Charles Poliquin Strength Training

[Curtis Cassel]

Infact, back in 1988 - yes, three decades ago - he wrote two articles titled "Five Steps to Increasing the Effectiveness of Your Strength Training Program" and "Variety in Strength Training" that I consider to be seminal works in the field of strength training.

I have successfully used these same principles you're about to discover with my hockey players over the years, so what follows isn't some theoretical mumbo jumbo like much of the lifting information you find online.

Poliquin proposed that with this type of undulating approach, strength and muscle can be built at higher and faster rates than through linear periodization where overloading mainly takes place through ever-increasing intensity.

Beginners don't need much variety because they're still learning how to perform exercises with correct form and can make rapid gains just by focusing on adding a bit more weight on the bar than last time. So sticking to the same movements for longer makes sense.

Advanced athletes require more variations to prevent plateaus. They have been lifting weights for years or even decades, so they're not going to add 5 pounds to their lifts every week for months on end like beginners can.

More frequent adjustments to their training program provide a welcome transition from a mental standpoint as well. It keeps training fresh and fun. The effect of that for long-term progress can never be underestimated.

For example, when people think about deadlifts, they usually picture the conventional deadlift done with a straight bar off the floor. But this is just one way of performing deadlifts, and it might not be the best variation for you.

With my hockey players, we perform several other types of deadlifts like sumo pulls from the floor or elevated off blocks. Trap bar deadlifts are another excellent movement since they place less stress on the spine than conventional deadlifts.

Most lifters focus all their time and energy in getting stronger in the concentric phase. However, there's some serious benefits to building greater eccentric and isometric strength that shouldn't be neglected.

Yunus Barisik, CSCS, specializes in making hockey players strong, fast and explosive. He has trained 500+ hockey players at the junior, college and pro levels, including NHL Draft picks and World Champions. An accomplished author, Yunus has had articles published on top fitness and performance sites, including T Nation, STACK and Muscle & Strength. He also wrote Next Level Hockey Training, a comprehensive resource for ice hockey players on building athletic strength, size and power, while staying injury-free.

German Volume Training, German Body Comp, and four-digit strength training tempo prescriptions are training methods commonly practiced today. What do they all have in common? Charles Poliquin, a Canadian strength coach who introduced these ideas and many others to the athletic and physical fitness communities.

This formula would tell you the exercise order, name of the exercise and type of resistance, body position, grip, sets, repetition range, speed of muscular contractions (eccentric, isometric, and concentric), time under tension, and rest period. For example, here is a leg workout Poliquin wrote for Phillips, the gold medal winner he started training in February 2004.

The Klatt test is performed barefoot. Standing on the edge of a low platform, Poliquin had the trainee extend one leg at a 15-degree angle, then hop off. How the trainee lands determines what muscles are weak and what corrective exercise should be prescribed. For example, leaning forward as they land could suggest a weakness in the gluteus maximus; corrective exercises could be reverse hypers or good mornings. Hopping forward could suggest a weakness in the hamstrings; corrective exercises could be leg curls or Romanian deadlifts.

Poliquin took the bus to the dojo. During one snowstorm, the buses were not running, so he walked. However, no other students showed up. Rather than conducting a private lesson, Corcoran invited the future strength coach to lift weights with him. Poliquin was hooked and set out to pack on muscle and become as strong as he looked.

Not only would Poliquin travel the world to attend seminars, but he would also seek out experts in fields he was interested in and offer to pay them for personal consultations. For example, twice I recommended he consult with athletic fitness experts I knew, and he flew to both ends of the United States to see and learn from them. I should also note that Poliquin was also a voracious reader, often devoting one full day each week to study (advice he gives to his students, explaining that Learners are earners!).

The way clients would work with Poliquin was distance, but the difference was you had to fly out to see him twice a year for an assessment. Thus, you would fly out to his facility and go through testing that often included lab testing. One beneficiary of this testing was Adam Nelson. After his eventual gold in the 2004 Olympic Games, Nelson visited Poliquin in Arizona.

Nelson always had an issue gaining muscle, so Poliquin had Nelson submit to lab testing. The testing revealed that Nelson had a bacterium affecting his ability to assimilate protein, so he had his doctors treat this problem. Within three months, Nelson gained 25 pounds of solid muscle and decreased his body fat by 5%! Poliquin also found that Nelson had a shoulder injury that affected his pressing ability. He treated that with ART, and Nelson made dramatic strength improvements immediately.

I met Poliquin at a strength coaching seminar in 1988. I was a strength coach at the Air Force Academy at the time, responsible for writing and supervising the workouts for all the major varsity sports. To give my athletes an edge, I did extensive research at the Olympic Training Center Library in Colorado Springs to find everything Poliquin ever wrote and began calling him weekly.

In less than three months, my hockey player gained more than 40 pounds of body weight, power cleaned 285 pounds, and bench pressed 400 pounds! Interestingly, later in his career he lost all that weight and got recruited to play for Moscow Dynamo in Russia. After that, he became a professional skater in pairs competition, teaming up with 1992 Olympic champion Natalia Mishkutionok.

The next German-inspired program was called German Body Comp. I had called Poliquin about the female figure skaters I was working with who needed to lose body fat. He told me about a program using short rest intervals designed to lose body fat quickly without compromising strength or muscle mass. In 10 weeks, without significantly changing her diet (in fact, we increased her calorie intake significantly), one skater went from 148 pounds to 104 pounds. I wrote an article about the program for Skating magazine and a mainstream fitness magazine (although I called it the German Body Shaping System), and later Poliquin and I teamed up to produce an article for Muscle Media 2000.

Throughout our three decades together, Poliquin championed other programs that many strength coaches or personal trainers were unaware of, including the 1-6 Method, the Patient Lifter Method, cluster training, and the Modified Hepburn Method. He also wrote and lectured extensively about lifestyle, nutritional supplements, and how to use body fat testing to assess hormonal balance. Poliquin left us on September 26, 2018, passing his company to his daughter Krystal.

Poliquin began working as a strength coach while he was in graduate school in Canada. He helped popularize German Volume Training.[1] In the late 1990s, Poliquin founded Poliquin Performance, opening the first Poliquin Performance Center in Phoenix, Arizona in 2001, and the Poliquin Strength Institute in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in 2009.[2] Throughout this time he certified coaches in the Poliquin International Certification Program (PICP), which includes a body hormone profiling method, which he invented, called BioSignature Modulation.[3] In September 2013 Poliquin parted ways with Poliquin Performance (now renamed Poliquin Group).[4] He subsequently founded another fitness company called Strength Sensei.[5] He trained numerous Olympic and professional athletes.

Poliquin published articles in peer-reviewed journals of exercise science and strength and conditioning.[6] His training theories were introduced to the bodybuilding community in 1993 through his articles for Muscle Media 2000 magazine, and after 1998 through the online and print versions of Testosterone Magazine[7] (now known as T-Nation). He coined the phrase "the myth of discipline" to suggest that fitness results depend on how motivated a gym-goer is.[8] As a columnist, he penned over 600 articles in numerous publications.[3] Additionally, he is the author of eight books, many of which have been translated into 12 different languages, including Swedish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese. His first book, The Poliquin Principles formatted a basic summary of his training methods and provided insight into the training regimens of some of the world's top athletes.

Strength Sensei is made up of a team of coaches from around the world that worked with and trained under Charles R. Poliquin. Each of them have built their own coaching businesses using the strength training principles pioneered by Charles R. Poliquin himself!

Charles R. Poliquin created the Dojo of Strength to make information on strength training & nutrition available for everyone. Building on what he created, our team of coaches have taken the wisdom of his teachings and expanded upon it. Find all new Dojo membership options for Women, Combat Sports, & General Training.

Each month strength training expert Charles Poliquin gives advice on how to get the most from your training, tackling topical issues from the world of health and fitness head on. Unafraid to say things that go against the grain, Poliquin is a no-nonsense trainer with a fondness for evidence-based research and good old fashioned hard work. This month Poliquin addresses training plateaus and what you should be doing to to overcome them.

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