Enhanced vs. Natural Programming

[silachoo]

Those of you with experience programming for natural and enhanced lifters...what difference have you made adjustments for? For example I have heard you can train bench press less frequently enhanced.

[Trevor45]

I am going to assume enhanced means "juice".

If that is the case, I don't think it would make sense for bench press to need to be less frequent. The whole point of the stuff is to increase your recovery.

Then again, I could be totally wrong. I've recently found out how little I really know about strength training...

[Tom Narvaez]

As a general rule, enhanced lifters can do more work than naturals, actually. However, you need to compare similar demographics for this to have any meaning.

That is, people are always trying to compare your average 200lbs "natural" to 250lbs+ enhanced lifters. In the same way that a 275lbs natural lifter cannot use the same type of frequency and overall training volume that a natural 165lbs lifter can, the same holds true of the enhanced. The thing is that with enhanced lifters, if they've been doing it for a while, they generally have FAR, FAR more overall muscle mass than your average natural lifter (this is the primary advantage of steroids -- not "recovery"). This overall size, and the accompanying absolute strength levels, usually necessitates less training frequency and less volume than natural lifters. However, if you had an enhanced lifter and a natural lifter with similar levels of overall muscle mass and absolute strength, the enhanced guy can get away with a lot more, usually.

In my experience, bigger guys, especially really big guys, have to train less than smaller guys and gals. It doesn't matter if they got that big and strong naturally or if they had enhancements to do it, either. They end up doing better on less training.

[silachoo]

As a general rule, enhanced lifters can do more work than naturals, actually. However, you need to compare similar demographics for this to have any meaning.

That is, people are always trying to compare your average 200lbs "natural" to 250lbs+ enhanced lifters. In the same way that a 275lbs natural lifter cannot use the same type of frequency and overall training volume that a natural 165lbs lifter can, the same holds true of the enhanced. The thing is that with enhanced lifters, if they've been doing it for a while, they generally have FAR, FAR more overall muscle mass than your average natural lifter (this is the primary advantage of steroids -- not "recovery"). This overall size, and the accompanying absolute strength levels, usually necessitates less training frequency and less volume than natural lifters. However, if you had an enhanced lifter and a natural lifter with similar levels of overall muscle mass and absolute strength, the enhanced guy can get away with a lot more, usually.

In my experience, bigger guys, especially really big guys, have to train less than smaller guys and gals. It doesn't matter if they got that big and strong naturally or if they had enhancements to do it, either. They end up doing better on less training.

Excellent thanks Tom

[marcf]

In my experience, bigger guys, especially really big guys, have to train less than smaller guys and gals. It doesn't matter if they got that big and strong naturally or if they had enhancements to do it, either. They end up doing better on less training.

How do you classify "big?"

[Tom Narvaez]

I start changing things moderately for 220s and by the time we are talking 275ers it's pretty different. So it is a matter of degree and not some arbitrary bigness cut-off. I'm also talking about people who have substantial muscle mass. If someone is 275lbs and 40% body fat, that's not really what I'm talking about here.

[Dag]

I start changing things moderately for 220s and by the time we are talking 275ers it's pretty different. So it is a matter of degree and not some arbitrary bigness cut-off. I'm also talking about people who have substantial muscle mass. If someone is 275lbs and 40% body fat, that's not really what I'm talking about here.

Eric Lilliebridge is an extreme example of this, I think. Big, heavily muscled, stood in line for genetics twice and gassed. Trains each lift directly once a week and alternates heavy and light weeks. Extremely low volume on the powerlifts themselves but lots of assistance. Andrey Malanichev trains with low frequency and and, unlike Lilliebridge, little assistance.

On the other hand Mike Tuscherer has those same qualities but is natural and his training is obviously high frequency on the powerlifts with very little (relatively) assistance work.

Don't most lifters outside the U.S., ie IPF lifters, tend to train with higher frequency as a general rule, regardless of bodyweight?

I don't think enhanced or natural makes a difference here, they all just found what works for them.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with Tom, although I think he's generally correct if you want to throw a blanket over it. There are many exceptions though.

[Tom Narvaez]

Even in the Norwegian and Sheiko systems, bigger lifters, SHWs in particular, use markedly less frequency and relative volume. Now that may mean going from 6x per week to 3-4x in the Norwegian system but the discrepancy is there.

I think that SHWs train less is nearly universal with very few exceptions. As you get lighter from there, there's more variation, but I think you'd find that, with enough data, a correlation emerges between LBM and frequency+relative volume.

[Dag]

On a semi related note, I'm not super familiar with the "Norwegian Project" but didn't they take the weekly volume and spread it out over several training sessions as opposed to Sheiko that intentionally over trains the lifter to get a kind of fatigue accumulation until the peaking phase where volume is significantly less? Or are they variations of the same thing?

[Tom Narvaez]

They're definitely substantially different systems. The Norwegian team trains with extremely high frequencies. Sheiko organization is different. Sheiko does tend to rely on accumulation with insane amounts of relatively low intensity work.

My point was that even in those systems, which people might point to as exceptions to big guys training less, the big guys still train less within the overall context of said system.