Training the Olympic Lifts

Until recently we followed a pretty standard approach to training the clean and snatch. I love 3 week waves with a 4th deload. It has been my experience that training results start to dimish after 4 weeks so we take a step back before that happens. So we have always started with working up to something like 79% for 2 sets of 4 the first week, 3 sets of 3 with 85% the 2nd week, and 4 sets of 1-2 with 91% the 3rd week. But I got sick and tired of seeing the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th rep looking horrible because of fatigue. There is a time and place for training under fatigue but not with the clean and snatch. We do the clean and snatch to be explosive and you can't be explosive after 2 or 3 reps. So what we did was change all our reps to singles. I'm sure that I'm not the first person to do this so I'm not claiming to be a brainiac. We switched to 4 sets of 2 the 1st week, 9 sets of 1 the second week, and 5-6 sets of 1 the 3rd week. I feel like this allows for more quality reps which is what we are always after. Our rest between sets is always around 45-60 seconds so it is comparable somewhat to conditioning for football although this is not our intent. Our intent is quality explosive reps.