The Actual Secrets of Powerlifting Programs (w/Daniel DeBrocke)

I honestly think a lot of people do a little too much volume, but they don’t necessarily get the most out of each set and each rep. Like, if you’re pushing, let’s say a set of five to an RP8, that is very hard. That’s very, very hard. If you’re really pushing that hard, you don’t need as many sets because the intensity of effort is so high.

Welcome to the “BarBend” podcast, where we talk to the smartest athletes, coaches, and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.

Today, I’m talking to powerlifter and coach Daniel DeBrocke, Director of Education at Kabuki Strength. He’s also a writer for breakingmuscle.com, a website in the BarBend network. I’m a huge fan of his writing, but then again I’m a little biased. Daniel is one of the most thoughtful people I’ve ever encountered when it comes to athlete prep and programming for competition.

In today’s episode, we dive deep on programming for powerlifting, including the sometimes unexpected changes that occur when progressing from beginner to intermediate to advanced. Daniel drops some real knowledge bombs in this episode, great for athletes and coaches alike.

Before we get to that, a quick shoutout to today’s episode sponsor, Organifi. Organifi makes a line of organic superfood blends that offer plant-based nutrition with high-quality ingredients.

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Go to organifi.com/barbend, and use the code BarBend, easy enough, for 20 percent off your order. That’s organifi.com/barbend, code BarBend for 20 percent off. Now, let’s get on with the show.

Daniel, thanks so much for joining me today. First time actually, ever chatting with you live, which is always a treat. I’m not going to lie and claim we go back a decade or anything like that, but hey, I get to make a new friend today. I’m excited about that.

Thanks for joining us. For folks who don’t know, if you wouldn’t mind, give a little bit about your background, who the heck you are, and why you love what you do.

For sure. First off, thanks for having me on. It’s really cool to be on here because I’ve read you guys’ stuff for a long time. It’s cool to be on the other end a little bit behind the curtain.

A little bit about me, my name is Daniel DeBrocke and I am a competitive powerlifter. I was a competitive weightlifter. I won Canadian National Championships in 2021.

In weightlifting, your…

Powerlifting.

In powerlifting, OK. Got it.

I’m just trying to stick to the relevant points.

[inaudible 02:58] quickly. I’ve been a coach for about 10 years now. A few years back, I initially started writing just as I thought it would be interesting to write for different publications. I submitted it. Got accepted as well. OK, maybe it’s a fluke, and wrote another article, got accepted. I said, “OK,” wrote another one.

Then, I just started writing all these articles for various publications. I started building up quite a bit of momentum. It turned out that I had a bit of an aptitude for it. Fast forward a little while later, I ended up writing for Kabuki.

The longer that I wrote, my articles have become a lot more long form. The last one, it’s not out yet, but it’s over 17,000 words. It’s a very deep literature review. Not a lot of people are doing those kind of articles, which is a bit of a niche space for me. I had written a really long in-depth article for Kabuki strength.

Then I submitted another one. It was actually at that point where they asked me to become a coach. I’ve been working with them for two years in the capacity of a coach. Both six months or something like that ago, they just reach out to me, and they’re like, “Hey, we see your skills being a little bit better suited towards this position.”

I’m Director of Education now. It’s been really great. I get to coach everyone from beginner, but mostly at least intermediate or more advanced athletes. I get a lot of time to do research and develop educational programs. We’re developing a certification right now for a powerlifting federation.

There’s a lot of really great things to go on in there. I really like the position, essentially, because it allows me to have my foot on both sides of the fence, where I had this opportunity to dive super deep into the literature. I also have to keep myself grounded through actual coaching practices. I think that’s probably what’s relevant to [inaudible 04:49] . [laughs]

The big question I have is that this is a name that we talked a little bit about when we were scheduling the podcast. Who is the bigger strength nerd, you or Greg Knuckles? That’s the big question I have.

He’s someone who I looked up to for a very long time in the industry. I still look up too, obviously. It’s cool, because now he’s a little bit more of a peer. He’s definitely got to take the take on that, for sure. [laughs] [inaudible 05:15] amazing.

He’s a great beard. 17,000 words for him. That’s like a warm-up. He’s like, “OK. When do we actually get to that? When are we actually getting to the top?”

[laughs] I know, right? It was funny, actually, because that was one of the things that really inspired my writing. I noticed that Greg was one of the very few people who wrote really long form content. That was where I was like, “Hey, there might be a space for this sort of stuff.” That’s what got me on that kick.

Makes sense. OK. Let’s talk a little bit about the topic of the day or at least an introduction to it. We’ll get more specific as we go on. We’re talking about programming for powerlifting.

That’s something that I know you’re super passionate about, and I think something that gets misinterpreted because when you first learn about the sport of powerlifting, at least when I did, it’s presented as something very simple, “linear progressive overload.”

That’s a phrase that I kept hearing when I was…I come from a weightlifting background as well. When you’re a weightlifter and someone’s explaining powerlifting to you, they’re like, “Oh, it’s much simpler. Linear progressive overload.”

OK, that seems pretty straightforward. Obviously with anything, there are levels of nuance and with proficiency and with expertise comes complication, because games don’t come so easy necessarily.

When thinking about powerlifting or programming for powerlifting in a broad sense, what are some of the principles that you think are really important to establish or at least wrap our heads around as we get deeper into the discussion?

That’s a great question. I honestly think that it also somewhat depends on the level of the lifter as well. I think they’re a good fundamental principles, which I’ll cover.

I also think that as you go from novice to intermediate to late intermediate, advanced, elite, international elite, the priorities tend to shift a little bit. If you want, we can touch on that but I’ll cover some of the more fundamental ones first.

First and foremost, specificity has to be prioritized. If you want to increase your squat bench and deadlift, you have to do some form of squat bench and deadlift. The farther that you deviate from the competition, the less translation you risk having into the sport. For instance, if you want to get good at boxing, don’t play tennis.

It’s funny because sometimes that gets lost a little bit because you’re like, “Well, I’m squatting or I’m deadlifting, or I’m doing an RDL, this is really similar,” but especially the more advanced you become, Specificity is almost like a funnel. You talked about a funnel before we started recording.

The higher up you get, the more specific you need to be. The more that the intensities, the volumes, the rep ranges, the exercise selection, the execution, range of motion, all of that stuff needs to be more specific to what it is that you’re doing. Specificity is definitely one of the foundational components.

Another one that’s really underrated is staying injury free to the best of your ability, because I think a lot of the times people get into powerlifting and they push really hard, get really strong, or get a lot stronger and then they start experiencing these injuries.

They don’t necessarily take the time to troubleshoot appropriately or seek out professional help or anything like that, so like, “OK, I need to maybe dial it back.” They dial it back a little bit, pain goes away, they start to push again, and they start getting injured more.

I don’t get what’s happening. Making sure that you have a very comprehensive and balanced approach to your training, but make sure that you can address any bilateral discrepancies, you can really reinforce productive training technique, and you can manage your fatigue. All of these things become really important.

Remaining injury free is also really important. From there, selecting some progression model, like you talked about linear progression, and a progression strategy is really important. As you become more advanced, these things become a lot more important as well.

Realistically, a novice lifter can basically just look at a dumbbell and they get stronger, you know what I mean? Whereas if you become stronger and more proficient, the amount of levers that you can pull starts to narrow a little bit, or at the very least, you have less of an adaptive potential from each lever that you pull.

If we’re looking at levers as like exercise selection, frequency, intensity, all these things. Those are some of the really big ones.

Selecting which mode you’re going to apply to the individual is really part of the soft side of coaching. The soft skills, that’s where all the experiential work comes in because realistically, there are no research papers to teach you how to coach, or teach you how to develop a program you’re assigned.

They just give you mechanistic stuff and theoretical constructs that you can imply things in the real world, but ultimately you do have to have that experiential component to really know how you’re going to place it into an athlete. Does that answer the question?

Yeah, that answers the question. That actually answers the next four or five questions I had. Sounds very, very thorough.

It’s already out there. I’ll see you later. [laughs]

See you guys later. This is a seven-minute BarBend podcast. I want to dive a little bit more into these coaching soft skills because I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about powerlifting that I personally had years ago. Obviously, now BarBend being over six years old, we produce more powerlifting content than literally anyone else on the planet.

I’ve learned a thing or two, or at least, I’ve tended to learn more about what I don’t know about the sport. I assumed a little bit less.

What are some of the presumptions or assumptions that you think people have about coaching the sport of powerlifting, maybe especially at the elite level, that you run into a lot, or that you hear a lot that don’t necessarily sync up with the reality of what you do as a coach?

I guess there’s a few. Anytime you look at powerlifting, people tend to self-organize into ideological camps. Whether it’s like, “Oh, I’m in the Bulgarian system,” or “I’m doing west side,” or “Just grind, brother, just push through the pain,” or minimum effective dose or whatever it is.

And so, I think your preconceptions are going to have a strong influence on how you interpret what people are doing at a high level. I think that’s the first consideration. I would definitely say one big thing is, people overvalue minutiae, and they significantly undervalue the fundamentals.

When you look at an elite athlete, and you look at the things that they’re doing, let’s say they’re really emphasizing nutrient timing and food composition around the training and all these things, you might look at that and say, “Oh, man, that’s the key. He’s exceptionally strong, or she’s exceptionally strong, very talented athlete. That’s what I need to focus on because they keep hammering on this.”

The reality is when you’re, let’s say, a novice, or intermediate athlete, these changes can be very small. If you don’t have the fundamentals dialed into a very, very high degree, all of those little details get washed out. You’re not actually able to really see them express themselves as some adaptive benefit.

Whereas when you get someone like, let’s say, Mike [inaudible 12:44] , I was chatting with him last week. He was talking about his training. He’s made very small adjustments to his nutrition, yet, it’s having a very profound impact. You wouldn’t necessarily expect it to, but I think the big distinction is he’s a very high-level lifter.

His room and the things that he like…all the volume knobs that he’s turning, or the levers that he’s pulling can have a much, much more significant impact, because everything else is perfectly lined up in his life.

Whereas if you’re someone you train really hard, but your protein intake is insufficient, your calories are insufficient, you’re not getting very good quality sleep, you’re pretty stressed out, you drink a lot, or whatever it might be. If you start to take creatine, I don’t know how much that’s going to help. You know what I mean?

It all boils down to individual context and where you’re at, but that would probably be one of the big ones is people will look at elite lifters and say. “Oh, that’s what the coaches are prioritizing with their athletes, therefore, I need to do that.” Whereas maybe you don’t, maybe what you just need to do is de-stress a little bit more, or maybe try getting to bed 15 minutes earlier, or whatever it might be.

There’s a lot of context that that’s missing when you’re making these observations, sometimes.

Let’s talk about programming at a more macro sense. I appreciate you diving into those, the devil’s in the details. You should matter, but they matter at different times and in different ways. It’s easy to lose the forest through the trees. That’s the last ADM I’m going to use for at least a few minutes, I promise.

Let’s talk about programming parameters in general. An athlete comes to you and I’m curious how the factors change between beginner, intermediate, and advanced lifters when they come to you and you’re tasked as a coach with directing programming for them.

Essentially, someone comes in and they’re more of a beginner or novice or early intermediate. There’s going to be a much heavier focus on skill acquisition.

We’re probably going to have higher frequency of competition lifts or close derivatives to really drive up some of those fundamental motor skills that they need, if they’re under muscles for their weight class or for their long-term goals, if they want to lose weight, or if they want to gain a bunch of weight or whatever. We’re going to be prioritizing those things.

Maybe a concurrent model might work really well for those individuals. You can prioritize hypertrophy and strength and skill acquisition simultaneously because ultimately, strength is a skill. You can be super strong in the leg press, but maybe only squat 225 because you don’t have the stability, the internal stability requirements.

Skill acquisition is going to be a really, really big focus. And so, all of the ways that we can do that are going to be through maybe increasing frequency, monitoring exercise selection, doing video reviews, if you’re not coaching them in person, having supporting exercises that can help bolster their ability to execute those movements effectively.

If someone just got really weak lats or really weak lutes or something that, maybe you need to apply a little bit more volume and accessory exercises there. A good general well-rounded base is going to be good. I also think, especially that for beginners and early intermediates, this is my perspective, doing a lot of bodybuilding, as your accessory work is going to be very valuable long term.

Because you’re building up that base and muscle is strength potential, essentially, to some degree. When you get into intermediates, that’s when it becomes, you start having to be a little bit more methodical in terms of what variables you’re changing.

For those people, you have to really start thinking about lifestyle a lot more. You need to be thinking about that stuff for everyone, but that’s where it really starts to matter a little bit more. Programming has to become a little bit more detailed and a little bit more individualized as well.

Hey, you know what, I’m noticing that SSB squats don’t seem to be doing anything for your comp squat, but front squats seem to be fantastic. How are you collecting that data? Are you doing, let’s say weekly reviews, bi-weekly, monthly, or whatever? That feedback is really important and the communication of your athlete’s super important.

How are you finding this? Are you enjoying the training? What do you find is working? What do you find is not working? Obviously, just reviewing the data and seeing what do we need to prioritize? In the intermediate stage, you probably still need to be focusing on building muscle as well.

Again, there’s a little bit…I don’t want to say less of a focus and skill acquisition, but there’s a little bit more of a focus on specialized skill, so really increasing the intensity and giving them more exposure to high intensity because they are better at bracing and moving and all of that stuff. Now, we can really start to push them.

Whereas with a novice, you maybe you couldn’t write because you just weren’t technically sound enough. For an advanced athlete, that’s where specificity has to become really, really important and take center stage. Now, maybe you get let’s say two standard deviations away from the competition lifts, and all of a sudden you’re not really seeing any carryover.

Now maybe that’s not the case, but maybe it is. So that’s where you really have to start dialing in all of the knobs. You have to be pulling all the levers looking at their sleep, looking at their nutrition, looking at their stress management, looking at their mood, their level of enjoyment of the training, looking at their hydration status, their supplementation, looking at their meal timing, all of these things.

None of those are even programming specific. Even if you’re only doing their programming, you still have to monitor those things because those have a very strong indirect influence on their training performance.

Then when you’re looking at the actual program design, you have to look at things like how much volume can they tolerate? How often are we deloading? Could we maybe pull back volume just a little bit? Maybe stretch out their productive training time so not having to deload as frequently.

Are they getting any hip pain with their squatting too much? Can we alter their frequency? Those are the little details you’re going to have to parse out. By that time, an advanced athlete should have a pretty darn good understanding of what actually works and what doesn’t work. If you’ve been working with them for a reasonable amount of time or if they have a training log, you should be able to tell a lot of that stuff just through that as well as the intake process.

We’ll get back to that in just a second. First, a quick shout-out from today’s episode sponsor, Organifi. They make a line of organic superfood blends that offer plant-based nutrition with high-quality ingredients.

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Now let’s get back to the show. This is not specific to powerlifting, by the way, this is just in strength sports. I’ve heard that some athletes say as they get more advanced and as they get to that elite stage, they start to realize that the impact of a coach is less. Then they have to unlearn that when they realize they’re actually not at that advanced stage yet.

Basically to say, [laughs] they think they’re elite, a coach isn’t as important. Then through that, they actually realize they’re not as elite as they thought and maybe a coach is more important than ever. I’m curious to see your interpretation on that.

It’s like when you’re a teenager. You think you know everything about the world, but you really know absolutely nothing. That’s the reaction I’ve gotten from a lot of lifters who have gone over that bell curve.

It’s like the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s exactly what you were saying before. You’ve got this wildly successful company. You’ve been in the industry a long time. You’ve been training for a long time.

You got to this point where you’re like, “Oh, wow, the more that I learn, the more that I realize, how much is out there still to learn?” I don’t know that I disagree with that. I’ve never heard people say that.

People are more reluctant to hire coaches initially until they do reach a point where they’re like, “Hey, how serious am I taking this?” At that point, that’s usually when they hire coaches. I would say that I would agree with that.

Excellent. It’s very rare that I ask a pretty open-ended question on the podcast, and someone’s like, “Yeah, I agree with that.” Normally, they’re trying to figure out a polite way to tell me I’m dumb, or completely misinterpreting something.

 [laughs] No, to each their own. I’ve seen people do that. I’m the kind of person who likes to tinker. I have hired coaches in the past. I have a nutrition coach right now.

If you go in there with the intention of learning, you can still get that learning benefit because I enjoy programming. A lot of people sometimes are like, “I want to do it on my own.” It’s like, “OK, cool, but you should also learn from other people.” [laughs]

It’s like improv. Yes. It’s not yes, but it’s OK.

Exactly.

[laughs] Sorry, some weird stuff just went on in my head. You’ll have to forgive me. This is why I like talking to Canadians on the podcast. Everyone’s so polite. I’m going to get the backlash afterward. Let’s talk a little bit about competition preparation, specifically, and competition specificity.

Look, this is a sport. You’re programming so that people can perform, not just well in training, but specifically, so they can perform to the best of their ability and set new personal records on the competition platform.

When it comes to competition prep. How are you approaching coaching, especially at that elite level, when people might have more competition experience?

That’s a great question. A lot of it is knowing the athlete as well. That is equally as important as the actual program because I’ve had athletes where…Especially when you start taking them into the peak where they’re hitting numbers with like, “I’ve never hit this weight before and I’m smoking it. This is my second or third attempt last meet and I’m hitting it for a double at an RPE 7.” They’re jacked up.

You have to know how to pull the reins in those individuals. Discipline is extremely important in contest prep. If you’re on off-season, yeah, sure, go out, have fun, play other sports, do whatever you like, but at an elite level the discipline is paramount. You cannot be going out hiking and doing all the things…You shouldn’t say can’t. Let’s at least say it’s not advised.

Because what happens if you roll your ankle when you’re hiking? What happens if you go on a hike, you get dehydrated, and maybe you strain your hamstring, or something like that. Now you’ve taken away like what, a week, maybe two weeks of really productive lower body training.

You have to be a lot more cognizant about what you’re doing and the risks associated with it. Then also knowing the individual being able to pull the rings back. That’s really important.

From a programming perspective, obviously, what you are going to see is this fumbling effect of having higher volumes at the bottom. Let’s say you’re doing sets of five or eights or something like that further off from the competition, three, four, and sixes, whatever it might be.

As you get closer, the eights start turning into fives, fives start turning into triples, doubles, singles. Then maybe four or five weeks out, you’re doing a fair bit of singles at like an eight, the microsure type thing.

Your exercise selection is also going to funnel. Your volume is going to scale down with some level of proportionality, according to proximity of your competition date. You’re, let’s say, 12 weeks out, yeah, sure, you can have front squats there, you can have hyper squats, and SSB and all sorts of stuff.

If you’re, let’s say, four weeks out and you haven’t done a low bar squat yet, it’s going to take a little while for you to familiarize yourself. You’ll just get comfortable in that low bar position if you haven’t done it for a while. You really need to make sure that exercise selection starts being scaled more specifically.

Volume goes down just enough to drive out rotation, but to still make sure that we can recover and we are not beating ourselves up as the intensity increases. Then also it’s really important to pay attention to what actually works because there are picking best practices.

I can tell you a number of times and it’s not a medium number either, but there’s a fairly large percentage, still minority, but a large percentage of individuals of very high level who require very odd encounter intuitive picking methods.

For me, I was doing front squats up until two weeks out of my competition and I had like a 50-pound [inaudible 25:34] on my squat.

For that note, do you think that might have something to do with your weightlifting background and your comfort in building strength in that position?

Probably, to some degree, but essentially, one thing, it’s really important to keep in mind is, specificity is a tool. Usually, it means these things but not always. Ultimately, specificity is lifting more on the platform.

If you do competition squats and you finally really bang you up and you need to do something else, then you just need to do something else. That was one of the reasons for me because I’ve got a big front squats. I could front squat 500 for a double or a triple.

That is something I use very effectively to drive my comp squat, but it’s also helping me keep the tee down. This is interesting balance where I was alternating between front squats one week and buffalo bar squats the next week to save my shoulders because I’m a bigger guy, obviously.

Those things are the big ones, managing recoveries is really important and prop. I know other people have their opinions on this. There’s plenty of lifters that do weight cuts and are very successful at it like Ben Pollack is someone who’s fantastic at it. A lot of people do it.

I’m the opinion of being a lot more conservative. I’m actually not a big fan of weight cuts. I think that you should walk around at your competition weight or very close to it. Probably shouldn’t cut more than maybe two or three kilos at most.

I know it’s very concerning, that’s just sort of my perspective. I don’t think that’s right or wrong, that’s how I see it because to me it’s introducing another variable uncertainty into the mix. It’s like you’ve done all this prep, why not just go out there and crush it.

Like I said, there’s greater arguments. For me, it’s for the counter. That’s just my perspective. It’s neither right nor wrong, it’s just my experience.

Are there any other aspects of programming for powerlifting that you maybe haven’t talked about yet that you’re particularly passionate about or particularly opinionated about?

Yeah. Level of the effort is something really important. Whenever I take on a new athlete, very frequently, I get them messaging me being like, “Hey, this is way less volume than I’m used to.” I’m like, “OK. Let’s just start here, we’ll see.”

It takes a couple of weeks. This is how it even happens in fairly advanced athletes as well. It just does. If you don’t have some really on you, the level of effort just goes down.

He sends me a video. I’m thinking particular individual. A video and he’s like, “Oh, yeah. This is my top triple at an eight, an RPE 8.” I look at it, and I’m like, “Mm-mm, you need to throw more weight. Next week, send me back to video.” He’s thrown on more weight. Mm-mm. More weight. Next week.

He’s going to be 40, 50 pounds at this point. This is a very strong guy. He’s a very experienced athlete. He was sandbagging it. He didn’t realize. It took about three to four weeks before he was actually pushing at that level of intensity. I honestly think a lot of people do a little too much volume, but they don’t necessarily get the most out of each set and each rep.

If you’re pushing, let’s say a set of five to an RPE 8, that is very hard. That’s very, very hard if you’re in a true RPE 8. Not this like, “Oh, this is an eight like you see on Instagram.” A real RPE 8 is very hard. If you’re really pushing that hard, you don’t need as many sets because the intensity of effort’s so high.

Then that skills, to some degree as well, with your auxiliary work. Let’s say you’re doing squats here and then maybe you’re doing a leg press. Pushing super hard on the leg press is brutal. Same thing with your accessories. Don’t sandbag your accessories. That’s very common that a lot of lifters do it at all levels.

If you’re actually pushing to that intensity, you can really see some incredible progress just because you were not putting out the effort that you thought. Getting people to work at the level that’s prescribed in their program is a really big thing.

Maybe doing a little bit less, but making sure that you’re getting a lot of intensive effort out of your actual training program, and a lot of times you can save yourself time, and then just additional wear and tear. That’s one thing that I see as well.

Makes a lot of sense. Daniel, I really appreciate your time. We’re coming up toward the end here. Before we leave, I do want to ask where is the best place for people to follow along with you, the content you’re producing, etc.?

I have an Instagram accounts. It’s daniel_debrocke. I have a YouTube account, Daniel_debrocke. Then I have a…Gosh, what is that called? I just started a TikTok. I totally sold out. [laughs] It’s also daniel_debrocke. Those are the three main social platforms that I use pretty consistently.

I’ve noticed that on Instagram. When you write something and someone asked about it, you’re interacting with someone, you will promote an article like, “Hey, I’ve written this about…” Not everyone does that. Not everyone who writes online will call attention to the fact that they are writing for various publications online.

I like that you do that by follow along with you, people are directed toward where you’re writing at the moment.

Yeah. I tried to do it because it ends up being a pretty useful resource. I get people ask me the exact same questions every time. Now, I just have an article, and I’m like, “Hey, here you go.”

I already did the work there.

Exactly. This is a better explanation than I’m going to be able to give you right now. [laughs]

This is an edited explanation of what I would give you.

Exactly.

 Daniel, I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s a pleasure to connect. I hope we get to do it again soon.

Thanks so much for having me on, man. It’s been a pleasure.