borderline illiterate and K Black includes a table of contents.”
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