Prilepin’s Table for Powerlifting

Who is Prilepin, What is Prilepin’s Table and what does it have to do with Powerlifting? these are some of the questions you may be asking right now. Keep reading to find the answers to these questions and more.

Who is Prilepin

Alexander Sergeyevitch Prilepin was the head coach of the USSR’s national Olympic Weightlifting team and led the USSR to dominate Olympic Weightlifting during his time as a coach. He introduced significant, unorthodox ideas to improve the training of the national weightlifting team.

Prilepin analyzed the training logs of over  1,000 national and international weightlifting champions to determine the intensity at which an athlete should train, the number of reps that lifter should perform per set, and the number of sets to perform in a given workout. The result was Prilepin’s Table.

Prilepin’s Table

This chart, is the basis of many of the popular training programs used around the world and the table provides for a wide variety of program design and allowing for each of those programs to achieve the desired goal.

Prilepin’s for Powerlifters

For powerlifters, we would all like to be able to maintain the optimal intensity for max 1 RM growth for an entire training cycle (over 80%) however there does need to be variation to avoid injury and to develop bar speed using lower intensity training. Using Prilepin’s Chart, progress can still be achieved towards a bigger max at lower intensity with less injury risk.

A good powerlifting program will use a well developed periodised plan with a range of intensities used while also containing enough volume using Prilepin’s chart as a guideline to achieve success without over training to the extent that frequency and recovery suffers.