No, Sheik-‘O’ isn’t a Middle Eastern rapper or a manufacturer of weight plates and barbells – that’s Eleiko. Sheiko is the surname of a powerlift coach and the program he developed. And unlike Eleiko, he is not Finnish, but Russian.

Boris Sheiko, like Sergei Smolov of the Smolov Squat Program, is a Russian. We make this comparison for a reason, because just like Smolov, Sheiko is an unforgiving program, although that is not due to the training intensity, but because of the training frequency and the almost idiotic training volume that you get to choose per training and week.

The basic ingredients of Sheiko are:

• in principle three training days: Monday, Wednesday and Friday – (advanced) advanced training four or even five times a week;
• focus on the three powerlifts: squat, bench press, deadlift;
• bench press on all three days; squats on Monday and Friday, deadlifts on Wednesday;
• often twice the same exercises in one workout.

That sounds heavy and let’s be honest: it is! You can somewhat compare Sheiko, in terms of volume, to combining the Smolov squat program and Smolov jr. in one cycle. And then deadlifts! It’s the absurdly high training volume that makes Sheiko so heavy. And at the same time so easy. That sounds contradictory, but we will soon resolve that contradiction. In any case, the program is based on percentages of your 1RM, so always tailored to your personal capacity.

Sheiko is not actually a training program, but a training method or system. This method was developed by Boris Sheiko, who has been training the Russian powerlifting team, which is among the best in the world, since the early 90s. The program does not take weeks or months, but years of dedication and can turn any novice into an ‘elite’ powerlifter in just a few years. If you dedicate your life to it, that’s called. But even with a little less dedication you can still get damn strong!

“Elite” means that, depending on your weight class, you have a certain total on the three competition lifts: the squat, bench press and deadlift. For someone who competes in the 90 kg class, “elite” means he has a total of 1,012 lbs, or 678 kg. A whole lot, because that would mean that you, for example, 240 kg squat, 180 kg bench press and 258 kg deadlift.

To keep Sheiko ‘doable’, the training intensity is not too bad – ‘against’, some might say. Where during Smolov’s intensive macro cycle you train at your maximum for about half of your time, with Sheiko you train about 70% of your maximum. You rarely exceed 80% and in principle never train to momentary muscle exhaustion (muscle failure). Much needed concessions on intensity to make the volume portable.

70% and even 80% are pretty much warm-up sets in the Smolov squat program, so that would be a cinch, right? After all, in week 3 of Smolov, we had done five more sets of reps with 90% of our maximum, being 170 kg. And Sheiko told us to do three sets of five with 150kg – a conservative 80% of our 190kg maximum – in week 1. We had to laugh about it a bit: 3x5x150 kg. And this is supposed to be a powerlifting program? 3x5x150 kg is ‘peanuts’ compared to 5x5x170 kg.

The difference is that with Smolov this was practically our entire workout, while with Sheiko we were supposed to squat, bench press and then squat again! What? Idiocy! On a stick!

Well, we were already used to bench press after squatting; after all, we had combined Smolov with Smolov jr. But this was in fact Smolov, Smolov jr and then again Smolov… Monstrous. Especially since we were also expected to deadlift on Wednesday and Saturday after having squatted on Friday. And that with an even sore lower back from the week before. And not only deadlifts, but also ‘pause deadlifts’: deadlifts to your knees, pause and then put the weight back instead of stretching.

Well, we have to note that we followed the 4-day variant of Sheiko. The 3-day variant for beginners is a bit more forgiving.

With a program like Sheiko, like Smolov, it might be a good idea not to look forward a day or even a set in the training program. That is perhaps even more true for Sheiko than for Smolov. If you look at Friday anyway, you will see that this training is a kind of inside out version of your Monday training; only instead of doing two squats, you now do two bench presses, punctuated by squats.

Our first week of a nine-week advanced CMS/MS Sheiko cycle looked like this:

Monday
Squat
– 1x5x50%*
– 2x4x60%
– 2x3x70%
– 2x5x80%
* We use Western, not Russian notation; So 1×5 means ‘one set of five reps’. The percentage refers to your 1RM.

Bench press
– 1x5x50%
– 1x4x60%
– 2x3x70%
– 6x3x80%

Squat
– 1x5x50%
– 1x5x60%
– 5x4x70%
(Plus some additional exercises: lateral raises 5×10 and sit-ups 3×10)

Wednesday
Deadlift
– 1x4x50%
– 1x4x60%
– 2x3x70%
– 5x3x80%

Bench press
– 1x6x50%
– 1x5x60%
– 2x4x70%
– 2x3x75%
– 2x2x80%
– 2x3x75%
– 1x4x70%
– 1x6x65%
– 1x8x60%
– 1x10x50%

(Pause) deadlifts (up to knees)
– 1x4x50%
– 1x4x60%
– 5x4x70%
(Plus some additional exercises: lateral raises 5×10 and good mornings 5×5)

Friday
Bench press
– 1x5x50%
– 1x4x60%
– 2x3x70%
– 5x3x80%

Squat
– 1x5x50%
– 1x4x60%
– 2x3x70%
– 6x3x80%

Bench press
– 1x5x55%
– 1x4x65%
– 5x3x75%
(Plus some auxiliary exercises: lateral raises 5×10 and sit-ups 3×10)

Saturday
Deadlift from elevation (so you are on a raise, e.g. two or three 20kg checkers)
– 2x3x50%
– 4x2x60%

Rack pulls (deadlifts from knee height, e.g. from the safety bars in a power cage)
– 1x4x60%
– 2x4x70%
– 2x3x80%
– 4x2x90%
(Plus some additional exercises: dips 5×6 and good mornings 5×5)

Please note: this is a program, not the Sheiko program. Just as Sheiko is a system rather than a concrete program. There are many different Sheiko programs and which program is right for you will depend on your ‘numbers’, ie your body weight and total on the three main lifts.

With a body weight of 198 lbs (at the time) and a total of just over 1,400 lbs, we fall into the ‘CMS’ category and followed the 9 week CMS/MS cycle, which consists of four workouts per week. MCIS lifters even train five times a week.

A table to determine your level can be found here.

Good. Back to ‘our’ 9 week cycle…

By summing up the first week like this, you can immediately see where the ‘pain’ lies with Sheiko: not in the training intensity, but in the high training frequency and the (super) high training volume. Exemplary for this are the 14(!) sets of bench presses on Wednesday, for a total of 63 repetitions (which in itself is not too bad). But don’t forget that you still have to deadlift for a while before and after!

Sheiko is in fact at odds with all the rules that normally apply to a powerlifter training program. The volume is ‘actually’ too high and the weights ‘actually’ too low. But what does this ‘actually’ – synonymous with ‘factual’ – mean when the results disprove the facts?

The fact is that powerlifting is not an exact science. Or actually again. 2+2 is 4, but so is 1+3. This also applies to powerlifting and strength sports in general: several roads lead to Rome. You can achieve the same result in different ways. Different ‘comparisons’ give the same results and whatever a program looks like, in powerlifting and strength sports in general there are ‘only’ three variables in the equation: training frequency, training volume and training intensity, i.e. how often, a lot and heavy (‘intensive’). ) you train. Okay, that second variable is partly determined by the first, but let’s not argue over details.

Basically, what Sheiko is doing is putting all powerlifting “mathematicians” on the block by shifting the emphasis from training intensity to training volume (including the determinant ‘frequency’). In this way you actually get a strange equation for powerlifting concepts, but one that apparently gives the same result as the better-known equations.

It has been or is believed that to boost your 1RM (the weight with which you cannot perform more than one repetition), you must train close to these percentages, so in the range of 85-95%. In fact, Sheiko proves that even training frequently and with low repetitions in the 60-80% range, the traditional range for bodybuilders, has a huge carryover on your 1RM. To understand how this is possible, we need to make the transition from mathematics to physics. To the formula force = mass x acceleration. Basic classical mechanics.

Powerlifting is the ultimate strength sport and for decades the emphasis in powerlift training was on mass, the first part of the equation. Until Louie Simmons of Westside Barbell discovered that you also have to pay attention to the speed, or more precisely, the acceleration. This is how the so-called speed days arose, training days on which you train with light weights and you focus on maximum acceleration and the speed of the weight. Because your speed decreases after a few repetitions, that amounts to a lot of sets (8-10) of few (2-4) repetitions with a low weight (<60% of your maximum).

Simmons revolutionized the world of powerlifting with his conjugate system, which has training days where you focus on maximum weight (max(imum) effort days) and training days where you focus on speed (dynamic days or speed days). Just about every powerlifting program ‘invented’ after the Simmons period is based on the conjugate system. That goes for Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 and Brandon Lilly’s Cube Method. Both are forms of conjugate training and both Jim and Brandon are indebted to Simmons. Sheiko not so much…

Where Louie Simmons also has ‘just’ tough days in his method, Sheiko doesn’t. Sheiko actually consists of many sets of relatively few repetitions with a relatively low weight. That low intensity allows you to train often, and by doing something often, you get better at something. That training frequency, short rest periods and cumulative fatigue, is the weight component of the program, so to speak, not the percentages and weights you use. Just think about that for a moment…

If you take the stage on race day, and there’s a 200kg deadlift waiting for you, you’ve never trained more than three reps with 170kg (85% of that) in your workout… Something that would normally translate to a 1RM of only 180 kg. Wonderful, isn’t it? That can only be due to one thing in the equation: speed. And in the ‘mathematical’ equation, training volume, not intensity.

Sheiko can therefore be briefly summarized as a program in which you lift very often, very quickly. Is it that simple? Basically yes. Although the elaboration of that basic rule is of course a lot more difficult, as you can see from the program. The exact numbers of sets, reps and percentages are not chosen randomly, of course. There has komradski Boris thought about it.

Sheiko is a relief if you continuously train intensively as a powerlifter. Is it the ultimate training method? No, because it doesn’t exist. It is one of the ultimate training methods. One worth trying if you’re serious about getting stronger for fun or competitively.