Charlie Francis

I have a feeling by half squat he is referring to 90 degree knee bend. I could be wrong though. James Smith (aka The Thinker) thinks of half squats in this way, and I know he uses a lot of Francis' work.
 
vision1 said:
I have a feeling by half squat he is referring to 90 degree knee bend. I could be wrong though. James Smith (aka The Thinker) thinks of half squats in this way, and I know he uses a lot of Francis' work.
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ive heard that francis athletes rarely squatted to parallel.
 
ghostwipe said:
I've only read part of the second post, but so far that guy sounds likes a pussy who squeals about fear of overtraining and inadequate preparation as keys to success. No offense.
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you also have to understand where hes coming from. its said that it takes 48 hours to recover from cns sessions. overtraining on any particular session can force you to rethink a whole microcyle. also, hes a sprint coach, which means he has to balance cns stimuli like no other. the cns isnt the sole factor in other sports like middle distance, fighting, basketball, or even power sports like football.
 
ghostwipe said:
As for frying CNS, well it's obvious that would be counterproductive, but again, I would argue that a good majority of trainees don't know what their threshold is, and therefore would not recognize where a good point to back off from training would be without indicators of overtraining such as getting sick, disruption of normal sleeping patterns, recurring injuries and stalled gains.
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sure, the majority of regular athletes. elite athletes often can. if they cant, then that is one of the things their coach is there for. there are plenty of ways to monitor overtraining. some are invasive and very expensive. others are simple, like monitoring heart rate. and of course, a coach with a lot of experience with a particular athlete knows what loads the athlete can handle and how the adapt to training. they also have testing for this reason (among others). when i was running track, i knew i was in bad shape if my clean went down. if it went up, i knew i was ready to run a big race.
 
Well, you've got me curious now how many others (besides the usual gym retards) are out there not squatting to parallel.
 
I think the most important thing one has to have in mind when reading this:
This is not written for average weekend warrior.

E.g. for the average guy squatting deep only has advantages. He has the extra time to work on the flexibilty to do this safely. If he gets sore it doesn't matter. He doesn't need to worry about CNS burnout.
A Ben Johnson on the other hand might not have the natural flexibilty to squat ATG. He doesn't need this flexibilty to sprint. So he would have to spend some extra trainingtime to work on a level of flexibility he only needs for the weightroom. If he then changes form his original halfsquats to fullsquats he will get sore. This soreness will then fuck up several following sprintsessions. His whole job as a prosprinter is CNS intensive - he has to worry about not burning out.
MAybe Ben J. would have benefited from bringing his squat deeper or from learning how to clean properly. But your brain only has a limited capacity to learn new things at the same time which is especially true if you wanna take an excellent sprintingtechnique to an extraordinary level.
 
Ben did squat to parallel (I think he was using about 600 for either a double or 6 reps, I forget)

I'm also confident he would have had the flexibility to go deeper considering how much of it you need to sprint (of course it isn't the same type of flexibility though).

Charlie is saying there is no need to squat very deep, but that is assuming you're doing a lot of sprinting which would strengthen the PC.

Lately I've been seeing many different strength coaches saying that half squats are good enough (some say better than full squats). I may test it out next season at a time when my sprinting + plyo volume is high.
 
vision1 said:
Lately I've been seeing many different strength coaches saying that half squats are good enough (some say better than full squats). I may test it out next season at a time when my sprinting + plyo volume is high.
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Good enough for what? I'm not questioning the efficacy of half-squats or saying that full squats are unambiguously better. My point is that a sprinter has a very specific goal: Run faster on the distances he competes in. He usually doesn't give a shit about anything else. Maybe heavy quarter squats + reverse hypers make him run faster. Another guy may fun faster with full front squats + power cleans. Nobody of olympic caliber trains with a cookie-cutter routine out of the Sherdog S&P FAQ.
 
i just wanted to add that charlie has said conflicting things about bens squats. on his 02 forum review we said he only quarter squatted. in a t-nation interview he said he squatted below parallel. charlie is a sprint genius but sometimes you do have to look carefully at what hes saying.
 
Why isn't this stickied?!

A lot of the exact same things were said when I did the USA TF Cert. Good info.
 
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