This video from John Broz (of Average Broz gym in Las Vegas, NV) has been making the rounds on the Internet training sites:

Broz is a big fan of the Bulgarian style of training, whch is to say that he’s all about training athletes on a daily basis. The motto that he likes to use is a famous Antonio Krastev saying:

“The day will NEVER come when you can’t lift the bar.”

Krastev, of course, is one of the best Olympic weightlifters of all time, and Broz is trying to capture that kind of intensity and training stimulus for his athletes.

I agree, to a point. Beginners and novices need to simply train three or four times a week with maximal loads (meaningless given that they are novices) to get their form down pat in the major lifts: A back squat variant, the deadlift, the press, the bench press, and the power clean. Other exercises can come later, but those big five exercises must be mastered before you start training your athletes into oblivion. Broz refers to the “dark days” that come when you train seven days a week (often twice a day); this is the intense CNS fatigue that you suffer from due to overtraining your body. However, Broz believes that overtraining the body helps it to eventually adapt to these brutal loads, and that it is necessary if you want to compete at the highest level.

Certainly there are a lot of things I agree with Broz about – training hard and often training everyday can be beneficial for athletes. However, missed time due to injury or major fatigue is a huge problem when working with youth athletes and ones who have short offseasons going into their sport of choice, so I tend to err on the side of caution. Still, the overarching message should not be forgotten – training hard will require pushing aside your desire to sit on the couch and play video games, and from time to time, this will be very difficult. But without this level of discipline, you can’t hope to become even a reasonably decent athlete – you will simply get outworked by those who want it more.