Welcome To Master Diesel

I am turning 35 this year, which means that I have already joined the team of “big boys” and this fact must be accepted. To be honest, it seems to me that the times of the national junior team, when we trained with great enthusiasm for 10-12 workouts a week, were quite recent – almost yesterday.

    I associate that life stage with hard work: we had 2 workouts from Monday to Friday and 1 workout on Saturday and Sunday. My friend Ihor Shymechko was my training partner: we trained on the same platform and lived in the same room. 

Such a tough or even cruel training schedule for us was the best way of life at that time – we were burning with a new result, proud of the opportunity to train with an adult team: world and European champions and really wanted to become them too.

We have a proverb – “Nothing can last forever.” This is about youthful performance and speed of recovery. With age, anybody needs more time to rest. More preparatory and warm-up exercises are required to “get into working condition.” The volume and intensity of the training work decreases and changes in its structure.

Personally, I don’t see any tragic situation in this. In contrast, I am sincerely happy with the fact that a huge number of men and women are discovering weightlifting as a sport and a form of physical activity after the age of 30, and sometimes even after 45 years.

It makes sense that the construction of their training program should take into account the age aspect: physiology and biochemistry, time opportunities, the level of responsibility and awareness.

When you are 19, the speed of recovery is fantastic – you can devote 100% of your time to training and lifting weights thinking or worrying about anything else. When you are 40, you have already accumulated a “body of experience and injuries”, you have several businesses, your family and even on Saturdays you traditionally go fishing with friends, then weightlifting training CAN’T be a copy of the Chinese national team programming. It is impossible, unnecessary,  and wrong.

Also, the trend of the last 5-7 years has shown an increasing number in amateur online and offline competitions, and the main audience is athletes in the 35+ age category. And the great thing is, the purpose of their participation is not only the desire to test their strengths on the competitive platform, but also have fun in a team of like-minded people and peers. All those brains, as well as communication with my athletes in the #TOROKHTIY_GANG chat, brought me to the idea of creating a competitive Masters program.

Together with my team we chose the right name of the program for a long time, we had so many ideas, but our Master Athlete, an experienced coach, and a member of our testing team Brendan Kennedy from Australia helped with the final decision. He said that the word Diesel is very well associated with something reliable, time-tested, powerful and at the same time quite modern. This is exactly what I wanted to realize in the training program for athletes age 35+.

What is special about the Master Diesel program? And why will it be the best training solution for athletes in the “solid division”?

The methodological design and structured periodization of the program include the following features:

• we optimally reduced the training volume to avoid the risk of overtraining;
• more attention was paid to a special warm-up for each workout to prepare the athlete for the upcoming intense work;
• we minimized the number of traumatic exercises, and also keep only the required amount of load at  90%;
• weeks 1-5 are focused on more strength and fundamental work;
• weeks 6-9 bring the athlete to the peak form and prepare for work in a competitive mode;
• an example of a competitive strategy and the reps order will help the athlete realize their potential.

Master Diesel is a balanced competition prep program for amateur and professional Master division athletes. Also, to all master athletes, who do not compete, this working protocol will be comfortable for weightlifting training. I believe that after completing the training program it is interesting for almost every athlete to do a control max out training in which you can test your strength and enjoy new results in the snatch and clean and jerk.

In conclusion, I want to tell a short story that I am proud of. In 2016, an athlete from Brazil came to our first weightlifting training camp. He said that he has experience as a fitness coach and professional sports experience as a rugby player in the past. At the same time, he had zero weightlifting experience and skills.

And he led me to believe that at his age of 48, he would never be able to do quality OHS again. 4 years have passed, a lot of work has been done and today Celson Cunha is a certified coach of my team and at 52 can elegantly demonstrate the snatch and clean and jerk with excellent technique, speed, flexibility and at the same time on quite solid weights.

Trust me – this person motivates 25-year-old Brazilian athletes, who at my seminars can’t immediately show such a high level of weightlifting performance. You can do weightlifting at any age, the main thing is to do it considering your characteristics and capabilities! 

I wish all Master athletes an effective training process and successful performance on your competition day!

Welcome to MASTER DIESEL!

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