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Kettlebell ROP adjustments for someone who sprints and looks to build his deadlift as well

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Plowingthrough

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I'm new here so I hope I can get some constructive feedback. I recently bought a line of kettlebells 24 to 48 with each 4kg jump in between. I want to start ROP as I eventually want to press the beast, among other goals I have which are deadlifting 200kg and doing a pullup with the beast. I also do running/sprints training twice a week at an athletics club which is Thursday and Sunday with Thursday being more volume and Sunday are hill sprints in the wintertime.

The program I did before was Dan John's template of "The warm-up is the workout" from "Never let go". I deadlifted and bench presses twice a week. I did loaded carries and goblet squat's on all days. I would like some continuity going into this program so I wanted to do the following.

Monday medium, Wednesday Heavy, and Light Friday. Doing pull-ups with the presses. Presses being 24 (about 8-10 RM but I wanna drive the tension techniques home and leave my ego out of it) and pull-ups being bodyweight.

I had a few things I was thinking off

- On Wednesday I want to cut out the swings and do trap bar deadlifts (low volume) and farmer walks with the trapbar after the presses and pullups (3 sets)

- On Monday and Friday I wanted to finish off with a loaded carry and an ab movement, as it has served me so well.

- I wanted to do 15-25 reps of goblet squats in the warm-up, avoiding fatigue, to keep and improve on the pattern.

- I was thinking of only doing a clean at the start of a rung instead of after each press, to save my hamstrings for the sprints. Since I'm already be doing swings twice a week anyway and I don't have a rep goal for clean's and presses.

- I didn't want to do the carries and the ab work on variety days as with my sprints I'm already training 5/7 days each week. I rather take the days off and finish my regular workouts with the carries and abs and do the squats in the warm-up. I felt this might be better for recovery.

Any feedback is welcome!
 
@Plowingthrough You will probably hear this a lot on this forum, but "keep the goal the goal". All of your goals are excellent goals, however you need to prioritize some and deprioritize others, because if everything is a priority, then nothing is. As well, with all of the changes you listed you aren't doing the ROP anymore, which is important to keep in mind. Will it work? Maybe, but no one could tell you and you wouldn't know until after you have done it.

I'm a retired collegiate decathlete so I know a thing or two about wanting to do it all, and having to do it all as well due to the demands of the sport. My recommendation would be this, first off, do you want to train 5 days a week because you feel as if you need to? Or because it works well with your schedule? In my experience, if you're training 5 days a week, 2 days have to be easy. So, does this mean your track workouts would be the light workouts? Unlikely if you're training with a club 2 days a week, so then it's likely your weights are going to have to give up some intensity somewhere. I personally work best when I train 4 days a week, it's enough to get a lot done, but also gives me enough to recover. 5 for me is very tough when my sleep, nutrition, and recovery is perfect, and impossible when it isn't. Everyone is different, however, if you can't see yourself doing the training consistenly for months, it's most likely too much.

So I'd start with ordering your priorities from most to least important and then deciding on what to do after that. You want to pick a program because it fits with your goal, not alter a program to meet your goal. From what you listed above it seems that the 4 things you really want to do are:

1: run with your track club
2: deadlift 200kg
3: press the beast
4: pullup with the beast

There are a couple ways you could do this, all of which involve scrapping the ROP and doing something else that better fits your criteria IMO.

1: Do an easy strength type program with the lifts mentioned and make great gains. (The first time i deadlifted 185kg it was from easy strength, and in a workout I never lifted more than 110kg, except for a single one time at 130kg. It felt easy, ridiculously easy, I thought I wasn't working hard enough, but I just learned how to work smarter and put my ego at the door. My previous PB was 155kg, in those 2 months the amount of strength I gained was incredible.)

2: Do your lifts 3 days a week and run 2 days. Maybe that makes it 5 days a week, maybe you lift on days you run (spread out apart as far as possible in the day), just do it however works best for you. So for your pullups and presses you can still do the ladders from ROP, but instead of swings and snatches you do a deadlift program. Vodka and Pickles is a 3 day a week deadlift program that works very well with sports IMO. So now you still get the benefit of the ladders and you can deadlift.

3: Grease the groove on your lifts. Stay fresh, stay strong, never go to failure, and train for success.

As you mentioned in your post earlier, I think doing goblet squats in your warmup and farmers carries as a finisher are an excellent idea no matter what you do. If you still want to do swings, I'd do them as a warmup with a light weight to really grease that hinge pattern.

I hope this helps and gives you some food for thought. If you have any questins feel free to ask!
 
@Plowingthrough You will probably hear this a lot on this forum, but "keep the goal the goal". All of your goals are excellent goals, however you need to prioritize some and deprioritize others, because if everything is a priority, then nothing is. As well, with all of the changes you listed you aren't doing the ROP anymore, which is important to keep in mind. Will it work? Maybe, but no one could tell you and you wouldn't know until after you have done it.

I'm a retired collegiate decathlete so I know a thing or two about wanting to do it all, and having to do it all as well due to the demands of the sport. My recommendation would be this, first off, do you want to train 5 days a week because you feel as if you need to? Or because it works well with your schedule? In my experience, if you're training 5 days a week, 2 days have to be easy. So, does this mean your track workouts would be the light workouts? Unlikely if you're training with a club 2 days a week, so then it's likely your weights are going to have to give up some intensity somewhere. I personally work best when I train 4 days a week, it's enough to get a lot done, but also gives me enough to recover. 5 for me is very tough when my sleep, nutrition, and recovery is perfect, and impossible when it isn't. Everyone is different, however, if you can't see yourself doing the training consistenly for months, it's most likely too much.

So I'd start with ordering your priorities from most to least important and then deciding on what to do after that. You want to pick a program because it fits with your goal, not alter a program to meet your goal. From what you listed above it seems that the 4 things you really want to do are:

1: run with your track club
2: deadlift 200kg
3: press the beast
4: pullup with the beast

There are a couple ways you could do this, all of which involve scrapping the ROP and doing something else that better fits your criteria IMO.

1: Do an easy strength type program with the lifts mentioned and make great gains. (The first time i deadlifted 185kg it was from easy strength, and in a workout I never lifted more than 110kg, except for a single one time at 130kg. It felt easy, ridiculously easy, I thought I wasn't working hard enough, but I just learned how to work smarter and put my ego at the door. My previous PB was 155kg, in those 2 months the amount of strength I gained was incredible.)

2: Do your lifts 3 days a week and run 2 days. Maybe that makes it 5 days a week, maybe you lift on days you run (spread out apart as far as possible in the day), just do it however works best for you. So for your pullups and presses you can still do the ladders from ROP, but instead of swings and snatches you do a deadlift program. Vodka and Pickles is a 3 day a week deadlift program that works very well with sports IMO. So now you still get the benefit of the ladders and you can deadlift.

3: Grease the groove on your lifts. Stay fresh, stay strong, never go to failure, and train for success.

As you mentioned in your post earlier, I think doing goblet squats in your warmup and farmers carries as a finisher are an excellent idea no matter what you do. If you still want to do swings, I'd do them as a warmup with a light weight to really grease that hinge pattern.

I hope this helps and gives you some food for thought. If you have any questins feel free to ask!
Thank you so much for this lengthy in-depth reply! I really do appreciate it. I think you're right in that what I was planning to do isn't ROP anymore so maybe I should elaborate on what I was trying to do here.

I looked at it from the lens of Dan John's 5 fundamental movement patterns and all of them having to be represented in some way in a program. Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Loaded carry. There are some strength standards I'm looking to hit that are also his. A double bodyweight deadlift (which is 200 kg for me), bodyweight overhead press (or half bodyweight each arm which for me is the beast and the pullup being there for balance and awesomeness). There are also squat standards but I have horribly neglected the squat so just getting busy with the goblet squat as a patterning exercise is what I was going to do with that one. The loaded carry I was looking to have represented in the finisher.

So I was trying to tick all the boxes of a solid program according to these guidelines while using some kind of proven loading scheme to get me there. ROP provided one for the presses and the pullups.

I like the swing. I read an article by Andy Bolton about 10 x 10 swings 1-3 days a week as a great assistance workout for deadlifts (Kettlebells and Deadlifting: A Match Made in Heaven? | StrongFirst). I liked the idea as they are explosive and easy to recover from he says. Both things I need I figured while also doing the running. ROP doesn't say much about the swings aside from doing it all out on heavy day and lighter on the other days in accordance to their name medium and light. The time was a dice roll so I figured since that was so random I could just go with the 10x5-10. Still not ROP, but you can see how I got the inspiration from it as a template.

But to do it 3 times a week and never deadlift? That would mean I would never lift the hinge in a grinding lift like a deadlift. So why does it have to be all or nothing? I figured doing the taxing hinge movement (deadlift) once and the easy more explosive hinge (swing) twice. To keep things fresh in the week and to have some variety which I like. Since it's only one heavy day in my mind I figured I could recover from it. Would you say deadlifting once a week while training the hinge more often with swings is a mistake? Since the deadlift and the swing are a "match made in heaven" doesn't it mean you still train the pattern and thus improve?

As for training 5 days a week I think I can do it. I started out training when I was 18 and I'm now 31. I've trained 5-6 times a week always. Moreso upper/lower, 5/3/1, bodybuild style workouts with a main lift and assistance lifts.
 
Please read ETK about what else to do and not to do when on the ROP.

-S-
Hi Steve! Thank you for your reply. I've read the book and I know you can do some practice lifts on the variety days only. So maybe I should have titled it differently. It isn't ROP but ROP inspired. I'm a long time lurker here and I've read a post of yours saying you used the ladders from ROP for the presses but used deadlifts for the pulls which was a successful program for you. So I think I was looking more for some tips and suggestions to make this ROP inspired thing work.

Thanks
 
@Plowingthrough

Welcome and good luck! A couple thoughts:

1. To maximize recovery, consider adding the light and possibly medium pressing days to your sprint days. This will decrease the number of days you have to train, simply adding 5x1 to one of your sprint days represents a minimal investment, and even increasing that to 5x(1,2) would still be fairly minimal. It also utilizes almost completely different sets of muscles as primary movers so there *should* be little interference.

2. Prioritize and execute. It looks like you have 4 Goals + training framework (the 5 patterns). Pick one goal to pursue, and let the others be maintained. You could even operate this seasonally - winter your main goal is pull-ups, spring your main goal is pressing, summer your main goal is sprinting, autumn your main goal is deadlifting. You maintain your skill and capability in the other three in their off season. This allows "one mind" and also allows us to utilize our increasingly finite recovery resources in the best possible way. This would also allow you to train ROP more "by the book" and use the two variety days to maintain your sprints and deadlifts.

3. Incorporate the other movement patterns as warm ups and/or cool downs. Warm up with overhead carries and goblet squats, for example, before you press.

4. Don't modify ROP; design your own program. If you like the HLM and ladders, well those are great so use them as a foundation!

Also start a log and tag me, love to follow along your journey :)
 
@Plowingthrough I really like your idea of heavy deadlifts once a week and swings twice a week, I don't think it's a mistake, I think that would work really well. Excellent idea! Good to see 5 days a week of training is already regular for you so you should be fine on that front as well.

So for you, 2 days of running and 3 days of lifting, would be a great plan. Keeping the goblet squats as the warmup to really get that squat pattern down is also a good idea, along with keeping the carries as a finisher.

As @Coyotl said above too, if you start a training log tag me in it as well, I'd love to keep track of your progress too.
 
I looked at it from the lens of Dan John's 5 fundamental movement patterns and all of them having to be represented in some way in a program. Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Loaded carry. There are some strength standards I'm looking to hit that are also his. A double bodyweight deadlift (which is 200 kg for me), bodyweight overhead press (or half bodyweight each arm which for me is the beast and the pullup being there for balance and awesomeness). There are also squat standards but I have horribly neglected the squat so just getting busy with the goblet squat as a patterning exercise is what I was going to do with that one. The loaded carry I was looking to have represented in the finisher.

So I was trying to tick all the boxes of a solid program according to these guidelines while using some kind of proven loading scheme to get me there. ROP provided one for the presses and the pullups.
As I have said elsewhere, and Pavel was kind enough to quote me on this in one of his books, balance in a lifting program is overrated. Move in lots of different ways, yes, but you don't need to load every possible kind of movement in the weight room. My personal example is squatting - I squat well and don't need to load it up except for the fact that I'm a competing powerlifter, now returning to full meets after a decade or so of specializing only in the deadlift. So I now squat with a bar on my back, but if you can do a goblet squat without a counterbalance weight - a bw-only "goblet" squat, if you will - and you do other things with weights, e.g., you deadlift, you don't need to squat with a heavy barbell. Do practice squatting regularly as a movement pattern.

Goals matter - I'm speaking in general terms. If something about your chosen sport or line of works suggest squatting heavy, then by all means, do it, but don't think that "completeness" needs to be accomplished in the weight room. If doesn't, and attempts at "complete" lifting programs often mean you don't get really good at anything and/or your overtrain. There is great beauty _and_ function in minimalist training.

-S-
 
@Plowingthrough

Welcome and good luck! A couple thoughts:

1. To maximize recovery, consider adding the light and possibly medium pressing days to your sprint days. This will decrease the number of days you have to train, simply adding 5x1 to one of your sprint days represents a minimal investment, and even increasing that to 5x(1,2) would still be fairly minimal. It also utilizes almost completely different sets of muscles as primary movers so there *should* be little interference.

2. Prioritize and execute. It looks like you have 4 Goals + training framework (the 5 patterns). Pick one goal to pursue, and let the others be maintained. You could even operate this seasonally - winter your main goal is pull-ups, spring your main goal is pressing, summer your main goal is sprinting, autumn your main goal is deadlifting. You maintain your skill and capability in the other three in their off season. This allows "one mind" and also allows us to utilize our increasingly finite recovery resources in the best possible way. This would also allow you to train ROP more "by the book" and use the two variety days to maintain your sprints and deadlifts.

3. Incorporate the other movement patterns as warm ups and/or cool downs. Warm up with overhead carries and goblet squats, for example, before you press.

4. Don't modify ROP; design your own program. If you like the HLM and ladders, well those are great so use them as a foundation!

Also start a log and tag me, love to follow along your journey :)
Thanks for the welcome and the reply! I like your thinking.
1. This indeed would be a good idea in terms of recovery but your "one mind" pointer from the point hereafter applies to this for me mentally in this microcycle of a day if you will. I vowed to do some abdominal work in the past after sprint practice but it's always subpar. Before is almost always problematic given the logistics of dinner and time. The most I can muster up is some small corrective/ prehab stuff afterward.
2. I like this insight and I never thought about it like this. I do think I somewhere know I can't progress in everything equally as fast but I always approach a program with the idea of improving in everything (Pullups, presses, deadlifts all going up). I think this way you suggested is indeed a focussed one and a mature long term way of looking at it.
3. Indeed great for keeping patterns in there.
4. You're absolutely right. From the replies I've got I realized it's not ROP. I liked the HLM approach and the ladder sets as well as swings being in there. I'm going to design a program with these things in it.

I have never done an online training log. I'll consider it as a way to get serious about documenting my workouts. I always knew the value of a log but I always slacked on it.
 
As I have said elsewhere, and Pavel was kind enough to quote me on this in one of his books, balance in a lifting program is overrated. Move in lots of different ways, yes, but you don't need to load every possible kind of movement in the weight room. My personal example is squatting - I squat well and don't need to load it up except for the fact that I'm a competing powerlifter, now returning to full meets after a decade or so of specializing only in the deadlift. So I now squat with a bar on my back, but if you can do a goblet squat without a counterbalance weight - a bw-only "goblet" squat, if you will - and you do other things with weights, e.g., you deadlift, you don't need to squat with a heavy barbell. Do practice squatting regularly as a movement pattern.

Goals matter - I'm speaking in general terms. If something about your chosen sport or line of works suggest squatting heavy, then by all means, do it, but don't think that "completeness" needs to be accomplished in the weight room. If doesn't, and attempts at "complete" lifting programs often mean you don't get really good at anything and/or your overtrain. There is great beauty _and_ function in minimalist training.

-S-
It's a great insight. I'm very new to minimalist programs and I've come to a newfound appreciation for movement over muscle after reading a couple of Dan John's books. Your insight of not having to load all of them is something I never considered but I can see how doing everything leads to nothing much. Coming from a typical gym rat background minimalist programs are far from home for me. I did gain quite some muscle but I'm honestly not that strong considering people can press a beast. I have it down in the basement and I can't even imagine pressing it one day. I'm 6'3, 225 so it's not that I'm small either. I will just need some time to adjust to clean simple strength programs that don't have tricep extensions in them etc.
 
I'm new here so I hope I can get some constructive feedback. I recently bought a line of kettlebells 24 to 48 with each 4kg jump in between. I want to start ROP as I eventually want to press the beast, among other goals I have which are deadlifting 200kg and doing a pullup with the beast. I also do running/sprints training twice a week at an athletics club which is Thursday and Sunday with Thursday being more volume and Sunday are hill sprints in the wintertime.

The program I did before was Dan John's template of "The warm-up is the workout" from "Never let go". I deadlifted and bench presses twice a week. I did loaded carries and goblet squat's on all days. I would like some continuity going into this program so I wanted to do the following.

Monday medium, Wednesday Heavy, and Light Friday. Doing pull-ups with the presses. Presses being 24 (about 8-10 RM but I wanna drive the tension techniques home and leave my ego out of it) and pull-ups being bodyweight.

I had a few things I was thinking off

- On Wednesday I want to cut out the swings and do trap bar deadlifts (low volume) and farmer walks with the trapbar after the presses and pullups (3 sets)

- On Monday and Friday I wanted to finish off with a loaded carry and an ab movement, as it has served me so well.

- I wanted to do 15-25 reps of goblet squats in the warm-up, avoiding fatigue, to keep and improve on the pattern.

- I was thinking of only doing a clean at the start of a rung instead of after each press, to save my hamstrings for the sprints. Since I'm already be doing swings twice a week anyway and I don't have a rep goal for clean's and presses.

- I didn't want to do the carries and the ab work on variety days as with my sprints I'm already training 5/7 days each week. I rather take the days off and finish my regular workouts with the carries and abs and do the squats in the warm-up. I felt this might be better for recovery.

Any feedback is welcome!

Hey, not sure how relevant this is to you, but I noticed Pavel wrote about combining ROP and deadlifts.
This is Pavel’s post copied and pasted on here. Sorry I didn’t post a link or something, but just doing this was pushing my technological limits.

Pavel

Founder and Chairman​

Siemen, thank you for your kind words about my books!

Given that your hypertrophy goals are moderate, either PTP or ETK (or a combination—PTP DLs plus ETK ROP KB MPs) will get you where you want to be—provided you eat enough. I would hold off on complexes until you have very good and stable KB technique.

At this point of the game your challenge is stick to one program for months and not getting distracted.
 
Hey, not sure how relevant this is to you, but I noticed Pavel wrote about combining ROP and deadlifts.
This is Pavel’s post copied and pasted on here. Sorry I didn’t post a link or something, but just doing this was pushing my technological limits.

Pavel

Founder and Chairman​

Siemen, thank you for your kind words about my books!

Given that your hypertrophy goals are moderate, either PTP or ETK (or a combination—PTP DLs plus ETK ROP KB MPs) will get you where you want to be—provided you eat enough. I would hold off on complexes until you have very good and stable KB technique.

At this point of the game your challenge is stick to one program for months and not getting distracted.
Thank you and I appreciate you taking the effort to bring this to my attention. I think Pavel would indeed be fine with a program where the swings and snatches go and are replaced with deadlifts. But that wouldn't be ROP but a different program. Still a good one ofcourse.

I do appreciate all input so thanks!
 
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