On Starting Olympic Lifting

Training Powerlifting
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First; I’m sorry if I’m not the first to make a thread like this,and doubly sorry if I’m the third,but other than wanting to hear about some personal experiences,I have technical questions that I’ve not seen addressed,personally or impersonally.

I’ve been training consistently for a few years, andI have made great gains in size and strength,though I’ve technically been training for strength. Most of my training has been singles or very short sets at best. Emphasis on explosive compound lifts. Total body training.

I usually do not get that many repetitions in,probably almost never in excess of 10-15 for a given bodypart+indirect work,and that is often during the course of several hours. I’m really slow. Despite that,I tend to get sore,like a bodybuilder,and break for four days or so.

From where I’ve been looking,training several times a week feels overkill,but I realize that’s how OL’s tend to train,so it would be a huge change for me to start training like that. But if I chop off my routine to the bare necessities of OL,then I can visualize how I could manage a larger frequency.

It would feel strange not to be sore the next day,and it would feel strange not to lift as near my max as possible all the time. It would feel strange working on technique.

What’s the deal with training with small weight anyway,other than improving speed? How do you know it improves your technique since you can get away with bad technique when lifting light? Do numerous light to moderately heavy reps somehow groove your nervous pathways towards greater efficiency?

I mean do you grow power just by going through that range of motion over and over,with the same resistance? You’re already ‘exploding’ in your heaviest lifts so is it a big difference? I suppose this would be the rationale for the folk wisdom about a boxer growing stronger punches from beating a bag,although the resistance will always be the same.

Would having a single,grueling workout with pure OL and assistance lifts,leading to a break of several days,be a reasonable idea,or should one always aim to keep the reserves fresh and look for a personal limit that allows training for several days straight?

I have done very few overhead lifts,especially with free weights. That’s because I injured my right shoulder in one swoop as a weak teengager,where I was pressing a 5kg dumbbell overhead and my arm went numb and collapsed,tearing my shoulder. The injury reminded me of itself a few times when I was lifting a modest weight overhead.

I’m slowly starting to get over the fear I grew from those experiences,though I think it’s gonna be a while before it’s over,if ever.
If there is someone with a similar experience,I would like to hear how you dealt with that.

So,I’m pretty strong up to my neck level; I can swing dumbbells far in excess of 60 kilos with some ease the way I want them,just not overhead.

But there is no sport which makes a lot out of that strength,and I’m not that fascinated by powerlifting,and want to compete at some point,so weightlifting seems like the only option.

I suppose one more more of these questions may seem kind of vague or even antagonistic but in that case you’re free to answer in kind. I’m just kind of confused and angry about having to deal with these questions,and really need some support. Coaching is for a later date. I just wanna get into building a foundation.
I’d appreciate any input.

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beginners weightlifting primer:

beginner’s weightlifting

try google search, you’ll find all sorts of goodies.

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theres a guy I train with who has a shoulder injury and is very hesitant overhead.

honestly, can’t get over it until you face it. He constantly yell at the guy to stop thinking about it and do it. Thats really it.

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You will still get sore, it’s just not the same kind of “I can’t even sit down” soreness that you get from high rep work. I get very sore traps from jerking, but as I either rest or snatch the day after C&J it doersn’t really affect my lifting too much. My legs are pretty much always slightly sore from squatting 4 times a week, but nowhere near as sore as they used to get from squatting once a week.

Work with weights that are heavy enough to cause a technical breakdown, but not so heavy that you can’t retake the weight and try to correct the error. Training with weights that are too light may even cause more errors than if you pushed it a little (e.g. personally my jerks are always much better at 90% than at 80%.)

In the meantime squat hard, front and back, and get strong.

Of course, you have to know what errors to look for, so even a couple of hours of coaching is worth it. Otherwise, watch as many vidoes as you can and read everything you can. Read the entire O-lifting thread on here: http://www.T-Nation.com/tmagnum/readTopic.do?id=1447538&pageNo=0 and start logging your training sessions.

An overhead strength deficiency will obviously impact on your lifting, especially if you couple it with some general hesitancy because of a previous injury. When I started O-lifting I’d done no overhead lifting at all for a year because of an impinged shoulder, so I had very poor overhead stability and very poor overhead flexibility.

I couldn’t even overhead squat an empty bar when I started. I did a lot of stretching, a lot of overhead squatting (I’m talking insane volume here - 13x13 on some days), a lot of upper back and rear delt work to fix the impingement, and lots of overhead lockouts in the rack to both build up stability but also to get used to having heavy weight overhead again.

As a beginner you need a lot of volume to ingrain the motor patterns, so annihilating yourself in a single session and then taking several days off is not the best way to go about it. Much better to keep some energy in reserve to allow you to train the next day, or the day after that.

You don’t need a million assistance movements. You could run a pretty minimal 3 day a week schedule that looks something like this:

Workout A:
Snatch - singles, doubles, triples
Front squats
Clean pulls

Workout B:
C&J - singles and doubles
Back squats
Snatch pulls

Just alternate between those two workouts, so one week starts with snatch, and the next starts with C&J.

You can then modify that template according to your own personal strengths and weaknesses. Add in drop snatches on your C&J day and overhead lockouts on your snatch day to work on that overhead strength and stability. Ab work and some curls at the end of the session.

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Thanks a lot for the answers.

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get coaching.

you don’t want to build bad habits that you will later have to work through.

-chris