Smolov and Smolov Jr Explained
Smolov is four days a week on a single lift, and it has a reputation for being the hardest program in common use. That reputation is accurate. Smolov Jr is the three-week compression of it that most people actually run, very often on the bench.
Where it comes from
Sergey Smolov was a Russian Master of Sport who coached through the 1970s and 80s and built the cycle to add squat strength to Olympic lifters in a very short window. It reached English-language lifters in 2001, when Pavel Tsatsouline published it in Powerlifting USA, and it has been passed around ever since.
The tables
Both versions train four days a week on one lift, with the volume front-loaded and the intensity climbing across the week rather than inside a session.
Junior is three weeks and is what most people mean when they say they are running Smolov. The base mesocycle is the original squat phase of a longer cycle, and it ends by testing rather than by inferring anything.
Why it uses a true max
Smolov predates the training max as a convention, and its numbers assume your genuine best. This matters because running eighty five percent of ninety percent would turn the hardest program in common use into a moderate one, and it would not look broken while it did it. If your saved number is optimistic, this is the program that will find out.
Who should not run it
Almost everybody, most of the time. Ten sets of three at eighty five percent, four days a week, is a volume of heavy squatting that an intermediate can absorb once or twice a year at most, and only when sleep and food are genuinely in order. It is not a program to add to another program, and it is not a program to run while doing anything else demanding. If you want squat progress with a life attached, the Texas Method or 5/3/1 will get you there more slowly and far more reliably.
Original source
Ægir Iron's template is built from this source. Under it is what the template takes from it.
- Smolov S (n.d.). Smolov squat routine (base mesocycle), and the Smolov Jr compression. Soviet coaching method; popularised in English in Powerlifting USA (2001).The base mesocycle (4x9, 5x7, 7x5, 10x3 at 70 to 85 percent of a true 1RM) and Smolov Jr (6x6, 7x5, 8x4, 10x3), with the published pound jumps turned into percentage steps
Running Smolov in Ægir Iron
Smolov publishes its weekly jump in pounds: for Junior, ten in week two and five more in week three, and for base, twenty and then a further ten to fifteen. A template cannot know what is on your bar, so Ægir Iron carries those as the equivalent percentage step for a lifter in the range each variant is aimed at, and says so when you load it. That puts week three's ten sets of three at about ninety one percent on Junior and ninety three on base. Pick the variant and the lift, set that lift's max, and every set is priced and rounded to the plate. Nothing is flagged as an all-out set, because Smolov is prescribed work to complete rather than a rep-out, and the base cycle ends by testing a new max rather than guessing at one.