It’s a great feeling when you’ve got a big opportunity coming up and you know you’re 100% prepared for it. Know what I mean? Have you ever sat in a hallway, waiting to be called into an office for a job interview, and you basically know you’ve already got it in the bag before you even go in there? That’s a nice little moment. All you have to do is walk in that room, sit down, turn on the charm, and they’re going to offer you a gig that pays you enough money to get those credit card companies off your ass.

However, there’s a flip side to this coin. Having experiences when you’re totally unprepared for an important moment are miserable. Let me give you an example. I used to train with a buddy who had a chance to go on one of those TV court shows. You know the ones I mean, like The People’s Court or Judge Judy or something. Anyway, for some reason he decided to go out and get insanely drunk the night before the show. So the next day, he was standing there in court with the cameras rolling, and he was hung over to the point that he was sweating booze out of every pore and trying as hard as he could not to crap his pants. That’s what we call “lack of proper preparation.”

These little examples lead us into this month’s topic. Many of you are competitive weightlifters. Maybe you’re a CrossFitter who decided to lift in a meet once, and now you’ve competed a couple of times and you’re fired up to keep it rolling. Others might be long time veteran lifters with a lot of experience. There might even be some of you who have never competed in a meet before, but you’re starting to get the itch and you’ve even looked around for some upcoming events in your area. And finally, some of you might be coaches who don’t have any plans to compete yourself, but you’ve got people in your gyms who have expressed some interest in it.

This is why we’re going to talk about meet week preparation in this article. Frankly, I’m surprised that I’ve been writing for Performance Menu for as long as I have without addressing this already, because it’s one of the most important topics I can think of. I’m talking about the week of a competition, the Monday through Friday time period when your meet is on Saturday (or maybe Sunday). Let me tell you something people, this is an area where you don’t want to make any mistakes. Think about it…you’ve been training for this meet for weeks, or maybe months. You’ve invested a ton of time and effort in it, your parents and friends are going to show up, your coach is excited for you, etc. The last thing you want to do is go out on that platform and look like some klutzbag who learned how to lift five minutes before the meet started. Well, that can happen if you don’t do things right during meet week. I’ve seen lifters who trained really well for an entire cycle, and then they went out there and crapped the bed at the contest because they did something stupid in the gym during those last few days. You don’t want this to happen to you, right? Okay, so let’s figure out how to avoid it.

European Influences…

As with a lot of the topics we’ve analyzed in the past, there are different ways to do this successfully. One of the first things I want to do is look at what some of you have seen and heard about from top international lifters.

If you’ve spent some time learning about the sport, particularly if you’ve watched the World Championship training hall videos from IronMind, you’ve probably discovered that many of the best lifters in the world train with pretty high intensity and volume all the way up to a couple of days before they compete. It blows your mind when you first see it, because these suckers are in the gym hitting multiple singles with weights that are relatively close to what they’re going to attempt in the competition, and they’re doing it 48 or 72 hours before the meet. It’s freaky because common sense tells us that those last few days before a competition should be mainly devoted to rest and recovery. If you want to be fresh and ready on the day of the meet, you need to drastically reduce the amount of activity you do in the last few days prior. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Sure it does. That’s why it’s confusing to see videos like the one of 2001 105+ World Champion Jaber Salem from Qatar snatching two singles with 200 kilos (440 lbs) just a few days before competing. Jaber snatched 210 kilos in the meet, so 200 was 95% for him. And he isn’t the only lifter who we’ve seen this from. The majority of the top lifters in the world do it this way. Going up to 95% right before a contest sounds like suicide. There is no way you should be able to recover from a workout like that in time to be fresh for the meet, right? Well, wrong…in the case of the athletes we’re talking about here.

The important thing to remember with world championship lifters is that they’re completely adjusted to this type of work progression. In the months leading up to a major competition, going to 95-100% on a daily basis is normal for them. It doesn’t sound humanly possible, but this is how lifters from China, Russia, and most of the other top European countries train. They often work out 12-15 times per week (or more), and they lift weights that are very close to their maximum in most of those sessions. This is why they don’t fall apart at meets when they’ve had heavy workouts only two or three days prior. Their bodies are acclimated to the workload. The competition, where they’re going to attempt their biggest lifts, is literally just another day at the office for them.

Now, it’s essential to acknowledge that it takes a very structured training system to achieve these results. With these athletes, lifting is their job. It’s their whole life, and they don’t have any real responsibilities outside of the gym. Their training is funded, they don’t have other occupations, and their coaches have put them on a highly developed plan that incorporates their training with advanced recovery measures such as massage therapy and, admittedly, performance enhancing drugs. I hate to be the one to have to tell you, but these lifters aren’t doing this clean. One of the reasons they can recover from savage workouts so quickly is that their testosterone levels are high enough to repair tissues quicker than normal humans.

So the best lifters in the world train pretty heavy all the way up to contest time. They’re able to do this because of highly developed workload adaptation and scientific recovery techniques. That brings us to you. You’re not a Chinese weightlifter. You have a job, a family, and you’re probably a little older than your late teens/early twenties, when your body can recover from almost anything at lightning speed. Considering all of this, how can we structure your meet week so you hit peak performances at the right time?

Calpian Method…

You’ve read a lot about how I trained with the Calpian weightlifting club during my serious competitive years. Well, our team had a meet week plan we followed pretty consistently, and it always seemed to work. Here is basically how we did it.

The last heavy full workout would be the Saturday prior to the competition. That was the last time we pushed for maximum weights in the competition lifts, along with heavy pulling and squatting. Then, during meet week, this was the procedure:

- Monday
o Snatch- work up to five singles with approximately 90%
o Clean and Jerk- work up to three singles with approximately 90%

- Wednesday
o Snatch- work up to five singles with approximately 80%
o Clean and Jerk- work up to three singles with approximately 80%

- All other days- light stretching, foam rolling, possibly some light bar work

That’s basically it. Our whole team trained the same way, so this is what we all did during our meet weeks. Now, there were times when our coach would make some small adjustments based on an individual lifter’s situation. If somebody was considerably overtrained or trying to heal up a minor injury in time for the day of the competition, these percentages could be lowered or modified. There were also times when some of our lighter lifters who had much quicker recovery time would add some back squats during this week, using weights that were around the same as the athlete’s projected clean and jerk at the meet. Little variations like that were possible, based on the judgment of our coach. But overall, this was what we did during meet week for many years.

Our method was based on a kind of informal principle we sometimes referred to as “supercompensation.” This was the idea that the last few heavy training weeks prior to the competition should be extremely demanding. The athletes would be working at maximum levels in almost all lifts and exercises. Attempts at new personal records would often be daily, which would obviously place tremendous strain on the body. To put it more bluntly, we would be beat to hell by the time that last heavy training week rolled around.

Then, the meet week was designed to be a piece of cake compared to how hard we had been training in the previous weeks and months. During the five or six days before a contest, our bodies went through a huge “freshening up” process. Our joints got a break from all the hard pounding, the heavy pulls and squats were eliminated, and the result was that we showed up on the day of the meet feeling totally recovered and ready to rock. We hadn’t lost any of the strength gains we worked so hard for, and we no longer felt like a train ran over us.
I can positively say that this worked for me for many years, and for many other athletes as well. I can remember going to meets and starting my snatches in the warm-up room and thinking to myself, “Damn, these 50 kilos feels like an empty bar.” That was what I remember most, how light the weights felt in the warm-up room compared to how they felt in those last heavy training weeks. And let me tell you something Jack, it’s a huge psychological boost when you’re warming up at a meet and everything feels light and snappy. That’s when you know you’re going to unleash hell.

Other Approaches…

Although the Calpian method was what I used for most of my biggest years, I’ve done some other things during meet week throughout my career. When I was twenty, I did a contest where I back squatted a new personal record on the Wednesday of meet week. This wasn’t the normal procedure I was used to, but it was a small local meet and we were “training through it.” I clean and jerked a new personal record at the meet, just three days after the back squat PR. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was younger, and I had that speed-of-light recovery we talked about earlier. Interestingly, the only other time I ever did heavy back squats during meet week was at another local competition about six years later. I squatted heavy on the Monday of meet week, and at the competition on Saturday I bombed out in the clean and jerk with a weight that was ten kilos below my personal record. My body felt slow and creaky, and I lifted like dog turds. As I said, I was 26 at this time and I was also about twenty kilos heavier in bodyweight than I had been in the other local meet six years earlier when I did the C&J PR.

That brings up another interesting reminder…superheavyweight lifters usually need more recovery time than lighter lifters. A lot of coaches have no idea how to train a superheavyweight. You have to approach it differently, plain and simple. If you try to train a SHW with the same methods you use for lightweights, it will probably fail. The big rhinos can’t go heavy as often as smaller people, especially in the C&J and squats. I’ve noticed over the years that some countries always seem to have good superheavyweights, and others rarely do. It’s pretty obvious that some of the national coaches in places like Germany, Russia, and Iran know how to prepare a superheavy. Other places…clearly not so much.

When I was in my early thirties, I actually lifted in several meets where I didn’t touch a barbell or do any kind of activity for an entire week before the contest. Seriously, I did absolutely nothing. And my competition results were actually pretty good, believe it or not. I guess I wouldn’t recommend this to anybody, but I also can’t say it’s a completely ridiculous idea because it worked for me more than once, and a couple of the meets I did it at were big national contests.

Here’s the main idea to this whole discussion, and it’s what you need to take away from this article. There isn't a perfect one-size-fits-all way to prepare during a meet week. I presented you with a few different ideas here. But if you talk to ten other coaches, you’ll get ten different plans. Most likely, you’ll find lifters who have had great success with all ten of them. The principle that really matters is that the meet week program has to be based on the athlete’s previous training. In other words, you have to plan the seven days prior to the contest in connection with what the lifters have done in the gym over the weeks and months. For example, if you’ve used a training plan where the athlete always has a rest day prior to attempting maximum weights, then you better make sure the day before competition is a rest day too. See what I mean? You don’t want to add things to a lifter’s meet week that aren’t part of the normal routine. You can subtract some things. That’s fine. But adding new things is a risky idea.

The whole idea of competing is showing up on meet day with the body at maximum strength, but also rested enough to perform well. Some athletes require more rest than others, based on their age, experience, bodyweight, and the workload they’re adapted to. Some coaches like to have their athletes work up to their competition opening attempts during meet week. Other coaches like to keep the weights a little lighter than this (myself included). I generally like to err on the side of caution during meet week, both with my own lifting and with the athletes I coach.

Finally, one thing we all know is that weightlifting is equal parts mental and physical. I think showing up for a competition with the mind prepared is just as important as having the body primed. If you do things during meet week that are going to make the athlete uncertain and under-confident, it’s a problem. I would rather create a situation where the athlete trains like an animal for several weeks and then gets to see the meet week as a little break before the contest. The mental strain of nailing heavy weights gets eased back for a week, and everything is rejuvenated on the big day.

This might involve trial and error. But with common sense and an understanding of training, you should be able to get a good plan put together. Getting completely hammered the night before an important day like my buddy did before he went on TV doesn’t demonstrate common sense. We all know this. So, as with many things in life, just don’t be a moron and you’ll be fine.