This is a quick connection I just made about fifteen minutes in the podcast episode of Joe Rogan Experience #1399 Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel explains that the Russians scientists measured the training of several top performers for decades and revealed certain patterns of training (I won’t go in the details) that were found to be much better than mainstream weight training today.
What I found interesting about this also is that we don’t completely understand why the method Pavel describes gives the best results, but it’s what the data showed. The following blog explains this in more detai: https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/4-secrets-of-soviet-weightlifting-as-revealed-by-pavel
“How did the Soviet system evolve to create such great athletes? They measured everything.” – Pavel Tsatsouline
But what I like about this is that it reflects a pattern in the Soviet Union of attempting to apply engineering principles into all aspects of like. The old documentary of Pandora’s Box has an episode on this if you want more details:
Anyhow, the documentary shows the faults of these engineering preoccupation applied to society. In business management there’s the issue of applying linear systems like Six Sigma which works great in a factory setting into other non-linear areas of the company. 3M had done this and abandoned Six Sigma everywhere except for manufacturing. You can find business articles explaining this if you search for “Ambidextrous organization.” But what’s interesting here however is that it shows that the engineering principles from the Soviet Union has amazing results for strength training and created world class athletes.
Pavel explains that the performance was recorded and then a pattern discovered. What superior about the Russian data also is that they had a sample data of decades, unlike the modern studies that get some college students over a period of a few weeks, which means the sample data is vastly superior.
Currently I’m not even 20 mins into the podcast, but I’ll try to do a followup and get the raw data from the Soviets to play around with.