In the dusty, beige, and completely silent training hall of the Bulgarian weightlifting federation, Zlatan Vanev approaches a barbell loaded with 210 kilograms, just a bit more than 460 pounds. Over the last 20 minutes, Vanev had tried four separate times to lift it overhead.
Howling, Vanev tries again and fails again. He wanders off, swearing to himself. A few days later, Vanev won the 77-kilogram division at the 1998 World Weightlifting Championships. The runner-up (and second-strongest man in the world that year) was Petar Tanev, another Bulgarian.
For professional athletes in almost every sport, the days leading up to a big competition are meant for recovery and recuperation. This is particularly true for weightlifters, who muster extraordinary strength and power to heave hundreds of pounds overhead in the blink of an eye.
But the Bulgarians had a different approach to strength training: One that made them the most dominant national team for nearly 20 years, producing multiple Olympic champions and world record holders.
Decades later, the legacy of the infamous “Bulgarian Method” still stands, long after Vanev and his countrymen, some of the most successful weightlifters in history, have vanished from the record books.
The “Unbelievable Bulgarians”
Vanev was an accomplished weightlifter by any metric, having won the World Weightlifting Championships for Bulgaria twice during his career (1998, 2002). Fans of the sport know his name, but rarely, if ever, would Vanev be considered among the greatest Olympic lifters of all time.
Such was the case for most of the Bulgarian athletes. The reputation of the “unbelievable” Bulgarian weightlifting team as a whole precedes the athletes themselves — barring a handful of exceptions.
Many of the most prolific weightlifting feats in history belong to Bulgarian athletes, such as Blagoy Blagoev’s legendary 195.5-kilogram snatch at 90 kilograms of body weight. Kilo-for-kilo, it is considered the single most impressive snatch of all time and held up until that weight class was dissolved years later.
Naim Süleymanoğlu, the “Pocket Hercules,” is the strongest (in relative terms) Olympic lifter ever. Süleymanoğlu began his weightlifting training in Bulgaria and went on to win seven World titles, three Olympic gold medals, and to clean & jerk well over three times his own weight.
Between 1972 and 2012, the Bulgarian Method produced 37 Olympic medals. Most came from the various men’s weight categories, as women’s weightlifting wasn’t hosted at the Olympic Games until 2000.
Bulgarian weightlifters also won medals at every single Games held over four decades’ time, barring two: Bulgaria was one of many in Eastern Europe to boycott the ‘84 games in Los Angeles during the Cold War. And weeks before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team after 11 of its athletes had been caught using performance-enhancing drugs. (1)
Weightlifting has long contended with rampant steroid usage at the international level. The successes of the Bulgarians were, in many ways, contingent upon the use, and abuse, of anabolic steroids and similar compounds.
In the eyes of Ivan Abadjiev, head coach of the Bulgarian weightlifting team from 1968 to 2000 and mastermind behind the Method, weightlifting wasn’t a sport. The lifting platform was a warzone, and wars are won by any means necessary.
Inside the Bulgarian Method of Weightlifting
“Abadjiev was the architect of the whole Bulgarian system from the beginning. He saw it as a way for Bulgaria to increase its international prestige. It was a business, and he had full bureaucratic support from the Bulgarian government behind him,” Max Aita tells BarBend. Aita is a weightlifting coach, commentator, and former competitor who trained under Abadjiev for a time.
According to Aita, the nuts and bolts of the Bulgarian machine were quite simple. Abadjiev’s weightlifters trained two or three times per day, six or seven days a week, and utilized only six exercises in total:
- Snatch
- Clean & Jerk
- Power Snatch
- Power Clean
- Front Squat
- Back Squat
During each session, Bulgarian weightlifters would perform two or three of these movements at a time, most often the snatch, clean & jerk, and front squat.
High exercise frequency and various accessory movements are staples of Olympic-style strength training, but the Bulgarian Method differed in its approach to workout intensity. Athletes would perform a very brief warm-up protocol, rapidly work up to maximal-effort weights, and attempt them over, and over, and over.
In a 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Weightlifting House, retired Bulgarian weightlifter Stefan Botev described his daily routine during his tenure under Abadjiev. Botev set seven world records during his career, won the World Championships twice, and is a member of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) Hall of Fame.
“In the morning, we started with squats, then snatch, then clean & jerk, then squats again … in the afternoon, we performed snatch, clean & jerk, and back or front squat … at night, we do the same,” he said. “This is our program every day, for 8 to 10 hours. We max out between 50 and 60 times a day.”
The Bulgarian Method defied conventional wisdom. Sports science had firmly established the value of a “periodized” approach to strength training, (2) wherein athletes progress through different phases of training intensity, moving from easier and more varied workouts to shorter, more intense sessions.
Most weightlifters will take a planned, well-thought-out attempt at an ultra-heavy lift in the weeks leading up to a competition. Rarely, if ever, will they redline themselves with multiple attempts at a 1-rep max.
Maxing out in the snatch, clean & jerk, and squat not just every day, but multiple times per day, is more than mildly reckless. Aita notes that the brutal simplicity of the system, which poorly managed fatigue and entirely ignored an athlete’s individual needs, was an intentional filter.
“For better or worse, [the Bulgarian Method] weeded out those who couldn’t live up to the demands of Abadjiev’s system,” Aita says. In Abadjiev’s eyes, Bulgaria couldn’t afford to play the same game as every other weightlifting team.
Beating the Bear
In the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union was a force to be reckoned with in international sport, and weightlifting was no exception. Russian weightlifters like Vasily Alekseyev performed feats of strength that stand up against those of modern Olympic lifters, even after 40 years of advancement in exercise and nutritional sciences.
Russian weightlifting dogma was starkly different from the Bulgarians. The Soviets focused intently on building work capacity, incorporating a large amount of exercise variation, and sparingly performing true max-effort lifts outside of competition.
“Abadjiev once told me, ‘we were competing against the Russians, and that’s why we did the weights we did. We would have been stronger if the Russians had been stronger,’” Aita remarks. Sentiment borne out of Cold War-era tensions created a proverbial arms race within sports like weightlifting.
“To achieve bigger and bigger results,” Aita says of Abadjiev’s industriousness as head coach of the Bulgarian team, “they needed to keep chasing each other.”
This approach extended beyond the doors of the Bulgarian training hall. Throughout the mid-20th century, weightlifting was the frontier for the emergence of ergogenic anabolic steroid use. (3) Russian weightlifters were the first documented cases of performance-enhancing drugs in sport as early as 1954, and after decades of pharmaceutical advancement, they were commonplace in weightlifting.
“The inclusion of [performance-enhancing drugs] … automatically has a dramatic effect on the outcome of a sport,” Aita says. “They’re so effective that countries have put forth massive research and development efforts to pass drug tests. Drugs made a massive difference to all lifters during that era, and Bulgaria was no exception.”
A “massive difference” isn’t hyperbole, either; anabolic steroids and exogenous hormone supplementation are quite potent for enhancing both muscle size and strength, (4) but certain drugs can also dramatically enhance recovery rates. (5)
Drugs made a massive difference to all lifters during that era, and Bulgaria was no exception.
“Enhanced” athletes are able to tolerate harder, heavier resistance training bouts on a more frequent basis, thereby accumulating more hours of practice time and skill acquisition. Pair that physiological augmentation with daily 1-rep-max training, which has legitimate scientific support as an effective means of producing robust strength gains, (6) and you get the Bulgarian Method. A perfect storm.
The Bulgarian Legacy
Abadjiev’s system may have been grueling, but Aita rebukes the idea that it was necessarily dangerous to the athletes.
“If you look at the most prolonged and highest-performing careers in weightlifting, many of them belong to lifters who trained with a Bulgarian, or similar, system,” he says.
Aita notes that only six athletes have ever clean & jerked three or more times their own body weight: Om Yun-Chol, Long Qingquan, Halil Mutlu, Neno Terziyski, Stefan Topurov, and Süleymanoğlu. The first two hail from North Korea and China, respectively. The other four men are Bulgarian, or trained under a derivative of Abadjiev’s system.
After decades of dominance on the international weightlifting stage, Bulgaria’s weightlifting team is a husk of its former self. Abadjiev retired from coaching in 2000 and passed away in 2017 at the age of 85.
Whether due to Abadjiev’s passing and no successor stepping in to take up the mantle, or the ever-increasing scrutiny placed upon weightlifting’s drug abuse that has finally placed it on the edge of excision from the Olympic Games, Bulgaria is hardly the powerhouse it once was. Their weightlifting team has won zero Olympic medals since London and were also disqualified from attending Rio in 2016.
Many of the principles of the Method, however, have influenced how modern weightlifting coaches teach their athletes to this day. Frequent max-effort attempts are much more common in Olympic lifting programs than in years past.
“Normal” weightlifting training is mundane and, at times, dreadfully boring (there are only two exercises in the entire sport, after all). But there’s a certain allure to the Bulgarian Method, despite its impracticality and dubiously unethical practices.
For many weightlifters, the thrill of sending an impossibly heavy bar soaring overhead is a feeling worth chasing for a lifetime. For Zlatan Vanev, cursing himself before ripping into a fifth attempt at his 210-kilogram barbell while his competitors took it easy ahead of the World Championships, it was just another day on the job.
References
- “Bulgaria Withdraws Lifting Team” BBC Sport. 27 June 2008.
- Williams, T. D., Tolusso, D. V., Fedewa, M. V., & Esco, M. R. (2017). Comparison of Periodized and Non-Periodized Resistance Training on Maximal Strength: A Meta-Analysis. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 47(10), 2083–2100.
- Nicholas Wade, ,Anabolic Steroids: Doctors Denounce Them, but Athletes Aren’t Listening. Science 176,1399-1403(1972).
- Bhasin, S., Storer, T. W., Berman, N., Callegari, C., Clevenger, B., Phillips, J., Bunnell, T. J., Tricker, R., Shirazi, A., & Casaburi, R. (1996). The effects of supraphysiologic doses of testosterone on muscle size and strength in normal men. The New England journal of medicine, 335(1), 1–7.
- Beiner, J. M., Jokl, P., Cholewicki, J., & Panjabi, M. M. (1999). The effect of anabolic steroids and corticosteroids on healing of muscle contusion injury. The American journal of sports medicine, 27(1), 2–9.
- Zourdos, Michael & Dolan, Chad & Quiles, Justin & Klemp, Alex & Jo, Edward & Loenneke, Jeremy & Blanco, Rocky & Whitehurst, Michael. (2015). Efficacy of Daily 1RM Training in Well-Trained Powerlifters and Weightlifters: A Case Series. Nutricion hospitalaria: organo oficial de la Sociedad Espanola de Nutricion Parenteral y Enteral.
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