Sheiko Explained
Boris Sheiko coached the Russian national powerlifting team, and his programs look wrong to anyone raised on Western training. There is no top single, no rep-out, and nothing above eighty five percent for weeks at a time. There is just an enormous amount of squatting and benching.
What makes a program Sheiko
Four things, and they all cut against normal intuition.
- Frequency over intensity. Squat and bench are trained on nearly every day, and bench is usually trained twice in the same session at two different intensities.
- A narrow band. Everything lives between fifty and eighty five percent, in sets of two to five, until the openers at the end of a cycle. There is no grinding anywhere in a cycle.
- Every block is walked up to. A set of five and two sets of four, a step or two below the working weight (fifty and sixty percent in the lighter weeks, up to fifty five and seventy in the heavier ones), precede the working sets every time, which is most of what keeps a day carrying five slots submaximal.
- Small, specific assistance. Good mornings, flyes, triceps, rows, abs. Not whatever is fashionable.
Why so much volume at such modest loads
The bet is that technical skill under a bar is trainable in the same way as any other skill, and that the way to build it is many quality repetitions rather than a few maximal ones. A lifter who has squatted four hundred times this month at seventy five percent has a more reliable squat than one who has squatted forty times at ninety, even if the second one had a better day. It is a coaching philosophy first and a percentage table second.
The numbered routines
Sheiko published specific numbered routines, #29, #30, #31, #37 and many more, each a table of sets written against a particular preparation and a particular lifter classification. They are not interchangeable, and they are not modular. His book Powerlifting: Foundations and Methods, published in English in 2018, is where the method behind them is set out.
What Ægir Iron ships is a four-week preparatory cycle built to that published method. It is not one of the numbered programs from the book. If you are running #29 or #37 out of the book, use New Program / Cycle and then Upload Program instead and the app will follow your table exactly.
Who it is for
| Sheiko | A typical Western intermediate program | |
|---|---|---|
| Days | 3, and each is long | 3 to 4, and each is shorter |
| Top intensity | Rarely above 85 percent | Regular work at 90 percent and up |
| Rep-outs | None | Common, and often the progression driver |
| Suits | A lifter with time, and a technical problem to fix | A lifter with limited time |
Original source
Ægir Iron's template is built from this source. Under it is what the template takes from it.
- Sheiko BI (n.d.). Sheiko powerlifting method and numbered routines. Method; set out in English in Sheiko BI, Powerlifting: Foundations and Methods (2018).The preparatory cycle built to his method: competition lifts nearly every day, 50 to 85 percent of a competition best, sets of two to five, walked-up warm-ups
Running Sheiko in Ægir Iron
Every set is priced off your squat, bench and deadlift, and the bench variations price off your bench, so the cycle needs only three numbers. Nothing is flagged all out, because nothing in a Sheiko cycle has open reps: it ends by testing, not by inferring. If the full volume is more than you can absorb, the reduced option trims a working set from the two build-up weeks, which is the usual first concession for anyone who is not a full-time lifter. It never trims the ramp, because cutting the ramp would make a reduced cycle harder than a full one.