Jon Broz

@ CT what’s your opinion on squatting everyday? Could you cut the frequency of other exercises and squat everyday instead and still have a good physique?

Well, I’m definitly not CT, but I see a trent in his training:
CT seems to be a fan of high frequenty training (which makes me a fan of high frequency training). When you have quad strength that needs to go up,I could imagine it would be smart to up the squats quite a bit.

Although, Broz is all in for squatting to a ‘max’ every day (2 times a day for most of his lifters). That could be a bit high, especially as a long term approach, instead of a relatively short program like Smolov.

Another thingy to consider is your strength ratios: when squatting every day,especially for ATG front/olympic back squats like Broz uses, your quad/leg strength will rise at a fast pace.
How do you keep the rest of your ratios up?
Broz’s guys do cleans and snatches like you wouldn’t believe, so the posterior chain strength will be taken care of, I guess.
As someone who has physique high in value (as I understand from your post), you probably have to keep up upper body stength as well.

Hope CT gives a more helpfull anwser…I just gave more things to consider haha.

Yours truly,

Panopticum

[quote]nickj_777 wrote:

@ CT what’s your opinion on squatting everyday? Could you cut the frequency of other exercises and squat everyday instead and still have a good physique?[/quote]

John coaches Olympic lifters. Olympic lifters squat often and need to squat often. They also need to clean & jerk and snatch often. But except for Rob Addell (who was also training with his football team and doing plenty of bodybuilding work) I don’t see any of his guys have what I would call “great” (or even good) physiques. That’s not what he does. He get his guys strong in the squat and Olympic lifts… that’s what he does. What he does will work for that purpose, but it will not build great physiques (which was what your question was).

So if your goal is to get a great squat or be good at the Olympic lifts, sure, do them everyday. I’m a fan of high frequency work if you want to maximize performance in a lift. I’m not sure about maxing out everyday though. That is obviously the Bulgarian school of thought. But do I need to mention that the WHOLE Bulgarian team was disqualified this year for testing positive… and that it’s the 3rd time it happened.

One thing I learned from specializing on many things in my training life is that unless you are blessed with a naturally muscular and lean physique, you will not build a solid muscular physique solely by training like a weightlifter.

Training only on the big basic lifts (squat, bench, deadlift, military press) has a better chance of giving you a muscular physique, but again unless you are genetically built to be lean an muscular it will not optimize your physique.

If you have “average” or “below average” genetics for being lean and muscular, you will need higher volume assistance work to build a good/great physique.

The big basics still need to be your foundation but if you want the looks to go with the strength you will need some higher volume work. Doesn’t necessarily needs to be isolation, but higher volume.

And if you add such work, either compound or isolation but done for higher volume you don’t have a choice but to decrease the amount of work you do on maximal lifting. I still think that high frequency on the big lifts is important but you can’t invest as much work/frequency on them if you add assistance volume as if you were focusing only on becoming strong and efficient on the big lifts.

So it becomes a matter of establishing what is your main goal.

MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCE IN THIS POST: It also means that you need to be objective about what training you decide to do: be convinced, not SEDUCED by a coach or a cool idea.

This is why you’re my favourite strength and conditioning coach CT; as you have an ability to cut through non-sense. Thank you.