Programming. When most of you hear that word, you probably start to perk up just a little bit. It grabs your attention, and you go on high alert because you think there might be some information coming that you could use as a new weapon in your battle for bigger lifts. Absolutely everybody I’ve ever met in weightlifting considers programming to be one of the single most important topics that exist. The way coaches and athletes set up their training plans, the way they arrange their daily and weekly workout routine, the lifts they select, the volume and intensity of their heavy attempts, the way they structure their long-term training in order to peak successfully for a competition…these are the issues involved in programming, and there’s a bloody good reason why so many people place such huge importance on this topic. The reason is that there are an endless number of ways to design a training program, and the method you choose will be one of the biggest deciding factors in how successful your weightlifting career is.

If you’ve had a little experience in this sport, you’ve learned that almost all weightlifting coaches use different programs. Some of them have some common ground, and they look similar when you see them on paper. But there are also some large variations between programs. For example, you’ll read an article from a coach in Vancouver about the training program he uses with his athletes, and he’ll give you a detailed outline for how his lifters have their workouts planned out. Then, a few days later, you’ll read another article from a coach in Florida about the exact same topic, but this coach’s program is different from the Vancouver guy’s. You compare the two methods, and it becomes really obvious that these coaches don’t use the same approach to train their lifters. Okay, got it.

Now, here’s where things start to get confusing. Both of these coaches have been very successful. They each have a long list of outstanding high-level weightlifters that they’ve produced using the programs you read. The Vancouver coach trains his lifters using an A-B-C method, and the Florida dude has his athletes doing X-Y-Z. They don’t use the same program, but both of them are taking lifters to the top. This puts you, the learner, in a dilemma. As George Clooney said in O Brother, Where Art Thou? “Damn, we’re in a tight spot!” You’re trying to pick the program that will possibly take you to the same record-breaking lifts as the athletes you’re reading about. But you can’t make up your mind which one you should go with. They obviously both work, but which one will work best FOR YOU?

Let me tell you where this is heading. This article is actually an introduction to a programming project that will be included in the upcoming issues of The Performance Menu. For the next seven months, I’ll continue to write the same kind of tantalizing articles I normally put in the magazine. It’ll be business as usual, and I hope you keep reading because I’ve got some gnarly ideas on the burner. However, we’re also going to include an additional, separate section each month. These extra features will be a chronological analysis of a highly successful Olympic lifting program. This will be a chance for you to examine a full year-long, completely documented training journal that was used by one of the top weightlifting teams in America. In other words, you get to see a comprehensive “year in the life” of a weightlifter, and a program that added seventy-seven pounds to a particular lifter’s total in less than twelve months.

Did that last part get your attention? I hope so. I need to start explaining this project, so let’s get to it. Would you believe that this whole thing started from a broken hose in my bathroom?

Freaking Cheap Piece of Crap!!!!

Four months ago, I came home at the end of a long day at work and found that my house was flooded. A crummy little water hose in my bathroom just spontaneously snapped sometime during the day, and it gushed out water until I came home and turned it off. It must have been going on for six or seven hours, because there was about two inches of standing water all throughout my house when I walked in the front door. Every bit of flooring was completely ruined, and it all had to be replaced. I called my insurance company and started the process, which was about as fun as jamming an ice pick in my toe. It took a little over a month for the construction company to basically re-floor the whole place, and my wife and I had to move everything we owned out of the house and into a storage pod while the work was being done. During this whole moving ordeal, I came across an old box of weightlifting magazines in the back of one of my closets (the water hadn’t ruined it, thank God). I probably hadn’t seen this box in ten years, and I opened it up to see what was in there. Guess what I found? An old yellow notebook…

I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. This notebook was the training journal I kept during 1993. For an entire year, I wrote down every single lift I did, every single day, nothing missed and nothing left out. Literally every rep of every exercise is in there. Warm-up sets, snatches, cleans, rack jerks, squats, pulls, presses, all of it. I documented everything I did with a barbell for fifty-six weeks. When I ran out of paper in the notebook, I just stuck it in a box and forgot about it. That was nineteen years ago.

Now, let me tell you what makes this notebook special. 1993 was the year I moved to Washington to train with the Calpian Weightlifting Club. Those of you who have been reading Performance Menu for a while have probably heard me make frequent reference to this. I started Olympic lifting in 1990 when I was seventeen, living in Arizona. In January 1993, I moved to Auburn, Washington to train with the Calpians and coach John Thrush. At that time, the Calpians were consistently one of the top weightlifting teams in the United States in both the men’s and women’s divisions. Thrush, US Junior World Team Head Coach and USAW Vice-President, had already produced multiple national champions, American record holders, and world team members. There were at least ten nationally-ranked lifters training for him when I joined the team. The Calpians had a huge reputation in American weightlifting in those years as a national powerhouse, and I went there to dedicate my life to weightlifting.

When I got to Washington in January ’93, I knew that I was joining something special. I wanted to keep a record of what I was doing, so that’s where the notebook came into the picture. I kept it in my training bag, and at the end of every workout I would take a few minutes and write down everything I did that day. As I said earlier, I kept this going for a little over a year and then put the notebook in storage. When I found it a few months ago, I told Greg Everett about it and asked if he would be interested in finding a way to use the information as some kind of programming analysis for Performance Menu readers. We put our enormous brains together and came up with the idea to basically publish the whole program in monthly installments. This article is the introduction to it, and next month will bring the first section. Each installment will cover approximately seven weeks of training.

Every member of the Calpian team was following the same basic program, with some small changes made for individual lifters who had specific needs or deficiencies. If any of the other lifters in the gym had been keeping training logs, they would have looked almost identical to this. The national/international results of our team continued to improve and make progress throughout 1993 and for several years afterwards. In 2000, the Calpians won the United States Senior National Team Championship. In other words, the training approach contained in this journal made us the best weightlifting team in America.

Facts and Figures…

You’ll be reading a lot of numbers if you decide to check out this program in the upcoming months, but I need to give you some basic start-to-finish information right here in the beginning. I’ll also include this information in each monthly installment of the program, just so people will know what’s going on if they pick up and start reading in the middle of the series. These are my personal stats from 1993 (age, bodyweight, best lifts).

January 1993
Age: 20
Bodyweight: 101 kg
Snatch: 120 kg
Clean and Jerk: 150 kg
Competition Total: 265 kg
Clean: 155 kg
Rack Jerk: 155 kg
Back Squat: 227.5 kg
Front Squat: 180 kg

December 1993
Age: 21
Bodyweight: 102 kg
Snatch: 132.5 kg
Clean and Jerk: 167.5 kg
Competition Total: 300 kg
Clean: 167.5 kg
Rack Jerk: 180 kg
Back Squat: 222.5 kg
Front Squat: 180 kg

Squats: You probably noticed that my back squat dropped five kilos, according to this. Here’s the explanation for that. When I squatted 227.5 kg prior to January 1993, it was done slightly below parallel depth with light knee wraps, more like a powerlifting squat than an Olympic squat. When I moved to Washington, I was ordered to start squatting with deeper, stricter Olympic form and I had to lower my workout weights because of this. The 222.5 kg I did at the end of this program was a much more disciplined Olympic full squat, wearing nothing on my knees. This is where you can see one of the most important points of this program. It wasn’t so much about how much weight we were squatting; it was more about how strict our squatting form was. The same basic explanation applies to my front squats. When you read the installments of this program, you’ll see how we used squats to increase our competition lifts, not just to squat more.

You can read the numbers for yourselves. My best official competition total went up thirty-five kilos in this year (77 pounds). This happened while maintaining basically the same bodyweight. And just in case any of you start to jump to any devious conclusions, I want to add that I was completely clean. I took no steroids or any kind of performance-enhancing drugs, aside from legal anti-inflammatories. I add that only to emphasize that the progress we made came from hard work, not from artificial enhancement. That isn’t meant to start a war about the drug issue or anything like that. It’s just a point that’s worth mentioning because a lot of people (including me) get suspicious when they see big increases.

In the coming months, you’ll obviously have a chance to see what our daily and weekly routines looked like. But I’ll give you the basic template of how our program was designed now. This is the outline of our training week:

Monday

- Competition lift- either snatches, clean and jerks, or cleans
- Pulls- either snatch pulls or clean pulls
- Squats- either back squats, front squats, or stop squats (stop squats are a back squat with a one-second pause at the bottom, some people call these pause squats)
- Seated Good Mornings

Tuesday

- Rack Jerks
- Power Cleans

Wednesday

- Competition lift- either snatches, clean and jerks, or cleans
- Pulls- either snatch pulls or clean pulls
- Pressing- some kind of pressing exercise, usually military press or push press

Thursday

- Competition lift- either snatches, clean and jerks, or cleans
- Pulls- either snatch pulls or clean pulls
- Squats- either back squats, front squats, or stop squats (stop squats are a back squat with a one-second pause at the bottom, some people call these pause squats)
- Seated Good Mornings

Saturday

- Competition lift- either snatches, clean and jerks, or cleans
- Pulls- either snatch pulls or clean pulls
- Squats- either back squats, front squats, or stop squats (stop squats are a back squat with a one-second pause at the bottom, some people call these pause squats)
- Seated Good Mornings

That’s pretty much what it looked like. Here are a few other general notes:

- Training days- Our training days were basically set in stone at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday. We never trained on Friday or Sunday, unless there was some kind of rare scheduling glitch.

- We had a very strong team approach, and we always trained together. Our team trained at 5:00 on weekdays and noon on Saturdays.

- Sets and Reps- In the competition lifts, we usually did triples or doubles with our light warm-ups, and singles with our top weights. In the clean and jerk, our top weights were always done in singles. In the snatch, we would sometimes work heavy doubles or, occasionally, triples. In pulls and squats, the sets were usually three-five reps. We rarely did anything higher than sets of five reps, and we would sometimes work as low as heavy doubles in front and back squats. We rarely did heavy singles in the squats.

- John typed up our workout programs individually and gave them to us on paper at the beginning of each cycle. Our workouts were always on these programs with all weights, sets, and reps planned out. We basically just followed our programs to the letter. Nobody made up their own workouts and nobody deviated from the plan. It was a very structured environment.

- We were an Olympic weightlifting team. The people in our gym were there to compete at the national and, hopefully, international level. There was a very single-minded purpose to what we were doing. I was one of several lifters who had moved to Washington from somewhere else to train as a Calpian. For many years, our team was a magnet for lifters around the country who wanted to take their lifting to the next level.

Okay, there you have a general introduction into what we’re going to include in the coming issues of the magazine. You’ve probably already got some useful ideas and tips just from reading this, but the real meat of the program is yet to come. Every coach and athlete is looking for a training program that will yield the greatest results. And anybody with any experience in weightlifting understands that there is no one single magic program. Championship results can be obtained using various methods, as we explained earlier. There were obviously other programs around the United States that were training differently than the Calpians, and they still reached high achievement levels. We weren’t the only ones with the keys to the kingdom. However, our performance record clearly proves that the way we trained was more effective than many other approaches. This training journal is a proven example of successful programming, and it is designed to give you extensive ideas and resources that you can incorporate into your weightlifting career. You, the coaches and athletes, can use the information contained here in various ways. If you want to become a better weightlifter, analyze and explore this program as extensively as you can.