Blood on the Barbell: Thibaudeau





Editor's Note: In this new series, our experts recount their toughest,
most psychotic workouts. Should you try them? Two words: Hell. No. And our coaches will be the first to tell you that. Instead, think of these workout stories as lessons in intensity.
Remember, these training sessions were performed by professionals/lunatics. Don't try this at home.
Christian Thibaudeau will kick off the first installment.

I'm Not Always Smart (But I Look Damn Good) I've
done some pretty crazy things in the gym. Back in my Olympic lifting
days I did some really off-the-wall stuff. For example, one summer I
drove 90 minutes every day of the week to train at the Centre
Claude-Robillard, where most elite athletes from the Province of Quebec
train. I'd train twice a day, squatting heavy on every
workout! My knees must've aged twenty years that summer. It got to a
point where I had to arrive thirty minutes earlier so that a physical
therapist could warm-up my knees prior to my workout. I had to wear
wraps over a pair of neoprene knee sleeves to be able to squat. It
was crazy. I should've stopped, but I reasoned that somewhere a Russian
or Bulgarian lifter was training even harder than me, so I kept on
pushing hard. My
Achilles heel was my small hands. I could snatch the world with wrist
straps, but struggled with even light weights when I didn't use straps
because I had problems holding onto the bar. I tore calluses at almost
every workout, bleeding profusely and uncontrollably, which obviously
made it hard to train efficiently. For some reason I came to
the conclusion that I had to make my skin tougher, so I started to do
chin-ups with chains. Not chains for accommodating resistance purposes
like with the Westside method, but chins holding onto old rusty chains.
I figured it would toughen up my hands. It might have too,
were I able to keep on doing that form of training, but I had to stop
after a week. Kinda hard to drive your car while holding the steering
wheel with your elbows. I
could go on and on. However logical and scientific I might sound today,
I did my fair share of "things that make you go hmmm" in the gym in the
past. For years now I've managed to stay away from the crazy stuff and
keep a logical outlook on training. But recently, I had a relapse.

The Dave Workout There's
a young guy who trains at my gym named Dave. Dave is about as
passionate about bodybuilding as it comes. He knows every pro and has
tried every supplement, exercise, and training method available. He
practically lives in the gym. He's a good guy too, eager to learn and
open minded. I designed a program for him once and although
he told me that he was "feeling it," I didn't see the results I
expected. I never really saw him train though, because he lifts after
I'm finished up with my clients. But because he's so passionate about
everything, I assumed that he did the program justice by leaving his
dinner in the garbage pail at the end of every session. One day
Dave and I were both in the gym at the same time. He'd already started
his workout (he was doing shoulders) and his training intensity was,
let's just say, on par with an anorexic grandmother's who's suffering
from a wasting disease. There was his problem: lack of intensity. It
just so happened that I was set to do shoulders too, so I asked Dave if
he wanted to join me. To him, believe it or not, it was a lot like
Jessica Alba offering you to spend a night with her exploring the
various possibilities of human anatomy. Needless to say, he was
thrilled and accepted. Big mistake. I proceeded to
put him through the hardest shoulder workout in the history of mankind.
It was actually a stupid workout too, something like 50 sets, all taken
to complete failure and often beyond with the use of rest/pauses,
drops, forced reps, and partials. I think I must've used every single
deltoid exercise known to man. Physiologically, this workout
probably set Dave and I back a couple of weeks because the body would
need a lot of time to recover from that abuse. But what Dave lost
physiologically he more than gained back mentally. What I did
was give him a crash course in ass kicking intensity, something that
can't be explained with words or photographs, something that needs to
be experienced.

Intensity of Effort The
amount of effort you put into your training session is responsible for
most of the gains you'll stimulate. A training program, regardless of
how good or cutting edge it is, doesn't have any magical properties
that will summon the Gods of muscledom and make slabs of beef appear on
your body just by going through the workout. A training
program is like a football playbook: you can have the better playbook
with the best game plan, but without driven players who leave their
sweat and blood on the field of battle, you'll get your ass kicked
every time. I coached football for seven years and won three
provincial championships as a defensive coordinator. In 2001 we used
only one defensive front, no stunts, and one blitz. Basically we did
the same play over and over all game long. We gave out only 51 rushing
yards and 120 passing yards. We also recovered three fumbles and made
two interceptions, including one in the end zone with one minute left
and leading by one point. The thing is, every single one of our players
were warriors; they left everything on the field. Effort is
king of everything. Don't accept anything but the best workout of your
life every time you hit the gym. And if you don't reach your level of
expectations, come back with a vengeance. A lot of people are
content to be training hard by their gym's standards. They're happy if
they train just a little harder than the average guy or gal at their
gym. The thing is that the average intensity level of most gyms is
about as high as a game of bridge at your local church's basement on a
Sunday afternoon. So being above average doesn't mean much in that
case. I'm talking about treating each workout as a battle to
the death with the weights. Sure, a lot of people qualify their
workouts this way, but how many of them really live it? Dave certainly
didn't!

The Workout I can't emphasize enough that this type of training is not
a recommendation. It's actually about as dumb and counterproductive as
a workout can be. Understand that this session had one and only one
objective: to allow Dave to feel what maximum intensity is all about. How
can he reach a maximal level of effort if he doesn't even know what it
feels like? As I mentioned, physiologically this workout might actually
have set Dave back some. But the mental gains he made from it allowed
him to exponentially increase his gains later on.
Exercise #1: Clean and Press I hadn't done these in years, but figured I might as well start off this workout from hell with something that made Dave, um, uncomfortable! We
kept it fairly easy, 6 sets of 6-8 reps, cleaning and pressing the
weight on every repetition. We only took 30 seconds of rest between
sets. This might not seem like a hard thing to do, but keep in mind
that the average teenager is used to taking four to five minute breaks
between sets, with most of that time spent talking about the girl on
the treadmill.
Exercise #2: Triple Set (Wide-Grip Upright Row, Cuban Press, EZ-Bar Front Raise) Now
the fun began! While I'm not a huge fan of the upright row, I do use
the wide-grip (shoulder width) version from time to time, but only pull
it up to the lower portion of the sternum. For this first
exercise, we did 6 to 8 reps to failure then immediately moved on to
the Cuban press performed for sets of 8-10 reps. We
then moved on to the EZ-bar front raise. We used the EZ-bar because it
has three distinct grip widths. We did reps to failure with a close
grip, then spaced out to a moderate grip and performed 4-5 reps to
failure, and ended with 2-3 more reps using a wide grip. You
can continue to perform more reps with a wider grip because the
resistance lever is shorter (bar is closer to your body). During that
third exercise, Dave had the tendency to use his lower back to relieve
his front delts of the burning sensation, so I made him put his back on
a wall to avoid cheating. We did this triple set at least
five times, but to be honest I didn't count. It was probably more like
seven or eight times. Starting at the fourth set I added a drop. When
we reached failure with the wide-grip front raise, we'd go down 10-20
pounds and continue to perform reps to failure. On the last set we also
added a static hold at the end. At that point Dave asked, "Do
you always train like this?" I answered, "No, normally I train harder,
but I want to take it easy on you. If you want to progress you must
train hard." It started to sink into his mind. I was getting somewhere.