The importance of the specific practice

The simplistic way to look at strength sports is with a focused view on the muscles that perform the desired actions only. With this view, bodybuilding-based programs for powerlifters have been built. We have seen programs loaded with isolated exercises, and analysis of the athlete's sticking points and weaknesses while performing a specific exercise while pointing out the weak muscle, and immediately we hear sentences like "Your glutes are weak, you need to do more hip thrusts" or "You have difficulty locking out on the bench press, it is a weakness in the triceps, you should perform an isolated exercise near the back."

These ideas may help many trainees break down small barriers, but in my opinion they miss the point of what a powerlifting program should look like. Isolation exercises certainly have a place, but they need to come with a more precise training concept.

A powerlifting program planner needs to understand that performing heavy lifting is not just about muscle mass, but rather about a specific skill.

Just as a baseball player is not told that all he has to do is bicep curls for his sport, or a swimmer is told to do only the barbell row, there is no reason to settle for a program full of isolated exercises for powerlifting. A swimmer's primary responsibility is to swim, and a powerlifter's primary responsibility is to practice his competition exercises. There has never been and never will be a more effective exercise for the squat than the squat itself.

There are several ways to be specific, but to understand them we need to understand what powerlifting is.

Powerlifting is a competition that tests the athlete's ability to perform the heaviest single lift possible under the competition's conditions and rules, in the squat, bench, and deadlift exercises.

Competition training should have been doing heavy singles on these exercises as much as possible. The problem is recovery and being able to develop the different skills we will need for that heavy single lift while planning too heavy and too frequently, and that is because practicing certain skills conflict with other skills. Practicing heavy weight for singles will not allow us enough volume to work the muscles, or to practice the technique we want.

Many things have been written as fundamental and important for the powerlifter, including practicing the desired technique, explosiveness and speed, mental skill, which is a complete issue in itself, of course basic muscle mass, and many more...
And many solutions have been written on how to plan the training to give everyone their own space to develop without one principle harming the other at the same time.

I will offer here my perspective on how to minimize the use of isolated exercises and why, and how to give each principle a respectable platform separately. But I will begin by describing, as I understand it, Louis Simmons' perspective on planning (Louis was extremely talented, and I recommend that anyone who wants to better understand his planning read his books. I apologize if I don't present him properly, it's difficult to condense his planning into a few lines).

Louis Simmons recognized the challenges of conflicting principles in planning, and came up with an idea for a plan that combined as many principles as possible. He decided to lift a weight once a week, but as heavy as possible for a single lift or two, and argued that as long as we replaced the exercise itself with another similar exercise