Putting Accessories In The Context Of A Weightlifting Program

Here is the best way to organise accessory work in a weightlifting program.

First, let's categorise accessories as either upper body or lower body. A lower body accessory is one that will affect our weightlifting performance from a moderate-large extent (at least, this is how I define it). So lower body accessories would include core work (even though the core is not fully in the 'lower body'), quad work, hamstring work, or lower back work. The remaining work would be upper body assistance: presses, isolation work for the back, chest, and arms. 

Now, let's take a typical weightlifting split:

Day 1/3/5: Heavy Snatch + Clean and Jerk, snatch pulls/clean deadlifts

Day 2/4/6: Lighter Snatch variation + Clean and Jerk variation, back/front squats

Day 7: Rest

We should not do accessory work the day before days 1, 3 and 5, since these are days where we do the full lifts and want to be as fresh as possible to maximise performance and ingrain good motor patterns. However, we can do accessory work on Days 1/3/5 since the days after are lighter days. Therefore, we have 4 days where we can allocate accessory volume: days 1,3,5 and 6(day 6 is followed by a rest day).

Let's split each of these days into 2 days where we do lower body assistance, and 2 days where we do upper body assistance. You could allocate this 3 days to 1 if your lower body is really weak or vice-versa. 

Lower body work should probably be done on days 1 and 6. Day 2 usually has the lightest squats of the week, so it is fine to tire our legs a bit the day before. Day.6 is followed by a rest day, so we can really hammer the legs without needing to worry about training the next day.

Comparatively, the upper body recovers much quicker (largely by the next day!). Therefore, we can put upper body assistance work on days 3 and 5, and they still won't impact performance on Days 4 and 6 too much.

Here are some exercises you can do for each:

Lower Body Assistance:

• Side planks
• Quad Nordics
• Split Squats
• Romanian Deadlifts
• Crab Walks
• Back Extensions
• Rows

Upper Body Assistance:

• Strict Press
• Weighted Pushup
• Weighted Pullups
• Rows
• Tricep extensions
• curls