America's ivory towers of sports medicine and exercise physiology are 20 to 30 years behind Scandinavia and Eastern Europe in their theory and application

Most of the powerful Iron Curtain competitors were relatively small and poor countries. How could these nations with their small gene pools hope to compete against the powerhouses of genetic variety such as the US with it's huge racial mix and the Soviet Union with it's hundreds of nationalities. These large nations could custom fit a genetic type to a sport. The smaller countries had to work with what they had. What mix of things did the likes of Romania and East Germany do to produce athletes of such superior ability? The answers were threefold: True strength training, plyometric power training, Systemic enzymes.

What mix of things ... produce athletes of such superior ability? The answers were threefold: True strength training, plyometric power training, Systemic enzymes

What do we mean by true strength training? Strength is the ability to apply force. Most of what passes for strength training in the West today is simply modified bodybuilding and as Russian strength coach Pavel Tsatsouline says bodybuilding is the worst thing that ever happened to weight training. Bodybuilding works with moderate resistance with moderate numbers of repetitions, in very strict movement with the aim of producing muscular hypertrophy. Hypertrophy is defined as an increase in the size of an existing structure. Bodybuilders use techniques that balloon out size with out producing significant gains in strength or producing strength that is adaptable to sports performance. I'll explain how that works in a bit.

True strength training uses very heavy weights, few repetitions and they do something unthinkable in bodybuilding - they cheat. In other words they use their whole body to help perform the lift. It's like Bruce Lees' principle of putting the whole body mass behind a punch! This is not the recipe for safety in commercial gym settings where worries about injury liability run dominant over performance physiology. Neither is it the recipe for a body builder's kissibly beautiful biceps. But whole body involvement is the recipe for functional strength. Skill movement in martial arts, sport, dance or any activity involves the whole body, never one joint at a time. Training only one joint solo without synergistic involvement of the rest of the body produces strength that has little transference to real movement during performance. When involving the whole, body strength is amplified into power (strength over time). Proper strength training does not produce a lot of hypertrophy (bloating). Instead it produces a change in muscle known as hyperplasia where a muscle bundle splits and becomes two or more overlapping muscle bundles. The result is not the bloated, soft, easily lost size of the bodybuilder, but plywood strong dense muscles with lasting useable strength.

Here again we have one of the differences between European sports science and the US; physiologists here don't believe hyperplasia happens in humans. In Europe hyperplasia has been a given in sport science for 20 plus years and they've adjusted their training methods accordingly with great success.

Notice the difference in size between bodybuilders and Olympic weight lifters. The smallest Olympic lifter is considerably stronger pound for pound than the biggest bodybuilder despite the size difference. Also, according to studies done at two separate Olympics, the weight lifters are the second most flexible, balanced, and agile athletes there: the gymnasts are the first. Watch a bodybuilder move - flexibility and balance are definitely not strong points of their training or being. Now, watch the balance of an Olympic lifter doing a clean and jerk; try the technique yourself if you don't think there's much to it! Then, watch that lifter get out from under a fully loaded barbell held over head! Strength, balance and agility; sounds like traits needed in most sports, do they not? Next, feel the difference in the muscle. Show muscle feels doughy to a hard squeeze, like the muscles on a dystrophic child. Now squeeze the arm of an Olympic lifter or power lifter. Solid steel covered by flesh. Show or performance? Posing or movement? Kata or Combat; for which shall you train? The physiological law of training specificity demands that one has to condition the muscles against the loads that the endeavor will demand from them. Bodybuilding is a fine activity but it is a non contact sport. If all you want to do is look great, then fine, bodybuild. But if you want to be able to apply your muscles to a task, then strength train. Real strength training gets you ready to perform, to excel and to strive.

Next, the Communists had to develop an advanced way of turning the strength their techniques developed into power. Training slowly teaches you to move slowly. While slow performance is initially needed to learn the proper mechanics of a skill, practice must be sped up after learning to insure proper performance. Most sports demand explosive movements against resistance. That resistance can come either from gravity (as in gymnastics), a medium (such as water in swimming), an opponent (as in judo or wrestling) or a bat hitting a ball (as in baseball). Explosive movements against the weights can be done safely if proper training if its bio mechanics is done before hand. (This is definitely one not to try at home boys and girls, unless you've got the supervision of an Exercise Physiologist or certified Strength Coach knowledgeable in the safety of such techniques). Don't depend on a personal trainer to know these things. What's the difference between those an Exercise Physiologist or certified Strength Coach and a personal trainer? It's like the difference between someone who gets their black belt by attending two or three weekend seminars every few months as opposed to someone who masters an art by spending years learning it's discipline in a temple.

Explosiveness against weights only partially builds the ability to produce power. To fill this need of sport, the Eastern Block exercise science group developed Plyometric training. Here in the States some folks have fancied up some aspects of plyometric training with giant rubber balls and fancy equipment. You don't need any of those; the Russians used tables and locker room benches.

Let's first answer the basic question as to what plyometric exercise is. Plyometrics are exercises that involve an explosive movement of the extremities to propel the entire body. The wind-ups to these movements are usually full body and the body learns how to cooperate in producing great speed and explosiveness that transfers directly to a sport skill. One example of plyometric work you may have seen involves athletes zigzag jumping over knee high benches side to side. The most common plyometric exercise involves jumping up onto a bench some 20 to 25 inches high with both feet. Then the athlete jumps down again absorbing the downward energy on the return only to uncoil it once more to jump up again. The Soviets trained all of their athletes in Plyometrics, from the archers to the fencers, the shooters to the wrestlers. They found that the balance, precession, agility, anaerobic conditioning, and power developed by this work were useful for all athletes in all sports.

A typical day for a Communist block athlete would go something like this.
Stretching, not the slow, static, passive stretching we advocate here, but an active stretching that actually had a side effect of producing strength.

What is anaerobic conditioning? Everyone can more or less describe aerobic exercise as working out the heart and lungs to develop endurance. This description would be correct, and we'll add one thing; in aerobic exercise, oxygen is the primary fuel the body uses to maintain its workload. You literally burn oxygen. Anaerobic exercise on the other hand does not involve long steady bouts of work, but short and super intense rounds of exercise. In this type of work, oxygen is either not available to the muscles due to the intensity of muscular contractions which cut off blood supply or, the work bout overloads the body beyond it's ability to deliver oxygen to all of the working parts. In this type of work, the cells burn glycogen or blood sugar as their primary fuel instead of oxygen.

Olympic free style wrestling is the best example of an anaerobic sport. Free style wrestlers are the best conditioned athletes in all of sport both aerobically and anaerobically, as the demands of their skill are so great. Conditioning for anaerobic ability involves near endless repetition of exercise drills involving one burst of energy after another. Athletes wind up breathless, nauseous, dizzy and the number of precious energy producing centers of the cells known as mitochondria just build and build. This increases both the stores of potential energy as well as the actual furnaces to burn that energy in the cells. The result: longer, stronger, more controlled and able bursts of skill performance.

The third secret was not a training method but a physiological realization as to three drawbacks of intense training: Inflammation, micro injury with muscle breakdown, and immune system depression. These are the main limiting factors on sports performance.

Inflammation, micro injury with muscle breakdown, and immune system depression....
are the main limiting factors on sports performance

All conditioning and skills training produces inflammation. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, bursa, periosteum all react to hard training by swelling and becoming painful. The more of this accrues, the less intensely the athlete will participate in the training. Micro injuries happen every day in skill and conditioning exercise. These tiny injuries are not enough to sideline an athlete but they accumulate and sooner than not become a macro injury demanding rest. Over and above the lapse in training, both micro and macro injuries produce scar tissue (fibrosis) which limits the range of motion in the limb and creates the potential for further injury. Hard training produces muscle wasting catabolizing responses, where the body begins to break it's own muscle down and eat itself. These happen through the cortisone hormones the body produces in response to the inflammation.

All conditioning and skills training produces inflammation

The one aspect unrecognized until the 60's was that intense training schedules lowered the bodies immunity. Every day of hard training is followed by two to three days of immune system suppression. When an athlete tags too many days of training together without adequate rest then the immune system goes into steep decline to the point where in some athletes, such as marathoners, it dies out all together. There is now even a professional journal for immunology issues in sports medicine. What armament did the Iron Curtain countries use to combat these three deadly foes to performance?

Through the 40's and into the 60's they tried to use Cortico Steroid drugs against the inflammation. These drugs had nasty side effects such as water weight gain, death of bursa (the tissues that lubricate the articulation of muscle to bone), weakening the tendons, wasting muscles, osteoporosis, extreme mood swings and more. None of those are conducive to high level athletic performance! The issues of fibrosis and immune system depression, they had no answers for. Then came the late 60's and everything changed.

In the constant search for substances to improve performance, the East Germans took notice of a preparation that was gaining favor on the other side of Germany. This product was used by physicians to naturally reduce inflammation, eat away at fibrosis, and modulate immune function.

Use of cortico steroids could be dropped. Moreover, the toxic non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID's) such as aspirin, ibuprofen and the rest could also be dropped, saving the athletes from facing the great killer of young sportsmen - kidney failure. The combination of dehydration and NSAID use is the single largest cause for athletic deaths. During one New Your Marathon in the late 1990's an Ibuprofen manufacturer gave out samples of their product before the race. Four runners died at that marathon from kidney failure!

What was this product whose use was classified as a state secret in most of Eastern Europe - Systemic Enzymes! The exact same products we can buy over the counter here in heath food stores!

Classified as a state secret in most of Eastern Europe - Systemic Enzymes!

Oral ingestion of Androstene and it cousins is wasteful. Research at the University of Dublin Department of Pharmacology found that absorption through the gut was only at 5% of what was taken in. On the other hand it was found that applying the Andro stack to the skin as a cream, using a special lipid carrier to draw the supplement into the tissues, produced 95% absorption and utilization. Tests proved it and even better, the effects of the increased T could be felt in 15 minutes! The cream the doctors at the school developed is available from a Phoenix based company called Life-Flo; the product is named Andro Edge.

If you are into extreme sports, true fitness and real training - overdoing and pushing the envelope of human performance, then take heed of what they did behind the Berlin wall. The Comrades got it right! Now 30 years later, we need to catch on.
 

References:

1). Muller-Hepburn W.: Anwendung von Enzymen in der Sportsmedizin. Forum d. Prakt. Artes 18 (1970).

2). Bronstein J.L.: Oral Enzyme Tablets in the Treatment of Boxing Injuries. The Practitioner 198 (1967), 547.