Remembering Charles Poliquin

Thinking about the Strength Sensei's impact on fitness.

I was recently going over some content by the late Charles Poliquin (March 5, 1961 – September 26, 2018). If you’re not familiar with the name, perhaps it’s easiest to say Poliquin might well have been the most famous trainer in the world.

Although most known as a specialist strength coach working with top professional athletes, Poliquin also had some high paying non-athlete clients. This therefore also bestowed him the titles of the ultimate personal trainer, as well as the “trainer’s trainer”.

Born in Canada in 1961, Poliquin was a martial artist first, holding black belts in Karate and later Jiu-Jitsu among others, this providing the inspiration for his later title of Strength Sensei.

While he held a masters degree in exercise physiology, which gave him more of a scientific background, he felt it didn’t directly equip him for what his work became.

Stumbling into strength coaching through training a volleyball player, by 1984 Poliquin was the strength coach for their national Olympic team, by the 1990s he was running his own institutions training top athletes.

Poliquin built an extremely impressive resumé as an elite strength coach training gold medalists and world record holders, way before the internet. Certainly way way before social media influencing and subs and likes became “reality” replacing merit and normative human interaction.

I don’t remember specifically when I first heard about Charles Poliquin. Maybe his name had come up to me years before in the old magazines he also wrote for, maybe a colleague had mentioned him, but certainly from around 2012 onwards I was aware of Poliquin as an online presence, now making content aimed at the wider market, turning his name and considerable reputation into a sprawling empire of supplements, seminars, certification programmes, training systems and licensing deals. (Tip: this is how you make big money in fitness, not as a trainer).

Twelve years back social media wasn’t as extreme as it is now. I used to follow Charles Poliquin on Facebook then—interacting with his posts occasionally, but I suspect his numbers at that time would be relatively—although not absurdly—small compared to today’s infinity-scroll-mind-spam butt-to-the-camera selling-you-to-advertisers fitness influencers, even though Poliquin’s real world achievements far outstripped theirs, and a lot of their ideas probably derived from his.

Interestingly, I came across an interview with Poliquin reflecting his surprise that a random video he posted making breakfast got tons of views, how popular it was and he then realised at this point this was “business”. For the first time, the trainer of champions had apparently stumbled into this unfortunate new world of the race-to-the-bottom; the disproportionate and undeserved success a certain kind of content could be with consumers of social media. In this world how many Olympians you trained didn’t count, but how penetrating a mind virus of hyperpalatable casual slop to passive idiots you could serve up did. Being the businessman he accepted this lamentable discovery.

Back in the real world, Poliquin had designed a number of pieces of equipment naming them after himself. Probably the most famous was the Poliquin bar—rather similar to the Swiss and football bars with neutral or angled grips.

Poliquin bar on the left

But he was also known for:

• Advocacy of bars with a wider than normal grip.

• A variation of the preacher curl

• Dumbbells that spun their weighted ends like the rotating sleeve of the Olympic bar—in this case reducing torque forces on the wrist

• A bar that shifted the centre of mass perpendicularly to the bar itself

• The development of something he called the scapula bench.

And probably a number of others. He also named some variations of exercises after himself.

With the familiar calipers—normally used to measure body fat—or some variant of them, he designed and promoted a system he called BioSignatures he claimed was able to estimate hormone levels (testosterone, estrogen, DHEA, cortisol and growth hormone) by taking fat readings in different areas of the body.

I remember when this was really hot stuff, when young trainers, awed by Poliquin’s stature in the industry, were serious about getting these Poliquin qualifications, having to navigate a waiting list (so it was claimed).

At the time it seemed a little hyped to me. With benefit of hindsight, although undoubtedly innovative in some ways, I imagine the practice straddled something between proto-science and marketing, coming with the upsell to the client for supplements to “correct” any hormonal imbalances. A blood test is a lot more reliable and cheaper.

Meanwhile coaches were required to retake his BioSignature qualifications once a year, which no doubt they had to pay for the privilege for.

And look, sure there’s always things to be learned from many different angles, yet these proprietary qualifications that have become all too common in the fitness and health industries—usually branded around a particular personality or leader figure—I’m far more chilly towards today.

However, despite the sales, claims and possibly gimmicks that later played a role around him, I really did like Charles Poliquin. A commenter on T-Nation in 2003—a lot earlier than I was following him—said on this,

Charles’ work is well done. You can’t blame the guy for trying to make some money. He’s put in the time and sacrifices to get where he is at - let the man try to reap some rewards without everyone jumping on his case.

It’s just that writing this article now, going over his content today, I wanted to focus on his core pillars of strength training. I want to say “here is what Charles Poliquin believed”, “this is what we can learn” and “this is what made him successful as a strength coach”. But it’s not a simple thing to do.

In fact I’m not sure what a great compendium of his expert knowledge even is.

Authoring eight books, his most famous, Poliquin Principles from 1997, is clearly aimed at the bodybuilding market at that time, a market Poliquin also wrote for in numerous magazine articles.

While it’s mostly solid information with good observations and ideas that I recognise, it’s not clearly laid out or well structured. The “killer information” you’re actually looking for from this world expert is painfully cryptically buried in different chapters, not well emphasised, never summarised, always remaining overly spread out—a bit here, a bit there. The book, in style, reads like one of those training articles from the old Flex magazine, which was probably its intention.

It’s unlikely that someone new would be able to bring all the pieces together to form a greater understanding, as the principles are never actually spelled out.

Mentioning the book, a T-Nation review of Poliquin’s impact said,

By today’s standards, the book is amateurish in construction, with lackluster photos and layout. [ ] Still, it changed the face of weightlifting and bodybuilding. Much of the shit you do today is because of what Charles wrote in that book.

Some things in the book also date it hard, like for example when he claimed to be taking 40g of creatine a day. On random days I use any creatine product today, I take about 1-2, but back then people did go crazy on loading creatine. He also talks enthusiastically about HMB—a metabolite of the amino acid leucine, a novel supplement at the time, that didn’t turn out to be much use at all.

I now suspect the better book by Poliquin is Modern Trends In Strength Training, but at $123.00 a copy on Amazon, and no PDF available out there, I haven’t yet found out.

This difficult-to-pin-down problem , along with quite speculative, exotic, even extreme ideas about supplementation, diet and exercise itself at times, would also carry over to his interviews and presentations.

We should be interested to hear speculative, creative, forward thinking proposals from one of the world’s top coaches, and some I feel are very strong. For example, when Poliquin said specific foods may or may not be a good fit for you as an individual. Yes. And I instinctively I have no disagreement with the notion of “earning your carbs”—where body composition is a paramount goal.

But still in later promotional work he’d often mention some one off study he saw and then make a massive extrapolation from it and he had a tendency to make these giant leaps. Hypothesizing patterns or plausible mechanisms from sparse data is the sign of a great mind—which undoubtably Poliquin had—but they may or may not turn out to be correct or the complete picture.

Poliquin would say things like he was “against sustained cardio (like hardcore runners do) because it damaged the brain, gonads and immune system because of oxidative stress”. My understanding is it’s more protective against the diseases of cognitive decline, but anything in excess could bring other problems I guess.

His remedy included some of his own branded supplements. Certainly, Poliquin wasn’t that interested in cardio, even though many of his own athletes would have been heavily cardio-weighted. He understood, but didn’t care, about it.

We should also consider that at that point in time cardio was out of fashion to most gym heads, other than super slow muscle sparing cardio to burn fat. Then, muscle was still the overwhelming thing that “the gym” meant. You came to the gym to get jacked or you got lost. This changed only a few years later due to new market pressures. So I wonder if this kind of statement is as much a product of its time—the fitness of its time—than a claim of Poliquin’s we should worry about.

Indeed, it’s difficult for a lot of people to understand that what fitness “means” morphs over time as new commercial forces and incentives fight for dominance in the marketplace. Unthinkable as it is to most of you, there may come a time when today’s talking heads—who seem to have all the answers about VO2 max and longevity and the science of how many sets you should do now—become dated dusty old curiosities tomorrow.

Poliquin would also advocate giving overweight trainees up to 60g of fish oil a day, which reminded me of Vince Gironda and his 100 liver tablets per day.

Some of Poliquin’s stuff may even seem to mirror today’s fitness influencing; novel, shocking, sometimes extreme ideas, but with a thread of plausibility; bold claims that will get attention and generate controversy and publicity. He was actually quite critical of that stuff with others and I tend to think he saw positive effects on athletes he trained with these ideas. Perhaps he also felt it important to stay ahead of the game. Information wasn’t a secret anymore. By 2017 Poliquin had also aligned himself with the self-help market and high profile life coach marketers, endorsing their products.

What I’m trying to say respectfully here, is the further we get away from strength, some of Poliquin’s more auxiliary ideas around diet/fitness/well being have probably aged better than others. Even at the time some people felt they were being fed something not entirely real, as you can see from these comments on reddit:

“Anything outside of The Poliquin Principles, you might as well just forget about.”

“His programs are cool. It's just he likes to make outrageous claims about gains made from his advice. "I took x out of his diet and replaced it with y and he gained 10 pounds in z days!!!!". He is, evangelical about certain things.”

His more aggressive marketing and sales deployments and claims—this fitness empire he created of stuff—based off of his formidable reputation as a strength coach may have started to get in the way of the latter at times, making it harder to separate one thing from the other, especially to the novice. Reviewing this material now, in the cold blue light of hindsight things may look rather different—have a different weight—to how they appeared at the time, and Poliquin’s marketing online empire, once a great colossus straddling the fitness industry, now makes me think of Shelley’s Ozymandius.

The original websites and branding which use his name—which for some reason he separated himself from directly in 2013—are now web museums frozen in time. Links to the supplement store and lists of approved coaches are gone.

However his daughter has carried on the Strength Sensei branding which has a more modern site, and it does have some good content. It’s not often updated, and there are some missing links. There’s only two approved coaches listed there, only one is listed to have the Poliquin certificates.

Once the cutting edge of fitness innovation, now who practices Biosignatures anymore ?

Whether he was directly involved with it or not, Poliquin himself held all of this branding and marketing empire together.

But I want to focus on the hard stuff and Poliquin’s first great legacy must surely be what he built his reputation on: strength, and his immense track record with athletes. His early drive and thirst for knowledge, reading Russian books translated into German to search for information, piecing together a picture out of fragments, he proved he was innovative and serious, highly intelligent and managed to sift out a vast prospectus that was very effective.

The second is his “method”, which I now don’t actually think existed in the way people might assume.

By the time Poliquin passed away, his knowledge, practices and insight were obviously extremely developed, spanning a number of complexities, but could not be well condensed down into one convenient “method” you could just explain to those outside his circle, or even to those within it it turns out. A repeated observation with Poliquin, is that it was extremely hard to pin down what his overarching working pathway even was—especially into some accessible form. As this writer who knew him wrote on T-Nation:

Charles Poliquin is a legend. His training principles work. But they can be tough to wrap your head around.

One might, like a proto-Poliquin himself, choose to piece together fragments from here and there, hoping to reassemble them into some kind of order, and people have tried to do this, but I have not seen any kind of really coherent A→B presentation of his ideas.

My general understanding is this (and all I can do is compile another list):

Unless he left something very specific unpublished, there isn’t a “Poliquin method” that I could find, although people who did his certificates must have been imparted with some kind of process. He was more a giant container of knowledge having different specific applications in different contexts with different probabilities of success.

Poliquin was very interested in research on strength right from the outset —beginning with German work, and that interest continued throughout his career. Through absorbing a ton of different research—with his sufficient science background to point him in the right direction—he converted it into an unusually deep, applied practical understanding of the field, and according to those who knew him he was always looking for the next advantage:

Not only would Poliquin travel the world to attend seminars, but he would also seek out experts in fields he was interested in and offer to pay them for personal consultations. For example, twice I recommended he consult with athletic fitness experts I knew, and he flew to both ends of the United States to see and learn from them. I should also note that Poliquin was also a voracious reader, often devoting one full day each week to study (advice he gives to his students, explaining that “Learners are earners!) [ ]

He also hired graduate students and colleagues to collect research papers, and he would read them during long flights. I met one of these helpers at an NSCA convention, and he showed me a foot-high stack of documents he collected for Poliquin.

At the same time Poliquin wasn’t beholden to science and theory, what mattered was practice, as he says in this interview,

Then there's a peer reviewed crowd who never produced anybody and only wait till it's published in Science with 60 papers. I wouldn't trust those guys either because they don't have any clinical experience. It's like basically consulting a virgin sex therapist.

Every trainer is looking for progress. In looking for progress, Poliquin understood very well there isn’t a one-size-fits-all programme for it.

Where someone is in their programme matters enormously. Also genetic differences matter greatly in how someone should be trained to maximize their potential. Poliquin was very aware of, and interested in these differences and how they manifest, sometimes later abstracting them up into higher level concepts, that people could be categorized by their “neurotransmitter dominance” as he saw it.

Poliquin notes there are some people who learn very quickly, and some who need to repeat a movement many times to get it or benefit from it. (I’m the latter)

He understood working clients most effectively within their own individual recovery windows was very important.

Poliquin became rather associated with German Volume training (10 sets of 10 per exercise) probably because it was an early influence and did help shape his ideas, but I’m not sure he was “about” GVT. He understood there was a kind of necessary effective working volume per session—and was extremely critical of Mike Mentzer’s minimalist ideas on volume and frequency.

Rather he was also an advocate of optimal frequency per week, which he typically put at 4 sessions, meaning 4 hours training per week—the fourth hour making a considerable positive difference over 3. But never more than one hour per session.

Poliquin would also talk about the “70% Rule”; what works 70% of the time, and he felt changing up a workout programme regularly was generally essential for progress. He said,

The most important rule is this: a program is only a good as the time it takes you to adapt to it.

There’s some debate today about how frequently things should change—especially for more average trainees, but Poliquin’s model of periodisation (a sequenced change in training, often with regard loading/deloading phases—with some longer goal in mind) seemed to be towards far shorter time scales than his early rivals as I understand it and remained that way.

He understood well there was no “magic routine”. A point I keep reiterating here.

He believed things need to increase in complexity with progression, saying,

Strength training is like learning a foreign language, it needs to get more complex over time.

He would say what got you from your 200lb to 400lb lift won’t now get you from 400lb to 550lb. That things have to become more complex.

He believed in mixing up different rep ranges for different benefits and was very interested in different tempos (speeds of different parts of the movement) for maximizing potential.

He wasn’t always constrained by percentages (of 1 rep maximums), and felt they may be flawed in practice for different reasons.

At some point early on, Poliquin became very interested in specific grip nuances and how to use them in training, including the use of wider grips. He was also interested in maximizing the benefits of the resistance curve of a particular piece of equipment. If it didn’t have the right curve, he would invent one that did.

He seemed to have different views on rest periods between sets at different points. In Poliquin Principles he talks about varying rest intervals between full rest and inadequate rest to maximize hypertrophy.

He often talked about Time Under Tension— the duration that a muscle is under load during a set, emphasising the importance of how long a muscle is actively engaged while lifting weights, rather than just the number of repetitions or the amount of weight lifted.

He didn’t have “one training plan”, he had a great variety of different training structures to go to as he needed them.

He would talk about the Yin and Yang Principle: training opposing muscle groups together essentially, which always seemed natural to me and became popular. He’d also apply the idea of Yin and Yang to neurotransmitters and supplements and I personally think this is a fine idea and I’ve often thought there many things in fitness that could be considered Yin and Yang.

Poliquin was also highly proficient in MSK assessment, athlete physiology tests, rehab practice and hands on techniques with his athletes—some of these deriving from his experience as practitioner of ART (Active Release Therapy).

Poliquin may have been one of the first in the West to put so much research on the topic together in this way in practice, more or less on his own, and effectively, with top athletes to boot. He may well have the first professional strength coach, defined as such. Sure, there must have been some preexisting formal general interest in the field; the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) had been around since 1978, but he was successful and innovative at a time in history when it wasn’t nearly as developed and saturated as it is today, making a considerable impact on the field itself.

With an unusually heavy technical fluency—with a tendency for others viewing it to got lost in the woods—Poliquin knew exactly what he was doing and could adapt all his knowledge per athlete.

It’s also just an interesting fact to me that the time Poliquin was working with Olympic athletes, the “outside” personal training industry didn’t really even exist, at best it was embryonic in America, it wasn’t even until the 1990s that it started to have formal qualifications. In the late 1980s Poliquin was already writing highly detailed articles for the NSCA’s journal. How much of Poliquin’s work directly influenced the curriculum for trainers I don’t know—he’s mentioned twice in my old course books I found out (so is McGill)—but indirectly Poliquin’s influence could be considerable.

Tragically, In September 2018, Charles Poliquin passed away at the young age of 57 due to a heart attack. I remember at the time and it was extremely sad news. Although I wasn’t following him closely at that moment, it sure affected me. The world’s most famous trainer had gone. It made me think a lot about all of this.

It’s said his family had a history with a particular heart condition, and he’d already had prior trouble and had an open heart surgery at the age of 30. He later claimed he was misdiagnosed, that it was because of lead poisoning, and had the surgery unnecessarily. Hard to understand what exactly happened.

The 2021 article on T-Nation, by his friend, sought to assess how Charles Poliquin’s ideas hold up today,

For those of you new to the iron sports or for whom weightlifting history isn’t your thing, Charles was one of the first strength coaches to bring science to the game. Hell, he was one of the first strength coaches to be CALLED a strength coach, at least outside of the guys who wore baggy sweatpants and carried around clipboards when they were counting out reps for NFL or college football players.

Concluding with,

First, let’s dispense for the looming question: What right does a schnorrer like me have in evaluating the great Poliquin? Fair point, but I knew Charles pretty well, and for a while back in the late 90’s, I was Sherman to his Mr. Peabody and trained with him a number of times.

That being said, most of what Charles wrote back then, by and large, still holds up just fine. But if he were here, I’d tell him that such exacting specificity works for cooking pasta, but not so much for humans. Then he’d smite me and make fun of my skinny arms, after which he’d agree with me.

After all, he was a scientist at heart and scientists continually modify their theories as new research is revealed.

---

Contact me for professional home personal training London, or Skype/Zoom rest of the world using this button:

Or if you liked this:

or send me your bitcoins: bc1qy2gdzdqxeunvex3875kf6nuguvxrvmmhcfyz3k