In powerlifting circles, cardio is often viewed as a dirty word. How many times have we heard “cardio is hardio” or “six reps is cardio bro”. Nah man, six reps shouldn’t be cardio. Improving your cardiovascular fitness can be of huge benefit not only to your health, but also to your powerlifting training. Excess specificity or specialising for powerlifting too much can come at a cost for your health and overtime, ironically for your performance too. Cardio training can help that.

At TSF, we typically program in five-week blocks and we are staunch on sub-maximal training. Understanding the “why” behind coaching decisions can help you as a lifter to attack your training with the intention that is built in to your program. If you don’t know why certain exercises are in your program or what the purpose of an intro/deload week is, it’s hard for you to execute them with the desired intention.

In this article I explain how we structure our training at TSF and in line with that, how you can best execute each week of your training block to achieve the best training outcomes.

Across a five week training period, we want to first recover from the fatigue accumulated in the preceding training block, then build training momentum across the block to launch us in to the next one. This is how we do it.

Getting started in strength training doesn’t need to be a super intimidating, complicated process. If you can move, you can strength train.

At its foundation, strength training is about adding load to human movement. It’s one of the things that I love about it so much; that it is infinitely scalable, which makes it incredibly accessible. Even an 80 year old with no experience with sport or exercise can start strength training in some form.

Perhaps you’ve read a little about strength training and it’s benefits and you want to get started. In this article I discuss where to start and what to focus your efforts on in your first six months in the gym.

Training for a powerlifting meet can be so much fun and can really encourage you to push hard in your training. You see all of your hard work come together as you step on the platform. You have a blast making friends in the warm up room and making some noise on your stage.

Then the bar hits the floor after your final lift. Now what?

The “post-comp blues” are a very common experience. Many lifters will report less consistent and less productive training in this post-competition period, which sucks. How you approach your off-season training is just as, if not more important than slamming your meet prep. This is where we lay our foundations.

So how can we set ourselves up for a productive off-season, rather than sinking deep in to the post-comp blues, and the lousy training that comes with it?

Accessory exercises are included in a powerlifting program to foster the outcome of lifting the maximum load possible in each of the powerlifts. To get better at powerlifting, some may think that all you need to do is squat, bench and deadlift, repeat forever. However this is not the case. While performing the SBD is valuable for improving at them and they are certainly an important part of your program, when performed exclusively they will inhibit your powerlifting performance. That is because they are not the best tools for developing technique, building muscle, nor reducing injury risk. And so, we include other exercises in our program.

I believe that it is extremely important for a lifter to understand why a certain exercise has been included in their program. When a lifter understands the purpose of an exercise, they can execute the exercise in such a way that it achieves that purpose. Furthermore, psychologically they will also have much more buy in to their program when they understand how it is working to shuttle them towards their goals.