Charles Poliquin Training Methods

[Carri Seargent]

GermanVolume 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.

If you are in the market for fat loss, use the German Body Composition Training program. Developed by Charles Poliquin, German Body Comp training is hands down one the most effective methods for fat loss without compromising muscle. The name comes from research done by Hala Rambie, a Romanian exercise scientist who worked in Germany.

German Body Comp uses weight training exercises with short rest intervals to burn fat while simultaneously building muscle. This style of training is great for fat loss because it taxes the metabolic pathways in the body and leads to an increase in growth hormone, the ultimate fat burning hormone.

German Body Comp workouts for fat loss use multi-joint exercises like squats, lunges, deadlifts, presses, rows, etc. Volume is fairly high with moderately heavy weights that you can lift for 8 to 15 reps, depending on exactly what phase of the training program you are in. Rest intervals are less than 60 seconds, often clocking in at just enough time to switch exercises.

The key to using weight training for fat loss is to increase the release of growth hormone, a biochemical produced naturally in the body that helps regulate body fat. Research shows that when blood lactate levels increase in response to metabolically taxing workouts, blood pH increases. Elevated blood pH is what causes the burning sensation in the muscles when you are training hard. This sends a message to the brain to accelerate production of growth hormone, which helps the body burn fat.

In contrast, German Body Comp preserves muscle mass while eliciting a large afterburn so that your body burns calories at an accelerated rate during the 24 hour recovery period after training. For example, one study that tested a GBC-style workout with short rest intervals found that energy expenditure was 33 percent higher compared to a traditional training program that used longer rest intervals. A second study confirmed the effect: Participants burned an extra 452 calories over baseline in the 22 hours after their workout. This was 350 extra calories burned compared to a group that did traditional weight training that used longer rest periods.

Unlike aerobic cardio, such as running, weight training strengthens weak muscles, helping you overcome imbalances that lead to pain and injury. Weights are ideal for overweight individuals because you avoid the pounding of repetitive cardio while correcting orthopedic problems associated with training.

Due to a combination of high-calorie diets and lack of physical activity insulin resistance and diabetes are increasingly common. Weight training automatically sensitizes muscle to insulin, helping to restore metabolic health and avoid inflammation that leads to disease.

Here is a GBC workout aimed at someone with a few years of training background who wants to lose body fat. Ideally, you should train 4 days a week, doing each workout twice a week. For the number of sets, start with the lower number in the range and increase to the higher number after a couple of weeks. As you get more conditioned, you can also shorten the rest periods, first to 45 seconds and then to 30 seconds.

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.

Ivan Rojas and Gwendolyn Sisto have written extensively on the training methods of the best weightlifters in the world. Their book, Kazakhstan Weightlifting System for Elite Athletes, detailed the training methods of the athletes on their national teams. They would train long but also hard. Very hard.

In one phase of training, Rojas and Sisto said these lifters would train Monday through Saturday, eight times a day. Further, the workouts required them to use weights representing at least 85 percent of their 1-repetition maximum (1RM), and often going to max several times a day. Here is an example of one of their Wednesday workout in a preparatory phase:

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