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Thread: The Gospel According to Duane

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    Default The Gospel According to Duane

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    Squat three days a week, power clean twice. Press (in some variety) every time you lift. Keep the reps in the 3-5 range for as much weight as you can move. Plan on a 1 hour workout, with the first half spent on squats or power cleans and the second half spent on pressing. Substitute deadlifts for squats and cheat kurls for power cleans on occasion. Plan on lifting every day of the week, except take Saturday and Sunday off. Eat, at a minimum, a dozen eggs, a pound of meat and a gallon of milk every day; doing this more than once in a day will make you a god. Avoid carbs until the weekend, then load up like there is a famine coming. Sleep 8-10 hours a night and try to get in a decent nap as often as possible. Brush your teeth and wear a seatbelt.
    Interesting. Very interesting. I wonder why he considers powecleans so important?

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    I might do just that this winter break.

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    Quote Originally Posted by msingh View Post
    Interesting. Very interesting. I wonder why he considers powecleans so important?
    Duane definitely has a bias towards the olifts. So obviously not all of his advice will be completely applicable to powerlifters, but lot of his thoughts on programming are not only wise, but tried and true. I think it could be easily argued that an olift movement is a necessary part of a program aimed at getting someone bigger/stronger/faster.

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    I'd like to hear that argument. My current program is squats, deads, presses and chins and that's it. What am i missing by not including a fast lift? Sorry if this is a hijack i'm genuinely curious.

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    Quote Originally Posted by scoppi View Post
    Duane definitely has a bias towards the olifts. So obviously not all of his advice will be completely applicable to powerlifters, but lot of his thoughts on programming are not only wise, but tried and true. I think it could be easily argued that an olift movement is a necessary part of a program aimed at getting someone bigger/stronger/faster.
    And also o-lifts are more capable of being done frequently, and duane sure does like frequent training.

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    Thats a legit question. I guess my saying that theyre a necessary part was going a bit far. I think someone could certainly get where they wanted to be by doing power lifts and conditioning work.

    The o lifts are different from the power lifts because they require speed strength, where as the power lifts are focused more on absolute strength. Speed strength is basically power, or that explosive strength. When i think of being stronger and faster, that explosive power is definitely there. Dont get me wrong, being able to bench 400 will give you plenty of power, but the o lifts train that fast twitch fiber well, which will help with any athletic endeavor.

    I guess it will come down to what you want out of your program. When i switch away from a pure powerlifting focus, i'll want one that trains strength, speed strength, speed, and conditioning.

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    for some reason it asks me to log on when I click the link. could you copy it into this thread?

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    it's too much to quote in one post (52,000 characters and the limit on this site is 10k). might be worth signing up?

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    starting strength coach development program
    its worth spending the time on that site. theres a lot of bullshit to sift through, but a lot of good info as well. heres the post though:


    duane hansen 5 day per week

    Squat three days a week, power clean twice. Press (in some variety) every time you lift. Keep the reps in the 3-5 range for as much weight as you can move. Plan on a 1 hour workout, with the first half spent on squats or power cleans and the second half spent on pressing. Substitute deadlifts for squats and cheat kurls for power cleans on occasion. Plan on lifting every day of the week, except take Saturday and Sunday off. Eat, at a minimum, a dozen eggs, a pound of meat and a gallon of milk every day; doing this more than once in a day will make you a god. Avoid carbs until the weekend, then load up like there is a famine coming. Sleep 8-10 hours a night and try to get in a decent nap as often as possible. Brush your teeth and wear a seatbelt.




    duane hansen abs

    For pressing in particular (and being strong in general), I think that the best thing to do for the abs is Roman Chair Situps (RCS) for low reps and with a lot of weight. What I did was like this:

    1) Do your RCS on something like a hyperextension or glute/ham apparatus. This will let you bend way back at the bottom of the movement and sit all of the way up at the top. When I do them I try to lower my torso far enough at the bottom to be able to look at the North (just to pick an arbitrary direction) wall in the gym and then look at the South wall when I am sitting up. Working through the extreme ends of your ROM could possibly be traumatic (especially if you are not used to it), so you will need to be careful. But the idea is to have the physical skills that you need in order to move your spine through flexion and extension without getting hurt.

    2) Add weight (holding it on your chest or across your shoulders) to your RCS as often as you can. I worked up to being able to do 5x5 while holding two 20kg discs under my chin. When I could do that I was at my strongest. The actual amount of weight that you use is not nearly as important as the idea of getting stronger. The best way that I have found to get stronger in a movement like this is to approach it like any other strength movement: several sets of low reps (say, 5x5) and add weight as often as you can.

    3) It also helps a lot if you stretch as much as you strengthen. Frog kicks (done in the style found in the old York courses) will both give the abs some more work and stretch the low back. I have spent a long time pondering the cause-and-effect relationship here, but there is a correlation: when I was strong enough to do a few sets of 10 reps in the frog kick at the end of my workout (and, in the process, stretch and relax the muscles in my low back), I was strong and injury-free.

    4) Hanging leg raises (performed like a gymnast by hanging from a bar and then touching your feet to the bar) will help a lot, too. These are almost a stunt (rather than an exercise), since you need to be strong before you can even look like you are trying to do them, but if you can get to the point where you can try to do a few sets of a couple of reps you will be strong.




    duane hansen beginner oly program

    An entry-level OL program will consist of Snatch, Clean & Jerk and Squats. Back Squats will be more forgiving of flexibility issues and Front Squats will highlight those issues and give you some specificity, too. Start with that program 3 days/week, alternating Front and Back squats each day.

    For the next month or two (depending on your needs), lift on three days/week and work on the mobility issues on the other days. If you are busting ass on both lifting and stretching, it will only take 2-3 months before you should be ready to move up. Equal time on lifting AND stretching pays dividends if you pay attention to it at the start.

    Once you can move the way that you need to move in the classical lifts and the squats (3 days/week), you can start to add work on another three days/week. Assuming you are doing the basic program on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, You can add some pressing and deadlifts on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I would suggest alternating bench press and standing press from day to day and deadlifting every day following the press. Presses should be fairly strict with the index fingers touching your shoulders at the start and the bench should be with the same grip as the press. Deadlifts should be done with a clean grip and a weight that will let you knock out 10 singles with a heavy weight, but not a weight so heavy that you couldn't do it again the next day.

    If you work up to that point and decide that you need more work, let me know. This should be a plan that will make you stronger and move the calendar quite a few months forward. Every time you press (either overhead or on the bench), make sure that you stretch your pecs and shoulders. Working your abs every day would be a good thing, too.

    You should not jump into the deep end of the pool right away. Work into it and add more as you can tolerate what you are doing now.

    I would say that 3 days/week is a good starting point. I will usually have novice Olympic lifters start with snatches and a light weight. Do singles up to a heavy weight. For a novice, the weight is too heavy when they start making technical errors. At that point back off on the weight a bit and do a few more singles with an emphasis on correct technique. Do the same thing with the clean & jerk. Finish the workout with some squats; triples in the front squat or sets of five in the back squat are good. Use enough weight to make it work and do a few sets (maybe 3). All that would be good for a single workout.

    Every workout you should try to lift as much weight as you can in the snatch and the clean & jerk in good form. The Olympic lifts are much more forgiving than the power lifts when it comes to recovery. Eventually you should get to the point where your limit in the Olympic lifts comes from the fact that the bar is too heavy and not that you made a technical error; this is the point where you are also no longer a novice.

    After you have been working on the 3 days/week program for a couple of months, the amount of work that you are doing each day will become routine. It should take you about an hour to get through all of that (not counting warm-up and other stuff like abs or stretching you might do at the end). Once you get used to it, you should not feel worn out at the end (tired, yes, but not exhausted) and you might start to think that you could do two of those workouts on consecutive days. At this point you can start adding in the other workout (pressing + deadlift). Start by adding it one day/week and eventually add a second and later a third day.

    The work load here does not need to be tremendous. Five sets x 2 reps with 80% of your max is a good, average workout. Five sets x 3 reps with 80-85% is some hard work, but not too hard. Often for the deadlift I will do 10 singles with 80% of my max and call it good. Certainly nothing earth-shattering there, but enough to call it work. A lot of the progress you make on this program will come from the cumulative effect of all of the work that you are doing. This is different from the HIT mindset, because few of the sets or reps in this program are significant by themselves (PR attempts are an obvious exception) but all of them add up over time and allow you to put more weight on the bar as you go along.




    duane hansen c and p ideas

    It is hard to go wrong with the clean & press as your only exercise. There are a couple of things that can help to round out this program.

    1. Ideally, you should be able to clean more than you press; it should also go without saying that the weights you could squat and deadlift are more than the weight you could clean. One way to take advantage of this is to C&P up to a heavy weight for the day, then do more cleans (without the press). If you are just doing power cleans, do more power cleans after you are done pressing; sets of 2-3 reps with the top weight that you power cleaned & pressed are good.

    2. Power Clean and Front Squat is another good thing to do when you are done pressing. You should be able to power clean your top C&P weight for the day and then do several front squats with it.

    3. Clean pulls or deadlifts are a good thing to do after you are done racking the bar on your shoulders. Several triples in the clean pull with your best weight in the power clean is a decent amount of useful work, especially if you pay attention to good technique. I like doing 3x3 in the clean pull with 100% of my best clean for the day, followed by 3 singles (adding 10kg to the bar each set). For deadlifts I will usually just add 40-60kg to the bar and do many, many singles.

    4. Hanging leg raises (pulling your knees up to your chin) is a great way to finish. This is a great way to decompress the spine and get some ab work in, too.

    4a. If you do have a bar to hang onto for the hanging leg raises, you might as well do some pull-ups every now and again. It works nicely to grab the bar with the same grip as your press and pull your body up to the same point where the bar sits at the start of your press.

    Just some ideas.

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