Overspecificity in Powerlifting
- MPS Coaches
- Apr 6, 2020
- 9 min read
Updated: May 9, 2020
It’s no secret that strength sports, particularly powerlifting, have blown up in popularity over the recent years. A little bit of common sense tell us why. Powerlifting is easy to get into, squatting 600 pounds is dope, and your training in the gym is the actual practice that you need for competition itself. You’re killing two birds with one stone, or boulder, because you’re going to be so jacked and strong that you can hurl a boulder.
At the same time though, the advent of social media has placed invisible responsibilities on powerlifters. It’s sort of like the unwritten rules of baseball: plunk the guy who your team has a problem with, beating on your chest as a pitcher isn’t cool, and for the love of God don’t step on the line. As a powerlifter, it seems like the unwritten rule now is working up to a heavy single every workout so you can post it on Instagram. Look, I like posting a feat of strength just as much as the next guy, or girl. But, it’s because my program has allowed for it, not because my program is centered around it.
In broad strokes, let’s call this dilemma overspecificity. To quickly summarize, the principle of specificity in training suggests that the more similar your training is to competition the more transfer from training you will receive. That makes sense right? Even though handstand pushups can be considered training, they are by no means going to make you an elite powerlifter. At the opposite end of the spectrum lies overspecificity. This is the year round hammering of competition low bar, deadlift, and bench press at high intensities. Before we get any further, let’s make sure we are on the same page. I am not at all saying that training with your competition lifts and doing very heavy work is a bad thing. In fact, it is the best thing to do, in the right context. If you have a meet coming up, it’s critical to use the competition lifts within a couple training blocks of the meet. If you want to train for max strength, using heavy loads is generally and optimal way to do so.
What I am saying is that the inability to remove highly specific means of training for a period of time is an abuse of the principle of specificity and is most likely ego or fear driven.
If it is ego driven, and the only reason you post a heavy single for months on end with competition lifts is so you can look cool on Instagram, then I wrote a separate post for that.
If it is fear driven, and you are afraid that if you don’t do extremely specific work then you are going to lose strength, then we are going to discuss why that’s not the case, and how you can potentially be holding yourself back.
Let’s first consider a variable that is overlooked in this game. Time. Time is the variable that no one wants to consider because it is the most honest variable. “You mean to tell me that it’s going to take me years and years to get really good at this?” Yes, it absolutely will. There are a few reasons as to why. One, you are going to have to develop a consistent and efficient technique, and learn how to do this under increasingly heavy loads. Two, you are going to have to make the necessary neural adaptations which will be ongoing as well. But, the main reason why is it takes time to grow muscle and this is magnified if you are a natural lifter. Once the newbie gains wear off, one of the major contributing factors to further progress is going to be increasing muscle size, and the more trained you become the harder it is going to be to put on muscle.
Regardless, time is a precious resource and needs to be looked at in a different light. Say you are a 25 year old who has a decent amount of experience in powerlifting. If you keep training until you are 35, that gives you 10 years of training. Now, just for the inevitable sake of argument on periodization strategies, let’s also say you consider a block of training anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks. In total, that gives you anywhere from 100 – 120 blocks of training in 10 years. Again, with the recent surge of powerlifting popularity younger generations are finding their way into the sport, and they will have 10 to even 20 years of training ahead of them. But, even if you are just getting in at say, 30, there is still 5 to 10 years of training waiting for you. The point is, you have a lot more time than you think you do.
Sticking with our original example, 100 – 120 blocks of training leaves a lot of room to do something other than highly specific work. Out of 100 cycles, if 10 were devoted to GPP and conditioning, 20 for optimal hypertrophy, 30 for general strength, and 40 for special strength, then each number would be the respective percent dedicated to each. Looking at training in this should eliminate some of the fear you may have when your coach programs something other than low bar squats. In total, you are still probably doing heavy barbell work around 70% of the time.
The point is, time is on our side.
Powerlifting exercise selection is so easy. I’ll say it again. Powerlifting exercise selection is so, damn, easy. Think about gross sport movement for a second. Football players must cut, accelerate, juke, hit, and reach near maximal velocities at times. Baseball players throw, swing, dive, and slide. Martial artists kick, punch, roll, and slam. How specific are any of these movements to moving a loaded barbell? Especially when you consider the velocities at which these movements are being done. A 1RM squat can sometimes last the better part of two entire seconds while most sporting movement occurs in the neighborhood of 50 to 250 milliseconds. 2 seconds may not seem that long, but when you compare it to a movement that only lasts 250 milliseconds, it is 8 times longer. However, pretty much every football training program is going to involve a barbell and some heavy ass squats.
Back to my original point, all of the training that you do in the gym for powerlifting competition is specific in and of itself. In powerlifting, the actual training that you do is developing all of the necessary technique, neural, and morphological characteristics for competition day already. You don’t have to get on a field and run and jump. You don’t have to learn how to use your newly acquired general strength abilities to swing a bat faster. All you have to do is get under a barbell, which is what you are already accomplishing through training.
There are several ways to classify the specificity and transfer of an exercise. Bosh, Siff and Verkhoshansky, and Bondarchuk are all brilliant minds in the strength field who have each respectively developed one. But, analyzing and categorizing a high bar back squat and incline barbell bench press into their own specificity box is well outside the scope of this article, and probably unnecessary. It’s obvious that a high bar back squat is not exactly the same as a low bar back squat. Still, considering the magnitude of sporting movement, these two exercises are much more similar than different.
All of this to say - and finally put an end to this drawn out point - you are not going to lose any strength in your competition lifts if you choose to focus on a different but very similar barbell lift for a series of blocks of training. A good rule of thumb is to just mix it up when you are outside of a couple months of competition. So, take out the conventional deadlift and throw in a deficit deadlift or a stiff-legged deadlift. A conventional deadlift is separated from these exercises by either adding an extra inch or positioning the hips a little higher. These exercises are not separated however by an exponential increase in velocity or external resistance.
My next point could get easily lost in the weeds and become a mess of neuromuscular jargon. I don’t want that to happen and this point doesn’t have to get to that basic of a level to make sense. So let’s try to keep this one as simple as possible.
One of the primary adaptations of the neuromuscular system to resistance training is motor unit recruitment. A motor unit consists of a motor neuron (the functional unit of the nervous system) and the muscle fibers that it innervates. Recruitment refers to the ability of the nervous system to successfully recruit as many motor units as possible, because if a motor unit is not recruited then it does not contribute to force production.
With this in mind, motor units are thought to be recruited on a continuum known as the size principle. Smaller, less force producing motor units are recruited first while larger, high force-producing motor units are recruited as contraction continues or more force is needed. This central tenant of the nervous and muscular system is a usual suspect for overspecificty in powerlifting. “Common knowledge” suggests that strength is thought to be obtained only through intense loading. This means somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 reps or below. This is probably in large part due to a misunderstanding of the size principle. Recruiting more and the larger motor units is not predicated by intensity, but effort. In application, this means that both a very heavy single and a very hard set of ten are both fully capable of stimulating close to if not the entire motor unit pool. And if one of the primary means of increasing neuromuscular efficiency is through recruitment, then both lower and higher repetition ranges are capable of making you stronger.
Basically, you are not going to get weak if you do sets of ten. You are going to get stronger. So its ok to remove those heavy singles, doubles, and triples and do some sixes, eights, and tens you goon.
Finally, and my favorite of all, is the concept of novelty. Novelty just means that something is somewhat new or fresh. In the context of powerlifting, this section is referring to exercise novelty.
The Godfather of block periodization, Vladimir Issurin, thinks so highly of exercise novelty that he deems it part of the stimulus magnitude. In layman’s terms, stimulus magnitude means the response your body is getting from the training you are doing. You know what the other two components Issurin claims are a part of the stimulus magnitude? Intensity and volume, which are probably the two most talked about variables in powerlifting. Yeah, novelty can be pretty powerful.
How novel can things actually get though for a powerlifter? If you have trained for a couple years, you have most likely high bar squatted, low bar squatted, front squatted, box squatted, banded squatted, tempo squatted, and dare I say…overhead squatted. It is true that we as lifters are limited to a narrow bandwidth of exercises that are actually going to be specific enough to improve powerlifting performance. It is also true that the novelty can be taken way to far and you start getting into the sumo stance overhead banded box squat territory. A place you do not want to find yourself in…and if you are there please, get help.
So you’re probably thinking, well how the hell do I actually even implement this? By being responsible of your training and taking out the competition lifts for a series of blocks of training. The only way that you can create some novelty, and add a sprinkle of freshness to these exercises, is if you stop doing them for a while. No, you are not going to lose those motor patterns, they are entrenched deep within your unconscious control.
In doing so, by being a brave little powerlifter, you will make the competition lifts fresh again. Not only that, but psychologically they will be fresh as well. Really all you have to do is just try it out. Go one month without touching a barbell. Don’t even do something like a barbell row or overhead press, and then tell me how fired up you are to squat, bench, and deadlift again.
Your workouts and your program do not have to be structured so that they look good for the gram, and if your ego is getting in the way, then one last time I refer you to my article on ego. If you are afraid of losing strength if you don’t do heavy competition lifts, you shouldn’t be. Powerlifting is already a highly specific sport, and barbell movements are all pretty similar. The best part about all of this is that this helps to create a long term model as opposed to focusing only on the short term. Thinking in this way begs the question, “Where do I want to be in 5 years of training, and not 3 months?”.
Don’t do it for the gram, do it for yourself.
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