And for good reason! His "progress" was immense when he undertook this style of training. He crushed a 405lbs squat after just a few weeks of Smolov Junior coupled with two weeks of high frequency squat work up to heavy singles immediately following the Smolov Junior protocol. 

During that time period of only a few weeks in totality he gained something like 40-50lbs on his squat one rep max. So it was basically like 50 pounds in a month, and honestly that that's not all that uncommon or crazy of a thing to have happen.

I have done that myself multiple times, on multiple occasions (just in myself), and I have seen similar things happen many other times in other people as well when using these same protocols over the years.

So after a few weeks of high frequency, high intensity squat training (and some immense and rapid progress) to go along with it, my client stopped training this way, as you have to do at some point because it's basically unsustainable.

Then just a few short weeks later his squat had dropped right back down to where it was before he had started the Smolov Junior program.

Now, the very first time I saw something like this happen was many years ago, something like 2008-2009. It was when I was first getting started with strength training programming. I wasn't doing it professionally or anything like that, I was just a guy who lifted, and a friend of mine ran the full Smolov Squat Program (not the Junior version) for his squat and he went from a 1RM of something like 230-240lbs all the way up to a 315lbs single at the end of the Smolov Squat Program.

I can still see him in my head hitting that 3 plate squat that I honestly didn't think he had a snowball's chance in HELL of being able to hit. So it was just crazy gains, man, really. Afterward the dude went back to normal squat training following his massive Smolov PR. So now he was going to squat just once or twice per week or whatever, but basically just something more sustainable with tamer levels of volume and tamer levels of intensity.

And a few weeks later he got absolutely stapled by 250lbs. It was the first rep of what was supposed to be a set of like 3-5 reps. This happened roughly two weeks after hitting 315lbs. For those at home who aren't doing quick math that is roughly a 20% drop-off in squat 1RM in 14 days. I am not exaggerating or making this up. Honestly it's pretty maddening to witness something like that.

So, these are examples of really high peaks. These guys had a baseline level that they had started at, and then they implemented what is essentially a highly specific, extreme, and unsustainable training method to reach a PR goal weight that they wanted to lift.  But then after returning back to earth, as we're all forced to do eventually, and being forced to perform more sustainable training once again, the peak dissipates and then their strength it dips back down.

Essentially it goes back to normal.

This is what frequency does. This is what peaking does (or what it can do) when executed well. And these methods are fun to tinker with and pontificate on, and fun to use to win competitions or hit lifetime goal numbers.

But the fact of the matter is that they aren't really methods of training. They are just methods of maximizing specific skill. These guys didn't actually get stronger; they didn't actually build muscle or enhance their ability to produce force. They simply became really, really good at learning how to optimally display the force that they could already produce in a specific movement pattern

But they did not truly get stronger because if they did then they would have retained most of (or at least even some of) those gains because true strength is an enduring quality. It can last for months and years with little maintenance once it's built because the neural and structural changes required by the body to build it are so intensive that once they're completed the body does not want to revert back to the way it was before because the organism must literally evolve on an individual level in order for these changes to occur in the first place.

So the peak is really an illusion. It's a transient state; it's fleeting. That's not to say that achieving it is easy by any stretch of the imagination because, in reality, it can be some of the hardest work you'll ever do. But if you're doing it you better damn well know WHY you're doing it. You aren't doing it to create gains. You are doing it to create a temporary state of maximal performance hopefully for a specific reason.

So now this leads us to the base. The base, on the other hand, is what can you do today, and what can you do tomorrow, and what can you do the day after that? It is the "what are you capable of all the time?" What are you capable of at a moment's notice? What are you capable of when you didn't sleep all that great? What are you capable of when you're going through it with your spouse? Or when work is stressful? Or when your dog just died? Or when the sun and the moon and the stars just aren't quite lining up right and everything in your life is shitty and nothing is going quite right. What are you capable of then?

That is your base. It's the everyday. It is the floor that your body considers acceptable to lie on when everything is going just kind of so so, or maybe even when everything is going kind of shitty. But it's definitely not your peak state. It's absolutely not your ceiling. 

In my opinion, the base is actually the most important thing of all.

The peak is nice, the peak is fun, the peak is cool, but it's really just the cherry on top. The base is the sundae, the base is the steak and the potatoes and the veggies, and it's the whole goddamn meal. It is everything, and the peak is an afterthought because the entire utility and value of the peak is contingent wholly upon the base.

The higher you push the floor then by necessity the higher the ceiling has to be. If you can make your base what your peak used to be then your peak will be even higher. And the more well-rounded that you can make yourself in this process, the more different types of things you can become strong at, the higher and higher you can keep stacking on top of it. The wider the base the higher the peak! It's literally a pyramid.

If you're good at everything you will be bad at nothing. That sounds so simple as to almost be meaningless, but when you think about it from this perspective of the base being the king you realize it actually means everything. If you're only good at low bar squats with a straight bar then that is all you're good at. But if you are good at squatting with any implement to any depth with any bar positioning then you're just a good squatter, and you are a good low bar squatter by default!

The real difference here is that peak training by its nature is unsustainable. It will lead to burnout, and stagnation, and inevitably injury if you push it too hard or too far or for too long. It also acclimates your body to a higher workload as its maintenance point, typically to an overly specific type of training stimulus. The minimum amount of work required to maintain the gains that you already have becomes that much higher.

That is NOT what you want! Because then you simply can't make progress anymore. You want your maintenance point to be the lowest amount of work possible. You want to be able to do the least amount of work you can do while still having your body retain all of its gains. That way when you really want to make rapid progress all you have to do is increase the workload slightly, and since base training is more moderate by nature that's an easy place to pick up from and improve upon.

This also makes it much more long term sustainable in general, and as a result the gains acquired this way are much truer and more stable as well. You can take time off, you can slack off, you can cut your workload way the F down and your gains will not go anywhere if you have a strong and solid base. So focus on the base first and foremost! Be smart about your training and approach it with a long-term perspective in mind.

Keep training hard guys.