Question: what are your thoughts on squat frequency? I have seen lifters who squat once every ten days, while among athletes on various national teams you can find people who squat nine times a week.
Answer: I can fully understand why such a wide variation in training would be confusing. Let me put it this way: you should be thinking about the optimal squat frequency, rather than worrying about the maximum possible frequency.
Successful, respected coaches such as Ian King and Al Vermeil, who have given serious consideration to what makes training optimal, point out that if you are not confident you can make your next workout more productive than the last, there is no point in going back to the gym. I agree entirely; I learned this principle from Ben Johnson’s coach, Charlie Francis. In other words, if you are planning to go to the gym, your motto should be “train harder than you did last time, or, if you already know and feel that you cannot, go home.”
If you cannot squeeze out a few extra reps with your usual working-set weight, or add even 2.5 kg to your set or sets, you would be better off staying home and waiting for the supercompensation wave to peak.
I expect that last statement will prompt quite a few people to write in saying that it is impossible to keep making gains in every workout, week after week, month after month and year after year. If progress and gains really were that limitless, plenty of people would be pressing 500 kg for reps after just a few years of training. Yes, that is true, but I am talking primarily about gains within a particular program, exercise or training plan. Suppose you have been following the same routine for more than 3–4 weeks and have already got most of what you can out of it. In other words, your workouts are starting to stall, and it is time for a change. However, provided you regularly change or vary your workouts before reaching a plateau, it is possible to keep progressing consistently from workout to workout without your progress slowing down.
As for squatting 9 times a week, this is a classic case of “unusual training methods for unusual athletes.” This approach may indeed work for “mutants” blessed with exceptional genetics, but in practice, fewer than 1% of athletes can tolerate that training load. Those athletes did indeed get results from squatting 9 times a week, but I am not convinced that it is the most effective way to train. My reason for saying this is that in 1992, I trained a hammer thrower who could clean more than a super-heavyweight weightlifter competing alongside him at the Olympics. During his 22-week Olympic preparation period, this thrower squatted every 3.5 days and only performed cleans during the final three weeks before the Olympics.
Here I agree with Louie Simmons, who also believes that weaknesses in the movement chain—that is, in the muscles a particular lift depends on—are the limiting factor. It is also important to develop different neural activation patterns that can support the squat through a variety of exercises.
In my opinion, the best training frequency for most people (70% of athletes) is every fifth day.
Translator’s note: I would venture to conclude that this applies to the squat, although what I have learned previously suggests that this should also be a beneficial frequency for other muscles/exercises.
Those with slightly better genetics may also progress by training the lift directly once a week. I have also seen individuals who get their best results when they train the squat directly once every 10 days. Of course, this does not mean they train their legs as a whole only 1 time every 10 days. When someone says they train the squat once every 10 days, their overall leg training might look like this:
Day 1 Sled; Dragging different types of sled
The athlete drags a weighted sled over distances of up to 60 m.
Day 5 A workout focused on lunges or their variations
On this day, the athlete performs stationary lunges, walking lunges or split squats, aiming to increase the weights used in these exercises. This day usually also includes a variation of step-ups onto a bench or step, with a barbell across the upper back.
Day 10 – Squat workout
Obviously, this day involves training the squat or one of its variations, with the aim of increasing the weight used from workout to workout.
Day 15 Start the cycle again
The leg training cycle starts again from the beginning.
Returning to squat frequency specifically, you can gauge whether you are ready to squat again today by how you feel during your warm-up sets. You may feel that you are not ready to squat at full capacity again, but that you could perform lunges or step-ups well. This feeling or situation arises when you perform a particular exercise or specific movement too frequently, even though your muscles have recovered.
This happens because your nervous system takes 5–6 times longer to recover from training than your muscles do. In other words, after a squat workout, you may soon feel that your muscles have recovered. What you may not immediately feel or realize, however, is that the neural network, nerves and specific neural activation pattern involved in handling the training load of the squat as a distinct movement are still nowhere near recovered. In this situation, you should not waste time: instead of squatting, you could perform an exercise or exercises that still work your leg muscles and the muscles involved in the squat, but use a slightly different movement pattern. This way, your leg muscles still work, but somewhat different neural activation patterns come into play.
If you do not progress with this approach (squatting every fifth day), change the frequency and experiment with other frequencies. Most people squat too often, so try a lower frequency as well (squat less often).
There are not many people who can train a lift or muscle 2 or 3 times a week and keep making progress, especially after work and alongside the other stresses of life.
Using anabolic steroids does allow you to increase your training frequency, primarily by improving your capacity for recovery, but many steroid users are probably also training too often, which means they are not getting the maximum benefit from their training either.
Translator’s note: plenty of good ideas, but also plenty of new questions for me. As I understood it, or as one could interpret it, the optimal squat frequency for most of us is every fifth day. Another apparent takeaway is that getting the best results does not necessarily mean squatting all that often, but rather doing other leg exercises that improve your squat and develop the muscles involved in it. The latter point is about maintaining progress, since this avoids constantly using the same muscle activation pattern. As for what continual progress means here, consider a typical leg workout with the following exercise order: squat, leg press, leg extension. You should be able to improve from workout to workout in one of these exercises, preferably the squat, either by increasing the reps or the weight. If you feel that your squat weight is no longer increasing, try an exercise sequence such as front squat, leg press, leg extension. This variation provides a fresh, ongoing stimulus for muscle growth.
With powerlifting systems and programs, ensuring continual progress is, of course, considerably easier, since programs are generally structured to include a small increase in every workout. It is harder to avoid, manage or prevent a plateau if you follow a conventional bodybuilding split and train to failure based on how you feel.
As for the claims that certain athletes/lifters squat or have squatted 9 times a week, I have also heard that a national team once squatted 12 times a week. If anyone knows more about this, please post a link to the article or explain in the forum how those 9 or 12 sessions are spread across the week and throughout each day. How many sets do they do in a single workout, and so on? It is not that I doubt this is being done or has been done; I am simply curious about how 9 or 12 squat sessions are distributed across the days, how many sets are performed, which squat variations are used, and so on.
As for making progress from workout to workout, I think one option is to perform the squat itself only once a week or every 10 days and support it with variations on the other days. You can also choose to focus exclusively on the squat itself, but then it is clear that you will not make progress from one workout to the next. This also applies to 5 x 5, for example, if there is no progression on Wednesday (the second squat workout of the week)!!!
Answered by: Charles Poliquin
Translated by:Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
