Mastering Strength Training for Weightlifting: Key Insights and Strategies

I've coached some of the strongest weightlifterss and powerlifters in the world, and I can tell you that getting

strong does not happen by accident. In this video, I'll break down exactly what I'm currently doing with my athletes so

you can apply it to your own training. All right. In this video, I'm going to discuss with you three things. One, what

do people get wrong about strength training for weightlifting? Two, what I do currently with my athletes. and

three, how to implement that with your own athletes or yourself to get the best results possible. So, first off, what do

people usually get wrong about strength training in weightlifting? I would say there are a couple factors, but one of

the biggest ones is they train with too much volume. They are doing way too much

squatting, way too much pulling, way too much pressing, whatever it is. It's almost always too much squatting.

They'll do giant squat programs that involve high high repetitions, eight, tens, you know, many, many sets. Do big

squat programs they downloaded off the internet. They'll do something that's just way too much, not appropriate for

the level they're at in the kind of attempt to try and drive up their squat as much as possible. They do these kind

of things that are just way outside of what they need. Right. Number two, I would say is too

high of an RP. And RP just means rate of perceived exertion. All that really is is a measure of how close or what the

proximity to failure you're at is. So, are your sets really grindy? Are you doing reps that are just really

fatigued, way too high of an RP, and you know, just way outside of where they should be for strength development?

Something to remember is that as you get more fatigued throughout a set and the bar starts moving slower, that's a

byproduct of fatigue, you're producing less force. If you're moving 100 kilos at 1 meter a second and then you're

doing four or five more reps and you're producing less force so that 100 kilos moves at8 meters a second, you're not

developing much more strength. So, it's not the best situation to be in doing really heavy or really grindy slow slow

reps as a byproduct of fatigue. And that's what I mean when I say we're training or people are training with too

high of an RP. They're going not too heavy, but they're doing too much work outside of the range of really

productive strength development. So, we want to avoid that. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make. Number three

is they are potentially doing strength training in too much of a segmented manner. So they're doing a block

approach. So block periodization too much. And this is not

to say that block periodization is wrong. I think there's it's totally fine to do this. But I think in a lot of

cases people are doing strength training that is maybe way too block oriented where they're doing high high volumes.

you know, eights and tens for four weeks, then they're shifting to, you know, fives or or fours or something,

and then they're shifting to doubles and singles. That can work fine. It's not wrong to train like that, but I think in

weightlifting, it's not as applicable because you're basically taking periods of training that are going to be very,

not say detrimental to the training, but you're not maximizing the amount of training you could be doing that's

focused on developing the qualities you want for weightlifting. So early in that block style of programming, you're going

to be doing high high repetitions, but nothing that exposes you to heavier singles or highintensity lifts that

gives you a skill or gives you the feel for doing one rep maxes that is applicable to Olympic weightlifting. So

I think that is not necessarily wrong. It's more that I think there are better ways to approach this than a block

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next, what do I do? How would I approach building strength training uh sessions for my athletes? I like to take an

approach that gives me the exposure to the things I want, which are heavy singles, heavier lifts that are going to

develop more strength adaptations and at the same time incorporate more hypertrophic work into the program

without having to really add more and more sort of single joint exercises. I think a lot of times when we think of

hypertrophy, we're thinking as weightlifters of throwing in, you know, single leg squats or belt squats or

curls or something. I like to use a system where my structured strength programs look like we're accomplishing

three different things. Number one, we're going to do something like a top single. So we can look at something like

a a set of one at uh one by one at let's say uh RP 7 to you know 7 to 9 6 to9 throughout

the training cycle. What this does in the training program is that single gives me a very clear and accurate

estimation of that athletes current level of strength because we're basically as close to testing their one

or max as we can be without it being really invasive. A a single at seven, a single at eight is not going to wear you

out. It's not going to tire you out. It's not going to be something that's super detrimental. But at the same time,

right away within any one week of training or any one, you know, as many often as we do this, any one session, we

can tell right away, hey, you're way down or you're way up or you're right where we expect you to be. So, this is

very nice, very beneficial. It also sets the tone for the rest of the session, which is where we do more of our

strength development work. So, after we do the single in the workout, we're going to drop down and do something

like, you know, two to five rep range. I oftentimes use triples. So let's just call it 3x3. And this is going to be at

an intensity or an RP range that is most beneficial for strength development. So we don't want this to be really really

light where it's maybe at say 65 or 70%, but we want it to be heavy enough that we're building strength. So more

intensity is always going to be the mechanism of overload for strength development. But we also don't want the

RPEs to be so high that we're getting into that range we talked about earlier where they're grindy and slow from the

fact that they're so fatiguing. So generally this is going to be something you know close to the range of like uh

let's say 75 to 85% in the RP range of you know somewhere between 6 to 8. I know this

seems kind of 6 to 8 RP. This seems like it might be a little bit too easy, but ultimately this produces a

lot of very high quality gains and I've used these methods very very effectively with powerlifters and weightlifters to

build their squat strength up quite a bit. So we have our single, we have our back off sets and then after that we

would decide does our athlete need any hypertrophy work and should we incorporate it right now. So we would

maybe drop down again after this and do our hypertrophy work with high repetitions. So, anywhere from say six

to 10 reps for anywhere from two to three sets. And this is going to be at an

RP of 8 plus. And the reason for that is we know that being in that higher RP range is generally going to be a little

more conducive to uh hypertrophy. um it's not that it's super important to be there, but closer to failure and the

proximity to failure is a little bit more indicative of hypertrophic work than doing you know low RP kind of

strength work with high intensity. So we have three different segments to the session. Number one is our top single.

It is a very good method to establish readiness and the current athletic ability. Are they stronger today? Are

they weaker? Are they more fatigued? You know, if we're doing our RP7 and it's going up in weight each week or going

down in weight each week, we have an idea of where they're at. The single is also potentiating. Doing that heavy

single makes the rest of the work slightly easier and a little bit more productive. So, this whole structure

really works well together. The second part is we've got our back offsets that are strength focused. They are lower

repetition ranges than the hypertrophy work, but they're higher volume than the strength work because we want to

accumulate some training effect here. A single at 7 to nine is really not going to do a whole lot. It's more

representative of what the rest of the volume in the training has produced. So these triples here are focused on high

quality strength work that is very easy to execute but produces good results. So, triples between 75 to 80%, they

could be slightly higher, slightly lower. That's dependent on the athlete. Uh, but RPEs in that 6 to 8 range.

Again, there's play there. You could go a little bit higher than that. You could do these a little bit more, but I would

avoid doing these triples reaching up into that 8 1/2, 9, 10 RP range. It's just not going to be as productive.

Granted, you can do that, you know, less often, less frequently, but in general, most of the time, we want to spend our

time in a very manageable place. And then finally at the end of the session the you've already done your practice

work there. You've also already done your strength work. Now it's time to do any kind of hypertrophy work if you want

it or you need it. So six to 10 rep range is really effective for this. It can be higher than that as well. I

wouldn't go a lot lower than that because I feel like when you get into the five or four rep ranges, the RP are

going to climb up a lot. the intensity is going to climb up a lot and you're going to start doing work that at this

point if it's lower than six reps is going to be heavier than the work you did before and potentially if you're

doing RP 8 n 10 with sets of five you're basically doing starting strength and no one wants to be doing that so this is

really effective for strength development really effective for hypertrophy development here and this

all feeds well into a system of training that can be adjusted as you go from one phase to another and I'm going to show

you how we do that. Now, instead of a block system where we would have just broken all those three things up, we're

using a concurrent system where we're doing them all at once. If you're say in an early hypertrophy phase, we've got

our single one by one at uh let's just say seven uh and then we have three by3 at let's call it, you know, six. And

then we have our hypertrophy work, which is let's say eights at, you know, three sets uh and you're at a nine. You've got

the ability here to now adjust the amount of volume in any one of these different components of the session and

get a different result out of it. So if we have a little bit more of a focus on work capacity hypertrophy, we can bump

this up to four or five sets and we can keep these at a relatively low level. We could even drop some of the strength

work down to maybe just doing two sets here and then have more of our volume focused on the the hypertrophy effect if

we need that. If the athlete needs more of that, if you're in a strength phase, you can do something like one by one at

seven and then you might have three by 4 to five at RP 6 to 7, which is going to be a lot more training for basic

strength where you're really spending time and doing a lot more volume in this strength work. And then maybe you only

have one to two sets of your hypertrophy work. That's not an amp percent. That's not an at symbol, I guess. Uh, RP, you

know, 8 to 9. So, we can adjust any one of these levels if we need to to get a little bit more of the stimulus we want.

We can also customize and adjust this to the athlete as well. Some people just don't need a lot of high volume work.

Some people benefit from high volume work. Uh, some people are going to get stronger from different rep ranges or

different combinations of volume here. So it's easy to adjust this while at the same time throughout the training cycle

you're always getting exposure to the things you need just in different doses. You're not getting away from these

different kinds of training stimulus or different kinds of you know training goals where in a block method you're

basically going to do this one then this one then this one and you kind of lose that ability to really dial that in. The

final thing I would say is let's say you're in peaking or you're in a period where an athlete doesn't need to do a

lot of volume or can't do a lot of volume. You can make an adjustment where you might do a single or you might do a

single times, you know, 3 to five singles at RP 7 to 8 where they're a little bit heavier. It's more focused on

maximal strength. Then your back offsets might be 3x3 or 3x3 to 4 at your RP that are lower, you know, 6 to 7. And this

allows you to stay focused more on the high intensity list, more maximal strength, not as much volume, not quite

as much fatigue or as much stress as you would get from having a bunch of hypert work in there. But this could be used in

a place where maybe you're getting close to competition, maybe it's peaking, maybe your athlete just doesn't need to

do much hypertry work. So you drop it all together and you focus mostly on the singles and some back offsets. So, it's

not really anything magical, but basically this this methodology in my opinion is the best way to structure uh

training that gives you the ability to really dial in someone's program specifically for them and adjust it

phase by phase without having these really big swings between, you know, block A of hypertrophy, block B of

strength, block C of peaking, and it's just this degradation of volume into the competition where you're doing tens and

eights, then you're doing fives, then you're doing threes and ones. And in my opinion, this works really well. In my

experience, it works very, very well. And I've seen a lot of athletes in powerlifting and weightlifting benefit

from it immensely by driving their squat results up really, really high without having to add huge amounts of volume. In

weightlifting, you cannot do high high volume squatting and the lifts at the same time and expect the lifts to

benefit from it and to go up. So, if you want to develop strength in weightlifting, you have to do it

strategically and you have to do it in a way that your sessions are going to be beneficial for weightlifting and for

strength development without negatively impacting the Olympic lifts to a point that you have to reduce them so much

that you're just doing a squat program and then coming back to the lifts again later. So, this accomplishes that. It's

a great way to build out a program. Uh, it's a great way to do your strength training uh in a way that is going to be

sustainable and you can do it year round like this with adjustments to the actual distribution of those loads in the

session and not have to worry about a period of time where you have to reduce snatch and cleaning drip volume so much

that you're just doing a squat program and then you come back to it and you have this two steps forward, one step

back kind of approach. I like it this way and I think you will too. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. If you

like this video, like and subscribe and check out my other video in this series on how to program for the offseason.