It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read my previous articles in Performance Menu that I believe highly in Bulgarian training principles with regard to preparing weightlifters. To me, no system in the world could have produced the results of Abadjiev's given the limited population of Bulgaria. Bulgaria is a country of eight million people and during the seventies and eighties, and then again in the late nineties, they were literally the most feared weightlifters on the planet. Imagine if you will, a Division III college football team standing toe-to-toe with LSU and winning more often than not. This is the picture of Bulgarian weightlifting in the eighties - a small country that took on the Soviet Union, often winning. Their crowning achievement came in 1986, when on their home platform, the Bulgarians won seven out of ten weight classes at the World Weightlifting Championships. It was a beat down of epic proportions.

So why do I say all of this? I believe that more of our lifters need to adapt Bulgarian training principles in order for the U.S. to effectively compete on the world stage. While the population of the U.S. is some forty-times that of Bulgaria's, our population of weightlifters is very small. We need to take these lifters and train them as hard as possible and watch as the strongest survive. This last statement may make some shudder, but it's the truth. Bulgarian methods can be very physically and mentally demanding, which is why many steer clear and use excuses such as, "you'll get hurt training that much" or "their lifters had short careers". It is true that many of the Bulgarian lifters were done by the time they were twenty-four, but weightlifting is a young man's game and at least they retired with a world title or two. And yes, while training that hard does require intense mental and physical conditioning, it can be done; the body can adapt. Let me provide an example.

Some time ago I read something written by Glenn Pendlay where he recounted a story of a tough manual labor job he had and how he learned of the body's ability to adapt to greater stresses by working this job. Not to steal his thunder, but a few years ago I had a similar experience and could not help but think of Glenn's story as I worked.

During college, I worked several different summer jobs. One summer, I got a job working at a nursery (lawn and garden variety) and my first day on the job consisted of eight hours of heavy lifting capped off with unloading a semi-trailer full of trees. Usually the Bobcat operator would scoop the trees up from the side, but on this day they decided to leave the side railings on the truck and drag the trees to the end of the truck to be unloaded. By the time I got home that evening my entire body hurt, I was dead tired, and after dinner I was asleep by seven. I woke up the next morning after eleven hours of sleep in such pain I swore to myself I was going to quit. I grumbled all the way to work that day before accepting the fact that this was my summer job and I needed money, so I put on my happy face and began another day of loading and unloading semi-trailers.

For the next few weeks my body ached, my training suffered, and I spent my nights in a near comatose sleep. Eventually, though, my training started to improve. Not only did it improve, but also I managed to lift PR weights. My sleep began to return to normal and instead of sleeping for twelve hours and still feeling drained; I could sleep for eight and feel refreshed. Also, I discovered that no matter how hard I worked during the day and how hard I trained at night, I could not get sore. At this point I began to make the connection to weightlifting and realized this is what Abadjiev must have been talking about when he spoke of adaptation. I had continued to push myself through the long days and intense muscle soreness and as a result I was much stronger than before when I had plenty of time to rest between training sessions. Had I quit lifting and waited until the soreness from work subsided, I never would have been able to adapt and make the gains I did.

Herein lies part of the secret to the Bulgarian methods. A lifter has to come to grips with the fact that he may be in for some unpleasant times in the beginning. It can be quite difficult training two or three times a day and at times it may feel as if your arms are going to fall off. However, if you can continue to push yourself, eventually your body will adapt and you will be stronger for your efforts. The problem with most American lifters is they give up upon the first sign of discomfort. We are an instant gratification society and unless we can constantly train on the upswing, it becomes all too easy to abandon ship. Training through these difficult times not only produces stronger lifters but also produces mentally tough lifters. If you can handle lifting maximum weights any time of the day, with varying degrees of pain, then there is no reason why you cannot perform on the international stage.

This leads into my next point: competitions are integral to the success and progress of lifters. Tommy Kono related a story once of his time in Germany while he was in the army. During his service he had very little time to train, but he competed in almost weekly competitions as the Germans were huge weightlifting fans and he had just won the 1952 Olympics. So during the week he would cram in the 3 lifts plus "squats with the bar in front" and would compete on the weekend. Despite what could be considered limited training, he made progress on a regular basis.

During a contest, the body is under increased stresses that are not usually present during training. There is an audience, lifters are only allowed three attempts in each lifts so every attempt has added pressure to succeed, and maximum effort is expected--that is, unless you lift in the U.S., where it is acceptable to perform at a sub-par level in a contest as long as you are "saving yourself" for the next competition. This was the rationale given for poor performances at the Pan-American Games this year, they were "saving themselves" for the World Championships. First, this was a poor strategy because the lifters had a realistic chance of placing high at the Pan-American Games had they given maximum effort, but at the World Championships, this was not possible. Second, if you are not in good enough shape to give a maximum effort in two competitions two weeks apart, then perhaps those sets of ten in the back squat are not "conditioning" our lifters in the correct manner.

One of the major misconceptions with Bulgarian training methods is that a lifter walks into the gym on his/her first day of training and begins lifting maximum snatch and clean and jerk. This is not the case. The Bulgarian system begins very light and focuses on an athlete's skill development in the early stages. This is somewhat contrary to the programs prescribed for young lifters in the U.S. in which the lifts are taught alongside a host of "strength" building exercises.

The trouble with this strategy is that the so-called strength exercises such as back squat, deadlift, and overhead presses (of each and every variety) do not build the correct motor patterns for weightlifting and therefore work against the development of ideal weightlifting technique. These bad habits follow the lifters throughout their careers and cannot be undone once a lifter is past the developmental stage. The skills that need to be developed in the early stages are proper pull technique during the full lifts, speed under the bar, and pushing under the bar in the jerk instead of pushing the bar upward with the arms.

Deadlifts do not develop proper pull technique and even snatch/clean pulls are counterproductive in the early stages of training if the lifter has not developed ideal technique in the full lifts. The power versions prevent lifters from learning to move under the bar fast as the breaks have to be put on the prevent the lifter from descending past the depth considered "power." Again, practicing these lifts before the full lifts have been engrained in the lifters means that they will have difficulty pulling themselves directly into the squat position after pulling the bar.

If our small population of lifters is going to ever gain ground against international competition, they must begin to train harder and prepare for competitions. Somewhere along the line, weightlifting was confused with strength and conditioning and the results (or lack thereof) speak for themselves. The early training of weightlifters needs to focus more on skill development and less on making them "strong as hell.” Lastly, the acceptable levels of performance need to be increased - anything less than a championship should be considered a failure. In the 1980s, Sports Illustrated did a piece on Bulgarian Weightlifting and they told the story of then 16 year-old Naim Suleymanoglu clean and jerking triple bodyweight in training under the watch of Ivan Abadjiev. After Naim completed the historic lift Abadjiev walked over and said, "never be satisfied, never." With expectations like that, how can you not succeed?