Keone (5/2) - Pavel's Russian Bear Induction

Hey gang,

So I decided that, as I am between programs, and given that I am likely not going to any meet (unless someone else wants to go on May 14 -- still looking -- still looking) in the next little while, I would go out on a limb. I've been looking into strength vs. hypertrophy programs for a little while (Practical Programming is amazing!) and want to try hypertrophy for a bit. (I know, sacrilege, especially since this is the MIT Strength blog.)

My reasoning is that it might be interesting to switch things up a bit to bulk out and see if it helps my strengt. Larger muscles have more leverage, plus then there is more muscle to train to be strong. In sailing, when you want to sail upwind you have to keep tacking to switch between two different partially-upwind directions.

But not to worry... I'm not doing curls or dinky little machines or things. Instead, I am doing this crazy thing called the Russian Bear program by Pavel T. (It's discussed in the book "Power to the People", which is decent although someone annoying in the sense that he tries to over-Russian things with lots of mentions of "comrade" and stuff like that.)

Basically it's a three week cycle (so, short experiment) where you do the same two lifts every time--Pavel suggests deadlift and side press, although I will be doing deadlift and bench press.

For each lift, first you do 5 reps at a weight you could normally do 7 reps (so an easy 5). Then rest a few minutes and multiply by 90% and do another set of 5. Rest a few minutes more and multiply by 90%... but at this point, instead of doing a single set, you do 10-25 sets of 5 with about 45-60 seconds of rest in between, continuing until you can't maintain form.

Then rest 10-15 minutes (necessary... gassed) and do the other lift. On subsequent visits, increment 5 lbs (deadlift) or 2.5 lbs (BP).

I know it's a lot of volume, and that recovery (especially from deadlift, which usually gets >1 week recovery) will be hard. Also, the usual caveats apply... listen to your body, don't let form break down (just stop when it gets close), high volume deadlifts are dangerous, etc. But it also seems kind of interesting in the sense that I feel my deadlift and bench need to go up, volume work might stimulate progress (especially for bench... this program is somewhat reminiscent of Sheng's program discussed a little earlier), and it's also only three weeks. I will be careful.

On to the logs:

Deadlift
345x5
310x5
280x5x15

Bench
155x5
135x5
115x5x17 (did 2 more sets of 4 reps, not counting them though)
[I decided to drop a little faster on bench as my elbows were sore from squatting. They loosened up nicely. This also gives me a bit of mileage to increment, although admittedly not much--these will get hard fast.]


Next time: deadlift increment by 5, BP increment by 5. Damn, I need to find my fractional plates...