In order to learn the movements/motor patterns better, I decided to do 5 days straight of clean and press. I figured it would be a good time to get a lot of volume in and really focus on the areas where I was lacking.
Monday - light weight, 30 reps total. Felt great.
Tuesday - moderate weight, 20-25 reps total (I wasn’t counting exactly). Still felt strong.
Wednesday - heavy weight, 15-20 reps. Turned into a bunch of singles. Felt okay.
Thursday - Didn’t want to touch a barbell. Did some reps at light weight and it sucked. Did some at moderate weight and it sucked more. Hung it up at around 20 reps.
Friday - that’s today. I’m just plain exhausted and don’t want to do anything.
Of course there are the issues of overtraining. But what if my job were to clean and press? Would I not show up to work?
Dude, you can’t do that. Yes, there are world class atheletes that can handle that training volume, but you have to work up to that. If you’re interested in Oly lifting, find a real program.
Also, I don’t know if this is what you’r doing… But if you’re planning on one full week of clean and presses, and then another week of snatches then you’re not gonna learn the lifts anytime soon.
You’d be better drilling both the lifts as often as possbile because by the time you’ve gotten back around to the clean after the snatch week you’ll be as good as starting from scratch again.
I didn’t just start doing cleans or snatches this week, I started doing them about 18 months ago, and I’ve been lifting since about 1991.
I’ve just been doing power cleans and power snatches because I never had the hip flexibility to do the full versions. But I’ve been working on hip flexibility for a few months now, and now I can do them but with only about 60% of the weight I used for the power versions. So ultimately I did a week of a movement at 60% 1RM.
I think it turned out well for me. The biggest problem I had was trying to overcome the hesitation to get myself under the bar into the deep squat, and by the end of the week that was much better. I don’t even really feel sore or overtrained because I simply can’t handle that much weight with these full movements yet.
I tried CT’s crazy bench press program a while back. It had volume unlike anything I’ve ever done before; on Sunday alone there were three separate sessions, each containing as much pressing as I’d normally do in 3 days. Then two more nutty sessions later in the week. I thought it was crazy but I did it anyway and gained 10 pounds on my bench by the end of the 6 weeks. It definitely expanded my belief of what was in the realm of the possible.
I think this clean week was much less stressful on the body. I wasn’t even trying to build strength but rather refine movement patterns, and for that I don’t know of anything better than just a lot of reps.