Olympic Workout - LiftBigEatBig

Hello! God it’s taken a pretty long time to smash out this second blog post but finally I made it. On the bright side I’m spending a lot of time training and that’s pretty much my reason why I haven’t had time to write anything.

The past couple of months or so I discovered this awesome new blog called LiftBigEatBig and began trying out their Olympic Lifting programme that tackled the following lifts: Snatch, Snatch Balance, Clean & Jerk, Front Squat, Back Squat, Deadlift, Push Press and any hanging / power variations of the Olympic lifts. So in essence it was myofibrillar strength training and boy was it a lot of fun. To be honest I intended this only to be just an opportunity for me to experiment and learn the Snatch but I ended up continuing for some time with the routine.

The routine was split across 3 days of the week and looked something like this:

-Week 1-

Day 1

Snatch: 3x3 @ 70% 3x3 @ 75%

Back squat:  4x5 @ 75%

Push press behind neck: 3x5 @ 70%

Snatch pulls: 4x5 @ 110% (of snatch 1RM)

Pullups:  3x8

Day 2

Clean & Jerk: 3x3 @ 70% 3x3 @ 75%

Snatch balance:  4x3 @70% (of snatch 1RM)

Front squat: 4x5 @ 75%

Clean pulls:  5x5 @ 115%

50 situps

Day 3

Snatch pull + power snatch + snatch  4x3 @ 70% 3x3 @ 75%

Back squat: 3x8 @ 70%

Push press behind neck: 4x5 @ 75%

Snatch deadlift:  3x7 @ 100%

Unfortunately my back injury played up again … sigh. I’ve seen a few people about it now because I’m so frustrated and it seems my QL is tight and causing havoc in my lower body. I’m not flexible at all I get that and now I try and stretch as much as possible, but it’s infuriating that the pain just won’t go away. As a result, I decided to stop with the lower body exercises and moved back to hypertrophy training, which I will discuss in my next blog post.

In the mean time I just wanted to quickly talk about my experience with this routine and the importance of training for functionality. The routine above is clearly an advanced level program designed for people with good flexibility and power (it’s not your simple bicep curls and bench press). You won’t be getting ‘the pump’ doing 3x3 sets / reps but you will be neurologically exhausted and drained as your entire body succumbs to traumatic stress performing these lifts. These are the kind of lifts that will make you explosive, fast and powerful, traits that are required in physical sports like Rugby, American Football and Football. Long story short, if you’re bored of doing the same old nonsense at the gym, I strongly urge you to have look into Olympic lifting because I had so much fun with it and was it not for my poor little back, I would have absolutely continued down this path. 

Stay healthy, stay strong.