They were maxing more than 2-3 times a day, more like 8. They basically trained all day long with 15 minute smoke breaks in between.
This system worked at a time when anti doping was non existent or easily defeated. And nations like the Soviet Union were still focused more on tons of light variations and lots of extraneous work. The Bulgarians cut to the chase and went all in on specificity at the cost of health and longevity. Of all the weightlifters I can think of who've died young, most of them are Bulgarian.
That system doesn't work today in a sport with much more serious anti doping and much higher levels of funding and corruption required to defeat it. And with the dominant China seeing more success with pumping huge levels of funding into developing and maintaining athletes with a more generalised and autoregulated training system, the mythological status of Bulgarian weightlifting has seriously declined.
I would guess Karlos is doing a much more reasonable version of how they used to train. He's their golden goose, they no longer have a stable of athletes to put through the grinder and still have enough to medal in most categories.
You should check out videos and commentary from Weightlifting House. They seem to have a pretty good relationship with him/ his coaches.
I suspect they are using a similar approach, as during worlds Seb commented on how Karlos was still hitting big numbers in the training hall right before competition.
I haven’t run the system myself. I don’t have the genetics/ motivation to take that kind of abuse.
From what I’ve heard, Karlos’s training is still quite similar to the old Bulgarian system but I believe it’s been modernised a fair amount. He still primarily trains with super high intensity.
As you found out, the old Bulgarian system was essentially to give the athletes a fuck ton of drugs and then completely push them to their limits with maxing out. If you couldn’t keep or, or more likely, your body got fucked up (which happened to a lot of would be great lifters) - you were off the team. There wasn’t very too many special cases where programming was changed for specific lifters either.
Max Aita had a crazy yet interesting story of when he went over to learn. There was a candy bowl of some sort of steroid or whatever and the lifters would take bets on how many they could eat and they would all comment about how their piss was red or something either later that day or throughout the week.
They were maxing more than 2-3 times a day, more like 8. They basically trained all day long with 15 minute smoke breaks in between. This system worked at a time when anti doping was non existent or easily defeated. And nations like the Soviet Union were still focused more on tons of light variations and lots of extraneous work. The Bulgarians cut to the chase and went all in on specificity at the cost of health and longevity. Of all the weightlifters I can think of who've died young, most of them are Bulgarian. That system doesn't work today in a sport with much more serious anti doping and much higher levels of funding and corruption required to defeat it. And with the dominant China seeing more success with pumping huge levels of funding into developing and maintaining athletes with a more generalised and autoregulated training system, the mythological status of Bulgarian weightlifting has seriously declined. I would guess Karlos is doing a much more reasonable version of how they used to train. He's their golden goose, they no longer have a stable of athletes to put through the grinder and still have enough to medal in most categories.
You should check out videos and commentary from Weightlifting House. They seem to have a pretty good relationship with him/ his coaches. I suspect they are using a similar approach, as during worlds Seb commented on how Karlos was still hitting big numbers in the training hall right before competition. I haven’t run the system myself. I don’t have the genetics/ motivation to take that kind of abuse.
From what I’ve heard, Karlos’s training is still quite similar to the old Bulgarian system but I believe it’s been modernised a fair amount. He still primarily trains with super high intensity. As you found out, the old Bulgarian system was essentially to give the athletes a fuck ton of drugs and then completely push them to their limits with maxing out. If you couldn’t keep or, or more likely, your body got fucked up (which happened to a lot of would be great lifters) - you were off the team. There wasn’t very too many special cases where programming was changed for specific lifters either.
Max Aita had a crazy yet interesting story of when he went over to learn. There was a candy bowl of some sort of steroid or whatever and the lifters would take bets on how many they could eat and they would all comment about how their piss was red or something either later that day or throughout the week.
Dude that's insane! I know abadjiev developed alot of olympic champions but at what cost