Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

From March 29^th up to April the 10^th I have been away from the Gym with a weird virosis. It started on a Sunday night, after a somewhat stressful business meeting. The previous Thursday and Friday had been strength test days and they were amazing: I had surpassed my prediction on a sub-maximal effort test.

I might have failed to supplement correctly post-workout, which is true; I might have not fed well Saturday, which was my birthday celebration; and the Sunday stress might have wrapped it up.

Anyhow, I had never been sick this long before, never had joint pain as I had now and never lost so much STRENGTH (not only 8lbs of muscle mass, measured by bio-conductivity tests).

Not good. Trying to recover.

Blog cadastrado no Rec6

I recently found myself without a well defined competition schedule after another one of those unbearable federation desintegrations that so often take place in Brazil. Coincidentally, I happened to be reviewing the chapter on periodization on my permanently-edited (I must make myself stop this) book on powerlifting.

I read Issurin’s paper on block periodization and it appeared to me that he addressed important issues as applied to powerlifting and strength sports in general. More to the point, the idea that it is more productive to limit the number of motor tasks being trained in each block, taking into account their retention up to the last block within a certain meso-cycle makes a lot of sense.

We handle potentially dangerous tasks concerning Central Nervous System responses. Every top powerlifter I know has had a nasty encounter with CNS overtraining. Another aspect of our preparation to be taken into account is the retention efficiency of task. Issurin’s idea that mixed training strategies overwhelm the athlete’s organism (in our case, I would say it overwhelms our CNS) explains much of the poor results we get when insisting on complex, extremely varied multi-task protocols.

I decided to plan my last meso-cycle according to these principles, in what I saw appropriate for powerlifting, and achieved interesting results. We’ll obviously have to wait until a next competition to verify this.