The Conjugate Edge #08: Concurrent Is Conjugate → The Soviet Edge

Actualizing Concurrent Treatment & Training Into a True Multiplicative Programming Strategy

Welcome to Installment #08 of The Conjugate Edge. Each month, we publish one essay designed to help programmers in strength and clinical settings step off the linear path and onto our conjugate strategy—one that propagates athletes from Point A→ Point B. This is the programmers go-to source for the most up-to-date thinking on Conjugate—not as a method, not as a system, but as a living programming strategy that treats and trains concurrently in real time. Want to join the conversation? Become a paid subscriber to access comments and our private chat. Want to go deeper? Check out our online course: The Art & Science of Programming.

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Concurrent Is Conjugate

There are two fundamental programming philosophies: linear and concurrent. Operationally defined, linear develops one quality at a time. Concurrent develops multiple qualities simultaneously.

When you program concurrently and structure the four Soviet methods of strength training (or some variant of them) inside that framework, you’re no longer just training concurrently. You are training conjugately.

Most programmers of training and treatment for the performance never learned this distinction—because their education of strength training methods was Western, not Soviet. Their programming is linear, not concurrent and definitely not conjugate.

Embracing Uncertainty—and What It Unlocks

When you step onto the conjugate roadmap: you are no longer managing an additive strategy. You are managing a multiplicative one.

Linear programming is predictable. Train one quality in each block. Progressively overload. 1+1=2. The logic is that you can add one block to the other block and they magically add up. In real life it does not work that way. A linear programming roadmap has two destinations. One road leads to neurological stagnation, the other to biological accommodation. The athlete, even untrained athlete will get to one or both of those destinations with linear programming—just depends on the time it takes to get them there.

Conjugate programming is different. In our strategy you are now simultaneously managing Absolute Strength, Speed Strength, Reactive Strength, and Joint Function—the four fundamental capacities of Point B. And these capacities do not add. They multiply.

Absolute Strength × Speed Strength × Reactive Strength × Joint Function = High Performance

Our conjugate strategy brings alive the Multiplication Principle. And it changes everything about how you program. (For a deeper dive into this concept, see The Conjugate Edge #07: The Multiplication Principle.)

When capacities multiply rather than add, neglecting any single one does not just reduce that quality—it collapses the entire capacity. If any variable approaches zero, the outcome approaches zero. The math is unforgiving. But the inverse is equally powerful: modest improvements across all four capacities simultaneously produce disproportionately large gains in performance. Small, consistent, system-wide inputs compound—and over time, the product becomes unmistakable.

This is why conjugate programming requires embracing uncertainty. You cannot predict the exact output of a multiplicative strategy. You can only steward it—protecting the integrity of all variables, sequencing treatment and training inputs intelligently, and trusting that the compounding effects will emerge.

That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is the condition that makes the multiplication principle possible.

What Louie Saw

Louie Simmons saw this before most of the field had language for it.

The Bulgarians were David. Neurologically dominant. Their system was built on one core idea: lift maximally, lift often, and let the nervous system adapt specifically. Near-daily competition lifts. Stimulating intensity. Low variation. Brutally efficient. For the athletes who survived it, extraordinarily effective at the Level of Competition. But it remained a single-variable programming strategy—neurologically aggressive and biologically negligent.

The Soviets were Goliath. A vast scientific architecture built over decades in state-funded labs. Max effort, dynamic effort, repeated effort—multiple methods rotating deliberately across the training week. They weren’t just training athletes. They were building them systematically, layer by layer—the process of attaining sporting mastery.

Louie took the neurological aggression of the Bulgarians and conjugated it with the systematic method rotation of the Soviets. Multiple methods—programmed simultaneously at stimulating intensities, week after week, in true conjugation. The result was not a compromise. It was a synthesis of the best of the Bulgarians and Soviets.

For the full story on this Bulgarian vs Soviet contrast and its influence on modern conjugate thinking, read The Conjugate Edge #02: David Beats Goliath.

At Absolute Sport Science, we have taken that method-based programming foundation and translated it into the language of capacities. This gives today’s programmers a clearer framework to consciously manage what Louie never fully mapped: the Multiplication Principle operating across all four fundamental capacities of Point B.

What happened next changed how we understand the human nervous system entirely.

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