The 7 Laws of Training According to Dr. Fred Hatfield | Breaking Muscle

http://breakingmuscle.com/strength-conditioning/the-7-laws-of-training-according-to-dr-fred-hatfield

The 7 Laws of Training According to Dr. Fred Hatfield

I recently sat down with Dr. Fred Hatfield, also known as Dr. Squat, to discuss his views on strength and conditioning and how they fit into modern training systems. For those of you unfamiliar, Dr. Hatfield was a great college gymnast and bodybuilder (he was Mr. Mid America, but he didn't compete in the Mr. America competition because of a powerlifting meet).

Dr. Hatfield is probably best known for his world record squat of 1,014lbs set in 1987 when he was the age of 45. He was also the founder of Men's Fitness magazine and the International Sports Sciences Association, and he has written over sixty books. He knows squat and a whole lot more.

The 7 Laws of Training

Dr. Hatfield combed through a great deal of research to best improve his training. Here is what he had to say about seven common laws he found in successful training programs:

If something is called a law then it's called a law for a reason. It means that you've just got to follow the law. If you break the law you go to jail or whatever; or you pay the consequences.
Many years ago, twenty-five or thirty years ago, people began to write about training a lot more than they had in the past, and I'm saying to myself how am I going to judge whether this training program is any good? I scoured the research literature and all of the popular literature for some kind of a yardstick to use to judge the efficacy of these training programs, because Lord knows I didn't have the time or the energy to go on all of those programs.

In reading the works of many sports scientists, Hatfield boiled down their thoughts to seven fundamental laws that apply to all training (although some sports might have additional laws). These are the seven principles that guided him to squat 1,000lbs without the supportive suit technology available now for powerlifters. He indicated that these laws apply to all types of training and not only powerlifting.

1. The Law of Individual Differences

Everyone has different strengths and weakness, which need to be taken into consideration for the training program. No program fits all individuals. This realization really hits when looking at hip structure. In the picture below, the balls of the two femurs extend very differently. You can imagine that these two people will have very different squat mechanisms. The law extends beyond form and technique as people will have different levels of strength, recovery ability, coordination, and mobility to name a few.

2. The Overcompensation Principle

Our body reacts to stress by overcompensating, so that it can handle stress again in the future. This principle is why beginners at any sport see great improvement when starting their programs.

3. The Overload Principle

In order for your body to overcompensate, you must load it with a greater amount than was already encountered. This principle is the reason that people plateau in their gains over time. It becomes more and more difficult to stress the body to a point where it has not been stressed before.

4. The Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID) Principle

The basic tenet of this principle is that you must tax your body in the same way that you want to improve. If you want to be explosive, then you must train explosively. If you want to be strong, then you must train for strength. A simple example is the oft criticized high-rep Olympic lifts in CrossFit. These high-rep lifts may help in building aerobic or glycolytic capacity, but they will not assist in building Olympic weightlifting strength.

5. The Use/Disuse Principle and Law of Reversibility

The first part of this principle is that we must continue train the skill or we will lose that capacity ("use it or lose it"). However, the second part of this principle is that once it has been trained and lost, the skill (or strength) will be much easier to recover than it was to originally train. The idea is that we have laid a neurological foundation that makes it easier to recover the function after we have lost it.
A simple example is the skill of riding a bicycle. We may not have done if for years, but we can pretty much get back on the bicycle and relearn it quickly. For strength training, it can take a little longer to recover to previous levels, but recovery is still at a faster rate than for people who are untrained.²

6. The Specificity Principle

Pavel Tsatsouline calls this principle "greasing the groove."⁴ If we want to get better at something, we must do that something. If we want to get better at pull ups, do pull ups. Although leg presses might generalize to the squat, the squat itself will build greater squat strength.
This rule doesn't indicate that we shouldn't do ancillary exercises. For example, we might want to work grip strength outside of the deadlift to better hang onto the bar. However, we don't want to do only ancillary lifts as the main exercise benefits our neurological system the best.

7. The General Adaption Syndrome

This principle might subsume the others as it contains three stages that overlap with other principles:

1. The first stage is called the alarm stage, which is when the body reacts to the application of training stress (similar to the overload principle).
2. The second stage is the resistance stage, which is when our muscles adapt to increasing amounts of stress (similar to the overcompensation principle).
3. The final stage is the exhaustion stage, where if we continue to train we will be forced to stop from too much stress.

This syndrome has been revised and renamed the fitness-fatigue model. Much of the revised model is due to individual differences in how novice and elite athletes respond.¹ Elite athletes fatigue differently and it takes a great deal more stressor to lead to the resistance stage (or overcompensation).
For novice athletes, exhaustion is easier to reach and thus, it might be best to have a wide range of activities to create fitness (to avoid exhaustion in one activity). It might be one reason for new athletes to gain greatly while beginning CrossFit. However, they need to change their training as they begin to respond differently.

Dr. Hatfield's Perspective on CrossFit

Dr. Hatfield was a multifaceted athlete during college and after (participating in national-level events as a college gymnast (pictured above) and being a strong Olympic and power lifter). If CrossFit were around, he probably would have excelled. However, he had some concerns with the current CrossFit training methods:

I like everything about Cross Fit, but it's not a system of training. By putting together all those different sports and activities … it doesn't make any sense because what you do in one sphere is going to take away in another sphere. For example, you cannot become a great marathon runner and an Olympic weightlifter of note all at the same time.
It's not going to work because the kind of training it takes to create great endurance removes from your ability to lift heavy weights, so you're competing against yourself really by getting into Cross Fit. … I took the time to go over CrossFit's methods with a backdrop of the Seven Granddaddy Laws to see what was going on. … they are breaking almost all the laws.

Take Home

In general these principles indicate that we can't blindly follow programs. We all have different technical backgrounds, skeletal structures, and strength levels, to name a few differences. Our programming needs to be tailored to our goals and to us as individuals following the seven laws described above.
One common idea for a solution is to scale the weight in programs. However, that is only one method of trying to create an optimal program. We also need to consider the other laws in making the best possible program to fit our goals.
References:
1. Chiu, Loren ZF, and Barnes, Jacque. 2003. "The Fitness-Fatigue Model Revisited: Implications for Planning Short-and Long-Term Training." Strength & Conditioning Journal 25 (6): 42–51.
2. Hortobágyi, T., L. Dempsey, D. Fraser, D. Zheng, G. Hamilton, J. Lambert, and L. Dohm. 2000. "Changes in Muscle Strength, Muscle Fibre Size and Myofibrillar Gene Expression after Immobilization and Retraining in Humans." The Journal of Physiology 524 (1): 293–304. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7793.2000.00293.x.
3. Selye, Hans. 1950. "Stress and the General Adaptation Syndrome." British Medical Journal 1 (4667): 1383.
4. Tsatsouline, Pavel. 2000. Power to the People!: Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American. Dragon Door Publications.

Sent from my iPhone

Fred "Dr. Squat" Hatfield Passes Away at 74 - BarBend

RIP Dr. Squat Fred Hatfield. A giant in the strength and conditioning field. One of the first certifications I held was through the ISSA. He was remarkable for his ability to teach and it's obvious from his feats of strength that he was very able to do that which he taught. A very giving and caring spirit and a great loss to the S&C community.

https://barbend.com/fred-hatfield-dr-squat/

Fred "Dr. Squat" Hatfield Passes Away at 74

Nick EnglishMay 15, 2017

Dr. Fred Hatfield, one of the first men to squat over 1,000 pounds, passed away this weekend at seventy-four years old.

It's hard to adequately summarize the life of a man who left such an indelible mark on strength sports, and indeed pushed the boundaries of human performance to unprecedented levels.

He is perhaps best known as the first man to squat 1,014 pounds (460 kilograms), which he did at age 45 at Gus Rethwisch's 1987 Hawaii World Record Breaker's Meet. He said of the lift:

I never really had any goals except for squatting the 1,000 pounds. There's a fine line between passion and obsession, and I'm not an obsessive person. So once I got as far as I thought I could go without getting a lot heavier, which I didn't want to do because I was eating about 10,000 calories a day, I took advantage of my success and I quit."

There's no video of the feat, but the photo of him completing the squat is perhaps the most famous ever taken of him.

"Dr. Squat" won two IPF World Powerlifting Championships titles, one in 1983 in the 100kg weight class and again in 1986 as a 110kg athlete, but prior to embarking on his powerlifting career he won national championships in gymnastics, the Mr. Mid-America and Mr. Atlantic Coast bodybuilding titles, and even tried out for the 1972 Olympic weightlifting team. His best lifts were his 1,014-pound squat, 523-pound bench press, 766-pound deadlift, 275-pound snatch, and 369-pound clean & jerk.

As an academic, he held a Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD in sports sciences and briefly studied at the Lenin Institute of Sport in Moscow. As a scientist, he was Co-founder and was President of the International Sports Sciences Association and developed a line of supplements for Vince McMahon's World Bodybuilding Federation. As a coach, he trained athletes that included eight-time Mr. Olympia Lee Haney and four-time world heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield. As a journalist, he wrote hundreds of articles and founded Men's Fitness magazine (then known as Sports Fitness). As a Marine, he served with the Office of Naval Intelligence in the Philippines for several years.

Image via Fred Hatfield on Facebook.

Dr. Hatfield stayed active in the strength community well into his later years, and until they were shut down following a redesign of his website, DrSquat.com had some excellent pre-Reddit forums for all things strength. You can still read them at this Webarchive link.

At the time of writing, the cause of Dr. Hatfield's death is unclear, but he was diagnosed with widespread metastatic cancer in his skeletal structure in 2012. Three separate doctors told him he had just three months to live, but he told CBN News that he used a ketogenic diet to slow the spread of the disease.

A devout Christian, Dr. Hatfield studied the Bible extensively and used prayer to clear his mind and achieve a meditative state for his lifts. His impact on powerlifting, sports science, and strength itself will last forever.

Featured image via @jailhousestrong on Instagram.

RIP Joe Weider

We lost a giant in the field today with the loss of The Master Blaster Joe Weider. He brought body building and weight lifting into the forefront of fitness and conditioning where it had previously lagged behind jogging.

My friends and I poured over these principles every month and implemented them into our own training. This was the late 70's -- pre-Schwarzenegger the movie star and mainstream celebrity -- a time when Arnold was considered more of a freak than anything else. Maybe we were freaks as well, but for better or worse the body building craze eventually filtered through the sports world, the fitness world and the strength and conditioning world and it was Katy Bar the Door. 

Weider influenced and educated millions without a doubt. The following is a summary of the Weider Principles from the Facebook site of another giant in power lifting and weight training and a great educator in his own right, Dr. Squat Fred Hatfield.

It says a lot about somebody when they influence and move other giants. It was a bitter sweet trip down memory lane reading this summary.

R.I.P. indeed, Joe Weider

from Fred Hatfield:

Folks, feel free to copy, cut and paste this short explanation of the Weider Principles. This is one of the very important legacies left behind by Joe. I do not want it to be lost to time.

The Weider System

The Weider System has been in existence for sixty years or so, and has grown over the years to incorporate other great training ideas as they came along. It's actually not a "system" in the strict definition of the term, but rather a "guide" to aid you in developing your own personal system based on your own unique recuperative ability, experience, goals, strengths, weaknesses, and ---well -- "guts" to go the distance.

This Weider System "guidelines" comes in the form of a series of training methods collected (and in many instances named) by Joe Weider personally over many years, which became widely known as the Weider Principles. In fact, of the Weider Principles that were developed by Joe personally, one in particular had a major impact on the world of bodybuilding. That was the concept of splitting your workouts to train specific body parts. The split system, double split system and triple split system, as they became known as, are Joe's unique contribution to bodybuilding science.

When I came aboard to work as Joe’s Director of Research & Development, there was just a “box” with a bunch of principles thrown in. There was no organization to them, and I took it upon myself to remove the chaos. Careful scrutiny revealed three broad categories of Weider Principles: 

Principles To Help You Plan Your Training Cycle
Principles To Help You Arrange Your Exercises In Each Workout
Principles To Help You Perform Each Exercise 

It's easy to discern whether this orderly collection of training methods, both in the aggregate and individually, adhere to the seven grand daddy principles (laws) spoken of throughout tmuh of my writing. The simple truth is that individually they do not. But when you look at them in the aggregate, and the guidelines as to when and how to apply them, they most certainly do! Here's why: 

The fact that you are training at all assumes that you know 1) you're going to grow (Overcompensation Principle), 2) you are going to train regularly (The Use/Disuse Principle), and 3) weight training is the most efficient method of doing 1) and 2) as opposed to (say) riding a bicycle (Specificity Principle);

Both the type and amount of adaptive stress each of the Weider Principles deliver to the organism can be manipulated very efficiently and effectively (S.A.I.D and Overload Principles respectively);
Each method listed in the Weider System has its strengths and weaknesses in regards to the specific muscle components it targets (S.A.I.D. Principle), so you must use your instinct and experience in discerning when to apply each, or whether to apply it at all (Individual Differences Principle); and

The list of methods is totally flexible. Within the instructions for each are listed guidelines to aid you in discerning whether to use it and how often to employ it in your day-to-day training microcycles (G.A.S. and Individual Differences Principles); 

The three categories of principles discussed in the Weider System are listed below with a brief explanation of each. One of the principles appears in all three categories. That's the Instinctive Training Principle. it's simple. Use your own training experience and knowledge of how your body responds to exercise stress when planning and carrying out a training program! This must take place on a cycle-to-cycle, day-to-day and quite literally a minute-to-minute basis! 

Principles To Help You Plan Your Training Cycle

Cycle Training Principle (Breaking your training year into cycles for strength, mass or contest preparation you help avoid injury and keep your body responsive to adaptation)

Split System Training Principle (Breaking your workout week into upper versus lower body training, for example, results in more intense training sessions)

Double or Triple Split Training Principle (Breaking your workout down into two or three shorter, more intense training sessions per day)

Muscle Confusion Principle (Muscles accommodate to a specific type of stress ("habituate" or "plateau") when you continually apply the same stress to your muscles over time, so you must constantly vary exercises, sets, reps and weight to avoid accommodation)

Progressive Overload Principle (The basis of increasing any parameter of fitness is to make your muscles work harder than they are accustomed to) 

Holistic Training Principle (Different cellular organelles respond differently to different forms of stress, so using a variety of rep/set schemes, intensity and frequency will maximize muscle mass)

Eclectic Training Principle (Combining mass, strength or isolation-refinement training techniques as your instincts dictate into your program often help you achieve greater progress)

Instinctive Training Principle (Eventually, all bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets, routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for them)

Principles To Help You Arrange Your Workout
Set System Training Principle (Performing one set per bodypart was the old way; the Set System calls for multiple sets for each exercise in order to apply maximum adaptive stress)

Superset Training Principle (alternating opposing muscle group exercises with little rest between sets)

Compound Sets Training Principle (alternating two exercises for one bodypart with little rest between sets)

Tri-Sets Training Principle (Doing 3 exercises for one muscle group with little rest between sets)

Giant Sets Training Principle (Doing 4-6 exercises for one muscle group with little rest between sets)

Staggered Sets Principle (injecting 10 sets of boring forearm, abdominal or calf work in between sets for (say) chest or legs)

Rest-Pause Principle (using 85-90 percent of your max, do 2-3 reps and put the weight down. Then do 2-3 more, rest, 2-3 more and rest for a total of 3-4 rest-pauses. The short rest-pauses allow enough time for ATP to be resynthesized and permit further reps with the heavy weight);

Muscle Priority Principle (Work your weaker body parts first in any given workout; alternatively, work the larger muscle groups first, while you're fresh and energy levels still high)

Pre-Exhaustion Principle (example: superset flies, a chest isolation exercise, with bench presses, a compound exercise involving triceps and chest, in order to maximize chest development by pre-exhausting the triceps)

Pyramiding Training Principle (start a bodypart session with higher rep/low weight and gradually add weight (and commensurably reduce the reps), ending with a weight you can do for 5 reps or so)

Descending Sets Principle (lighter weights from set to set as fatigue sets in --0 called "stripping")

Staggered Sets Training Principle (stagger smaller, slow-developing body parts in between sets for larger muscle groups)

Instinctive Training Principle (Eventually, all bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets, routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for them)

Principles To Help You Perform Each Exercise

Isolation Principle (All muscles act as stabilizers, synergists, antagonist or protagonist. By making any given muscle the prime mover in any given exercise you've "isolated" it as much as possible, and therefore the stress applied to it)

Quality Training Principle (gradually reducing the rest between sets while still maintaining or increasing the number of reps performed)

Cheating Training Principle (swing weight past the sticking point at the end of a set in order to add stress)

Continuous Tension Principle (maintain slow, continuous tension on muscles to maximize red fiber involvement)

Forced Reps Training Principle (partner-assisted reps at the end of a set)

Flushing Training Principle (Doing 3-4 exercises for a bodypart before moving to another bodypart)

Burns Training Principle (2-3 inch, quick movements at the end of a set)

Partial Reps Training Principle (Because of leverage changes throughout any given exercise, it's sometimes helpful to do partial movements with varying weight in order to derive maximum overload stress for that bodypart)

Retro-Gravity Principle ("Negatives" or "eccentrics" as they're called, make it possible to get more muscle cells to respond because you can lower about 30-40 percent more weight than you can successfully lift concentrically);

Peak Contraction Principle (holding the weight through maximum contraction for a few seconds at the completion of a movement);

Superspeed Principle (compensatory acceleration of movements to stimulate hard-to-reach fast twitch fibers);

Iso-Tension Principle (method of practicing posing, tensing each muscle maximally for 6-10 seconds for up to a total of 30-44 flexes in a variety of posing positions);

Instinctive Training Principle (Eventually, all bodybuilders instinctively attain the ability to construct diets, routines, cycles, intensity levels, reps and sets that work best for them)