An Intermediate Weightlifting Program Part 1 - Structuring The Session

I made a post with a beginner weightlifting program in the past (link), but this program was certainly not optimal for intermediates. So this in this new series of posts, I will create an intermediate olympic weightlifting program.

Firstly, this program is going to have several differences to the beginner program. Namely, these are:

1. Increase in frequency: In this program, the full lifts (full snatch and full clean and jerk) will each be trained 3x a week, with variations of both lifts done 2x a week each. 
2. Emphasis on strength work: In this program, I will give more attention to proper programming of squats, deadlifts and overhead/push presses.
3. Percentage based programming for the olympic lifts: I used autoregulation for the beginner program since beginners would not know their maxes for the lifts. But intermediates should, so percentages of 1RM can now be used for programming.

In this post, I just want to talk about structuring the workout. Here is how I generally structure weightlifting workouts:

Snatch/Snatch Variation
Clean & Jerk/Clean & Jerk Variation
Strength Exercise 1 (squat/push press/pull)
Strength Exercise 2 (deadlift/strict press/bench press/row)
2 Accessories/Bodybuilding work

So workouts should start with snatches and then go to clean and jerks. Pretty fucking self explanatory, snatches are technically harder than cleans, so they go first. I usually do full cleans 2-3 times a week, and do full snatches 3 times a week. 

Then we move onto strength work. I like to split my workouts into upper body focus or lower body focus in order to manage recovery (ie. a lower body workout would follow an upper body workout). On upper body sessions, I usually do pulls/presses are my first strength exercise. For pulls, I would either do snatch or clean pull at 90-110% of my snatch/clean and jerk max. Althought, for these pulls you could also do snatch grip high pulls, muscle snatches etc. For presses, I would ether do 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps on the push press, or do some heavy strict press (top set + back offs). For lower body sessions, I would do a squat followed by another pull, this time a bit heavier. So I would either front squat/back squat, and then do a clean/snatch/conventional deadlift or maybe a stiff-legged deadlift. 

Then the accessories. On upper body sessions, accessories would be work for the lats (chinups + barbell rows), shoulders (lu raises, rear delt flyes), some chest work (bench press, db bench), triceps and biceps. For lower body accessories, I would usually stick to hamstring, low back and core work since the quads are targeted pretty hard with the Olympic lifts, pulls and squats done prior. So on lower body sessions I would do leg raises, leg curls, back extensions, and some adductor work. 

So that's the basic structure of each workout. In the next post, I will go over the microcycle with sets and reps.

~ Prem