Aaron King (00:00):
Welcome back to the modern old school training podcast. I'm Aaron King with coach Bob King, and we are getting back into the swing of things. This is kind of the kickoff of a new season. It's in the middle of fall sports. And so winter's coming up and I've been out with a lot of different people that have been on the show. It's been great. We're going to get back to a little bit of training and to kick things off in this kind of new chapter if you will, or series, let's call it that. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the questions you get. And you want to kinda explain what we were talking about before, but explain kind of what this led to this topic.
Coach Bob King (00:33):
I'm asked all the time about what do I do too, and then you fill in the blank. What do I do to lose five pounds? What do I do to get taller? I can't do that. What do I do to increase my bench or increase my squat, get faster? And there are all these individual questions, but what we'd like to communicate today is all these individual questions are connected to each other. It is not a improvement on your bench. It's not just getting faster without improving this side or the other. So every one of these questions are coming
Aaron King (01:01):
Well, let's start there. Okay. I'm coming into the gym. What can I do to improve my back?
Coach Bob King (01:06):
Well, in my world my bread and butter is program design. And so there's, there's been too much enthusiasm to come in and just lift, add weight, lift, add weight, the lift had weight. We call it periodization. It's a way to predict where you're going to be going as far as like I'm lifting this much today. And then on the next workout, I'm going to lift this much with these reps. And what that means is every workout is connected. And so what I prefer to do is like, all right, we're gonna, we're gonna start you off in a and just a conditioning phase of the repetition. So we're probably doing lots of eights in the early going. We may bench three times in the week. Now I want to be very careful and listen to this carefully because you know, a lot of people, you know, jump on that and overdo it at the same time.
Coach Bob King (01:50):
Some of my colleagues would say, he'd bench three times a week. You're going to crash and burn. But what we'll do in the way I like to do it is all right. Let's bench sets eight on first day two, which would be like, let's say Monday, Wednesday, Friday routine. We're going to do dumbbells. We're going to make sure the body's being symmetrical and we're not dominant on one side. It can come back to bite us. So it's nothing but a kind of active recovery with dumbbell presses. And then Friday, I prefer to use that in a three-day scheme as my big day. So those aides may become sixes three sets of eight, three sets of 10, four sets of six. And we have all these available. You'll see them in our training app. So the workouts are published. Then as we go, I'm kind of a two-week guy, I've looked at the research, I've looked at results over the, over the decades.
Coach Bob King (02:36):
And if we change every two weeks in our scheme, we get a pretty good result from it. And it helps us extend the training. So the two weeks become four, become six, become eight. And what we do is we build in an unloading or active recovery about somewhere six to the seventh week. We'll start, we'll pull back. And so it's not a mad dash. You know, I think strength training is the easiest of the components and athlete development to improve, but it also has to be done intelligently. And so I mentioned that three days, we'll take it to two days after the third into the third week. And so we're kind of crawling for two weeks. And so to improve the bench, take the same approach to improve a squat, improving, improving an Olympic lift. We're going to go in a two-week adaptive stage of saying, right. Here's kind of where your baseline strength is. Here's where your techniques need to be worked on and cleaned up. And now week three, we think that that's the best time with started really kind of adding to a hefty part of the program.
Aaron King (03:38):
So right now we're kind of using bench press as the example, but beyond that, who's the subject here? Is this, how does this apply the two-week rule apply to gender level?
Coach Bob King (03:49):
That's I mean, believe it or not, that's a great question because I think it's universal. Because it let's take you to know, somebody who's been an athlete and their lifetime, who's now working at the office, got the nine-five, nine to five going, well, they've got a, they've got a trickier cycle to work in. And so two weeks is, is definite for them. And then I may, I may try to, with the non-athlete try to get to three-week cycle because they are they got a long way to go. And so the object is now till eternity, so to speak. And so what we'll do is go ahead and let them have maybe the third week, but no doubt, we're going to change the program at week three. And I work with these people. We have some guys in here who were, you know, they're in business and they're coming in pretty religiously. And so my challenge is, is 52 weeks. Yeah. I mean, that's hard to plan out, but fortunately, there are adults who have families and go on vacation. So my active recovery is built-in and holidays and so forth. But when you start talking about a 52-week cycle, man, that's, that's a tough one.
Aaron King (04:54):
And so all the little auxiliary lifts that we would do that someone might say like, okay, I'm trying to up my bench. Why do you have me doing so many polls? Why do you have me doing so many things that's not helping my bench? What's what do you explain to them as far as how balance works?
Coach Bob King (05:10):
And, and that's just, first of all, that's not helping my bench false. And because you have to have a good strong platform to push from. You have to have good stable arms, to push from. And so when you're, when you're doing one thing, they say, just pushing them back is stabilizing. And so if you ever watch powerlifters, if you ever got a chance to see any video on powerlifting, you'll see those guys kind of wiggle and, and, and kind of sink into the bench because they're trying to get that base. And so if their back's not strong and doesn't matter. So a couple of things about it, one symmetry, as far as like, if it's an adult, there's statics involved. And so you do so much bench. You don't want your shoulders pulling in to where you just, you know, lousy posture at the same time you want your clothes to look good on you.
Coach Bob King (05:57):
So we need that wedge or that, that back muscle. So there's cosmetics for the adults and in the athletes is balanced to be able to do both because you're going to get me going in both directions. And just let me give you a kind of a non-obvious example is like if you ever watch more, more in the heavyweight division, would you see heavyweight boxers? They have huge lats, you know, it's like, well, wait a minute. Everything's in front of them. Well, it is because they go forward, but something stops it and then something retracts it or pulls it back. So it's a front-back proposition, even though nobody would think of boxers, anything but front side,
Aaron King (06:32):
God. Well, and so I just, I, I, you said it's universal and I try to specify in the different gender sports, et cetera. So kind of dive in deeper into that. When does it kick in if I'm for the youth athlete?
Coach Bob King (06:46):
Day one well, as far as
Aaron King (06:48):
Like, are we talking middle school? Are we talking about high school?
Coach Bob King (06:51):
We're going to start you know, if I had to back against the wall here, I'd say 12. Because you're not going to get statistical improvements. So to speak with young ones, like 12 even, you know, even though they're not being able to put on, let's say large amounts of weight there's a couple of things going on here. And then the bottom line is we're training you how to train. This is how you do it properly. Here's what it's called. Here's how you handle the weight. And so we're going to train you how to train next. We found a by-product that we weren't looking for. And, and everybody knows this part. The first part of most strength gains for anybody is neuromuscular. Because if you've not lifted before, it's just like we see the wobble. And every time somebody comes in a new athlete or non older young, and they get that wobble, I just say, that's, that's going to go away.
Coach Bob King (07:42):
Don't worry about it. And it's almost instant because their body figures it out pretty quick. And so they start stabilizing it and that's a nervous system event. And so with the young ones, they learn how to train and they have the wobbling and they can't handle a lot of weight. But with the athlete athletic population, we found out something kind of from a neuromuscular standpoint is that now it doesn't matter what I do. If I play tennis, golf, baseball, I have, I have limb control or implement control my club, head speeds, faster, racket speeds, faster, bad speeds, faster. And we, we SIM I approve this because we had a group of 13-year-olds coming in and lifting new to weightlifting who played baseball. And I caught a dad one day and I go, how's his batting average. And I felt something great would happen.
Coach Bob King (08:28):
And it's like, I don't, I'm not hitting instructor. Well, he goes, ah, batting average about the same more basis. And oh, wait a minute. What yes. Singles or doubles, doubles, or triples he's got more home runs. Well, the strength was coming into play, but more of the limb control. And what that means is he could swing the bat where it needed to go and not just kind of hope it got where it was going to go. Strength produces speed. So bat, head speed was faster. And so obviously he got more basis to carry that over into the whole athlete development principle in terms of running limb control helps us be able to say, look, here's where the arm tracks, it's the arm path for your sprinting. So that's the hardest thing I deal with with the young wizard limb arms all over
Aaron King (09:13):
And that 12 years old kind of that might vary based on the athlete,
Coach Bob King (09:18):
You know, not all created equal. So we'll have variances in that, you know, the man-child and then just like, okay, this is going to be a project and that's okay. But we don't know when the physical part is going to kick in.
Aaron King (09:28):
So there's the next thing that kind of, the evolution of this question is now where is the differentiation of, I am training for competitive bench press, where it's literally just about the bench or bench press is just an element of my athletic development, where I want it. I want those numbers to grow, but it's really not like the end all be all, but for a competitive lifter, it kind of is
Coach Bob King (09:52):
Let's take that for example. And they'll competitive lifter, it ends up being some of these adults like I'm talking about, well as a coach and periodizing and all whatnot, I have to look way out and look ahead like you know, can I get a 12-week cycle out of this? That's a long time actually. And so what we'll end up doing is, is trying to plan out, let's see how long can I stretch out the earliest stage and just build a strong base and then start pinpointing, you know, let's say the one RM and one rep max, and be able to get to that max point because what we find in everybody is that when you reach a max point, it is a max point. So you've got to start falling back off again. So we have to build in that peak and in that beginning to the Valley. And so without crashing and burning, we build it in and say right here in eight, nine weeks, we want to be at this level and we hit that level. We're going to come, we're going to come right.
