[quote]lboro21 wrote:
[quote]Christian Thibaudeau wrote:
[quote]lboro21 wrote:
Also, whats your view on full squat cleans as a primary lower body movement? -to take place over front squats?
L
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Well, unless you are an amazingly efficient olympic lifter, it will not provide enough loading. The MOST EFFICIENT competitive olympic lifters in the world will normally clean what they can front squat for 3 perfect, no grinding, reps.
So you will always be limited by your clean strength if you use that as your main exercise. For example, let’s say that you use 90% of your clean for your sets (which is a lot to use on that movement in training with any form of frequency or volume. That means that IN THE BEST POSSIBLE CASE you will be using 80% of your max front squat… and that is if you have the efficiency of an elite lifter. More likely it will be 70 or even 60%.
But you can only get about 2 reps on cleans with 90% of your max. So if that is all you do, you will be doing 2 reps of “front squats” with 60-80% of your max, which isn’t very challenging on the muscles. Furthermore, you cannot do that many sets with 90% of your max clean… so the volume of leg work will be low too.
NOW, you could do a complex, for example one clean then 5-6 front squats. At least you will get a more challenging number of reps for the load selected, but it still represents a fairly light load to put on the muscles.
There is a reason why elite olympic lifters squat so often… if it were possible to build enough leg strength only by cleaning, they would drop squatting in favor of more cleaning since it’s more specific… but they don’t.[/quote]
That makes a lot of sense! -especially for me, since i’m a beginner when it comes to training olympic lifts with any sort consistency/loading.
i’ll stick to the front squats as my lower body movement!
I’ve been reading one of your training spills, saying that doing the ‘full’ layer system (ramp, 3 sets of clusters, 3 sets of HDL) is very important, and the same hypertrophy stimulus cannot be achieved by compensating layer volume for frequency; is this something you still preach?
-i’m considering a 4 say split of SGHP, Decline Press, Front Squats and Clean Grip Muscle Snatch and maintaining the full ‘layer-volume’ which would adhere to my original issue of CNS drain… i think this information could benefit a lot of people struggling with short-long term CNS fatigue especially beginner/intermediates like myself!
-so do you still rank layer volume over frequency (with compensated volume)?[/quote]
(1) There is not ONE layer application. Layering besically means using a mix of methods when training a movement to get a more profound stimulation. Just in my forum 4 applications of layers have been discussed.
(2) One thing I came to realise this year is that there is a certain threshold that training intensity must reach to lead to gains in muscle mass. And if you do not reach that threshold you cannot compensate by doing more work or more frequent work that still doesn’t reach the necessary threshold.