Advanced Olympic Weightlifting Programs

The Advanced Olympic Weightlifting Athlete

The Advanced Athlete is one who has reached a high level of commitment and engages in regular consistent training 5 – 8 workouts per week. This level of training requires considerable time and effort spent on recovery and wellness by maintaining good sleep patterns, exemplary standards of nutrition and consistent work on flexibility and injury management/ prevention.

Find an Advanced Olympic Weightlifting Program

Simply select ADVANCED in the LEVEL dropdown box.

Characteristics of Training Programs for Advanced Olympic Weightlifting Athletes

An advanced Olympic weightlifting program is one that prescribes the level of work required for athletes aspiring to be highly competitive at the national championships level. The frequency and volume of work prescribed is physiologically and psychologically demanding and should not be undertaken by athletes without guidance and due consideration for health and well-being.

Advanced Olympic weightlifting programs assume that the athlete has developed a reasonable level of competency in Weightlifting technique but may require a degree of “fine-tuning” in order to be ready for a major competition. In general, the exercise schedule in an Advanced Olympic Weightlifting program contains fewer assistance exercises that focus on body position correctness but more time is spent pursuing power and strength development. In particular, there is a significant level of work on pulls and squats of various types.

Advanced Olympic Weightlifting Programs are designed to prepare the athlete for competition and include the following features:

• A recommended intensity (heaviness) for each exercise of each session. Workouts follow a cyclical pattern of intensity allowing the athlete to recover between the highest intensity workouts.
• A guide to the volume of work to be performed on each exercise. The guide prescribes 8 levels of volume. There are 3 volume levels that allow the athlete to go beyond the stated workout parameters if the athlete is feeling good, and 5 volume levels which restrict the athlete only to the stated intensity and number of sets.
• Instructions on how to interpret the program, in particular how to work out percentages.
• Recommendations on how to incorporate additional exercises based on individual weaknesses.
• Suggestions on how to incorporate extra training sessions (e.g. 3 mornings per week) into the training program.