But I am a lady, I do not have testiclÈs!

Note: It is PR Friday — post weights gained, lifted, consumed, etc.

A novice can train heavy on a regular basis because they are not lifting a significant percentage of their genetic potential to disrupt homeostasis more than a couple days. Read that sentence again, because there is a lot of shit going on. A novice, defined as someone who adapts to stress on a daily basis (as opposed to a weekly (intermediate) or monthly (advanced) basis), will program things differently than an intermediate. Once intermediate status is achieved, things will get individualized…i.e. more complicated.

An intermediate will have particular recovery limitations that others may not have, and this must be accounted for. As of right now, I do not think there is any good way to efficiently increase strength while getting adequate practice in the Olympic lifts. Increasing the back squat, press, bench press, and deadlift are going to help the Olympic lifts go up, but those “slower lifts” will not increase as fast if the Olympic lifts are practiced adequately during the week (adequate probably means at least twice a week). In comparison, when the focus is to increase those “slower lifts”, you cannot adequately put enough time into getting that “adequate practice” in the snatch and clean & jerk since recovery is a finite thing. This means that you either have to cycle the emphasis on a regular basis or strength train until x weeks out from the meet.

Tommy Suggs used to do the latter, according to an old article written by Bill Starr. He would get strong in training, and then six weeks out from a competition he would get back into doing the lifts and refining his technique. The method seemed to have been useful for him.

Not everyone is an intermediate though, and very few people get there legitimately. Lets say you are a novice, or you train novices. Well, I may have an outline you can try. It has worked for us at the WFAC. It is assumed that the lifts have already been taught.

Monday
Clean and Jerk heavy
Snatch for sets across

Tuesday
Squat
Press
Chin-ups

Wednesday
Off

Thursday
Snatch heavy
Clean and jerk singles across

Friday
Squat
Bench
Deadlift

The lifter will be fresh on Monday to clean and jerk heavy after the two days of rest. A novice will be able to squat the day after doing the Olympic lifting, and deadlifting is done at the end of the week because if it was done any earlier, it may interfere with the other pulling. The sets across for snatch or C&J should/could be timed — on the minute for a snatch (between 10 and 15) and every two minutes for C&J (for 10 reps). Doing it in this manner accomplishes a few things (not in any particular order); A) it uses medium weights so that completed reps build confidence, B) the higher reps are technique practice, and C) it gets the lifter used to lifting on a clock, which will be important in competition. The heavy snatch or C&J days can be five singles across, or just working up to a heavy single (ideally increasing that single week to week). Remember that any increase is still an increase, so it may be 2.5 or 1 kg per week in the later stages — the point is to drive the weight up and PR.

This program can be followed for quite some time — it is what quite a few of the lifters here in the gym did, and got pretty strong. One of my lifters named Bryan, who was mentioned in Rip’s article, The Novice Effect, squatted over 500 for three sets of five and clean and jerked 155 kg in the gym using this program. A novice can recover from this work load because they are a novice. In fact, I used a variation of it at one time while I added 5 kg on my clean and jerk every week all the way up to 165 kg in the gym (I was an intermediate though, and it didn’t last long). The point is that it still includes two strength days while working on the lifts twice a week. More strength will improve your total — remember that.

From Brent:
This is Dmitry Klokov, born in 1983, was the 2005 World Champion and 2008 Silver Medalist in the Beijing Olympics. His best competition total is 423, and in this video he snatches 193 and clean and jerks 230:

Whether or not you have an “every day coach”, you will have to figure out how you are going to program the Olympic lifts. There are plenty of programs you can find that include, but are obviously not limited to international teams (Bulgaria, Greece, China, etc.), the US Olympic Training Center, or standard stuff you can find in Milo or online resources. I caution any of you to get very interested in advanced programs designed for successful national teams. Typically these are advanced lifters who have been in a system for 10+ years and they require the kind of volume and intensity that is present in their program in order to undergo an adaptive stress.

The rest of us are not so fortunate, whether we are talking genetics or childhood exposure. Since the Olympic lifts are an expression of strength (as opposed to primary strength movements), a strength emphasis should be inherent in the training program. For some reason the previous statement is borderline blasphemy in some weightlifting circles, yet it is the same message that has been touted by Tommy Suggs and Bill Starr since their competitive days. Starr recently wrote an article that touches on the matter for the Starting Strength website called, Keeping the Strength in the Strength Program (any article by Starr is a good read — it has been said he has forgotten more stuff about strength training than we will ever know).

In any case, the thing that is going to help a beginning weightlifter get better at the snatch, clean, and jerk is getting stronger, thus strength training is incorporated into the program. Now, depending on your relationship with your coach, this may be contradictory to what they teach. The coach may want you solely on their program. It may be a situation where you see them less frequently which means programming is up to you. Maybe you cannot even perform the lifts unless you are at the coach’s gym because of equipment limitations. Whatever your circumstances may be, improving your strength is vital to increasing your lifts, and this is should always be the heart of your program.

Tomorrow I will leave the fuzzy conceptual strength stuff and give some vague outlines that a beginning weightlifter could try. In the mean time, discuss the topic, and if any of you are experienced weightlifters or coaches, you can share what has worked for you or your athletes.

Here is Olympian Kendrick Farris, a really fucking strong 85 kg lifter. In this video he deadlifts 280 kg (616) — he attempts a double.

Here he smokes the piss out of a 170 kg power clean and jerk:

So it goes.

We like to encourage the readers of this website to compete in something. It’s a safe way to take risks, it allows you to challenge yourself, it focuses your training (and makes it more fun), and it lets you learn about yourself. Since we want you to be strong, the initial competitive endeavors are the barbell sports; powerlifting and weightlifting.

Most of the people here gravitate towards powerlifting since that closely resembles their training: squats, presses, and deadlifts. Olympic weightlifting seems to be less popular. The biggest reason probably is that the lifts look difficult to learn and execute, especially without a coach.

Yes, the shit is hard to do without a coach. For some people, they will never be decently good because they are goofy athletes. But if you were athletic growing up, and you like lifting weights, then why not take a stab at Olympic weightlifting?

If you take a chance on weightlifting, then you should initially learn the movements from a decent coach. I suggest this because the ability to properly teach yourself complex movements is rare, and you don’t want to teach yourself a bunch of bad habits — they are harder for a coach to break than for the coach to teach you properly to begin with.

Finding a “decent coach” may be a task. Some of you will be limited to what is available to you locally or to your own resources to find a coach. My experience would suggest that you find a coach who takes mechanics into consideration. Rippetoe has taught me how to do the lifts and coach them (as he has with many people), and the way that he coaches lifting is derived from a mechanical analysis of the body’s anatomy. I have been coached briefly by Tommy Suggs, and he thinks in terms of efficiency (bar path being vertical, no wasted energy as a result of a non-vertical bar path, etc.). Here is a video of weightlifting legend Tommy Kono explaining how he teaches the snatch. I particularly found it interesting how he wanted the shoulders in front of the bar in the set-up position, which is contrary to what most coaches teach nowadays:

I like how Kono makes an attempt at validating some of the things he is teaching, even if one or two points are contradictory to what I have learned to teach. Having a reason based on analysis, even if it is faulty analysis, is better than teaching it because “that is how it has always been done”. I consider this particularly important; if it were me, I would use this as one of my qualifying factors in choosing a coach…assuming the luxury of choosing a coach was present.

Then there is all of the obvious shit you should look for in a coach; how you get along with them, what is their coaching style, what kind of experience do they have (higher level lifters or novices — some coaches are not very good at teaching a beginner), how patient they are, etc. I could write quite a bit on coaching and all of the considerations that go into doing it and receiving it, but it leaves the scope of this post — you’ll just have to learn what kind of approach works best for you.

This is, of course, more of an extensive list for the OCD-type person that takes all of this stuff into consideration. The majority of you just need to get your ass on a platform and learn the lifts from somebody. Get a working knowledge of how they work, what your body is supposed to be doing, and then you can start gaining the experience to make adjustments.

In the next few parts of this “Getting Into Weightlifting” series, I will talk about how you and your coach will program, what to expect in your learning process, and suggestions on how to proceed after that initial learning stage. If there are any of you who are experienced in this sport, feel free to add to what I have started in the comments section. More information from multiple sources will help prepare the beginner and experienced lifters alike.

People always like training montages — here is the Polish national team (get past the non-english intro and you will see some lifting):