Let’s talk a little more about selecting the right lifts and exercises for your training program. I know we’ve gone over this before, but I got some more thoughts about it this morning while I was eating a burrito.

It occurred to me recently that the weightlifting community these days is made up predominately of rookies. The population of this sport has exploded over the last five years, so there are thousands and thousands of new lifters out there. They’re all loaded with motivation and goals, but they haven’t been around the game very long. And just so you know, a “rookie” is somebody who’s been in weightlifting less than three to four years. I know that sounds extreme, especially in an age where everybody thinks they’re sage gurus after six months and two clinics. But trust me, you’ve still got a lot to learn when you’re under the five-year mark.

In other words, we’ve got a new generation of lifters who are high on enthusiasm and low on experience. This means they’re searching the earth for the right training program because they’re hungry for progress. These are mostly intelligent individuals who have the right mentality, so there’s a lot of potential for good learning and development.

You need to know something: this sport runs in cycles. When Bulgaria was bulldozing the international weightlifting scene back in the 80s, their training methods were accepted as gospel. It was a stripped-down approach with almost total focus on the competition lifts and squats, not a wide range of assistance exercises. Because of Bulgaria’s stunning success, many programs adopted their approach. For quite a few years, some of the most effective weightlifting programs in the United States (and many other countries) were developed as adapted versions of big bad Bulgaria.

But now the cycle has turned. Bulgaria has imploded because of multiple drug scandals over the last 20 years (which could obviously be a whole separate chapter in the training conversation), and China is the great white buffalo, so their methods have taken over the holy pedestal of training ideology. Everybody wants to train like the Chinese these days, and it’s understandable, because their training methods are interesting. They do tons of unorthodox exercises with lots of assistance work. Variety, variety, variety. It’s perfect for the ADD Generation. Because of China’s stunning success, many programs have adopted their approach. That includes many of you.

NOTE: Please keep in mind that this description of Chinese training is based on reading, conversations with other lifters and coaches, the internet, etc. None of us really know exactly how they train because…it’s China. However, the broad statements I’ve made are safe ones. We don’t know their specifics, but we know their generalities.

China smashes world records. Bulgaria smashed world records for a long time. And they used different approaches. Okay, cool. Now we come to all of you, and you’re about as far removed from Chinese or Bulgarian circumstances as possible. These countries have professional weightlifting systems where the athletes don’t have to do anything but train and recover, with the finest restorative tools on the planet. You’re a bunch of old people with house payments. That leads to the big question…where do we find some applicable ideas about how YOU should train, and which exercises you should use in your program? That’s the main point of this article. You need to learn about training methods of successful athletes who actually have lives and circumstances that are somewhat similar to yours. Fortunately for you, this ain’t my first rodeo. I’ve seen training systems that led to high-level success without the immense resources and advantages of the professional weightlifting countries in Europe and Asia, and now I’m going to tell you about how they set up their routines. Read on, my friends.

I’ll start with what I know best…

I want to tell you about the weightlifting program I built my career with. As I’ve mentioned before in other articles, I’ve been a member of the Calpian Weightlifting Club, coached by John Thrush, since 1992. The Calpians are based in the state of Washington, where I lived and trained with the club full-time from 1993 through 2004. Those of you who have read my stuff before are probably familiar with this.

We were a typical American weightlifting program…a bunch of athletes with complete commitment to competitive Olympic lifting and no financial support from anywhere. If you’ve seen the American Weightlifting movie, you get the drift. Some of us were going to school, all of us had jobs, we weren’t taking drugs, and we were all broke. And like all American programs, we had to develop a training method that was realistic for our circumstances. We couldn’t just copy China or Bulgaria because our conditions were nothing like theirs. This is the point that relates directly to most of you, because you’re in the same situation we were.

Through his extensive body of experience as a coach and athlete, John Thrush developed a training system that produced the following results (These are the Calpian accomplishments from the late 80s through early 2000s, and this is just what I can remember for certain. There’s probably some stuff I’m missing.):

Senior National Champions- 13
American record holders (junior, senior, university)- 8
Junior National Champions- 11
University National Champions- 10
Olympic Trials Competitors- 14
World/Pam Am/Olympic Team members- 11
Team- 2000 Senior National Champions, top 3 at the National Championship and American Open for 10-15 years
National Championship/American Open medalists- Too many to count

And I know some of you are saying, “that was 25 years ago; things have come a long way since then.” You think anything that happened before your generation is old news. So…just so you know that our dinosaur days are still relevant now, here are a few of our notable lifts:

- 166 kg C&J by a 75 kg junior male (365 lbs. at 165 bodyweight)
- 200 kg C&J by a 90 kg junior male (440 lbs. at 198 bodyweight)
- 113 kg C&J by a 53 kg female (249 lbs. at 117 bodyweight)
- 100.5 kg SN and 120 kg C&J by a 69 kg female (221/264 lbs. at 152 bodyweight)
- 115 kg SN and 152.5 kg C&J by a 64 kg male (253/336 lbs. at 141 bodyweight)
- 145 SN and 187.5 C&J by a 85 kg male (319/413 lbs. at 187 bodyweight)

So before you chuckle and dismiss the antiquated old days of yore, I humbly ask you to consider the fact that our top lifts from that era would still kick most of your asses into a different time zone.

As I said…we’re talking about programs and exercise selection, right? Okay, let me give you a few details that might interest you. First of all, our entire program consisted of the following exercises:

- Snatch
- Clean and Jerk
- Snatch Pulls
- Clean Pulls
- Rack Jerk (sometimes from behind the neck)
- Power Clean
- Front Squat
- Back Squat
- Stop Squat (back squat with a one-second pause in the bottom)
- 3 or 4 assistance exercises like Push Press and Seated Good Mornings.

That’s it. We’re talking about nine primary exercises and two to three minor ones. You know that lift I listed above, the 113 kg C&J from a 53 kg female? That was Melanie Roach. I saw Mel’s entire development, from the day she walked into the gym and picked up a barbell for the first weightlifting workout of her life…all the way to the 1998 National Championship where she hit this 113@53, which was an unofficial world record at the time (world records couldn’t be set at national meets, but her 113 beat it). The training system I’m describing produced this result. And here are a few other Calpian program notes:

- No block work (we didn’t even have a set of blocks in the gym)
- No power snatch (I personally went from 120 kg to 155 kg in the snatch over the course of five years, without doing a single power snatch the entire time)
- Training was not planned by percentages

I was there for almost 12 years, and this was how we all trained…all the time. As you can see, it’s a fairly limited arsenal of exercises, more narrow than a lot of current trendy programs. We didn’t do some things that many people are in love with these days. And our results were more competitive than most other programs that were operating on the same playing field as us.

Here’s a little more for you…

You’re all looking for useful information that can make you successful, so I’m sharing this with you because it’s an approach that made a lot of athletes successful who had “life situations” that were similar to yours. If you want to see how our actual training was organized, here’s a sample week of our program. It’s actually one of my personal training weeks from 1993, taken straight from my old lifting journal. This is something I included in a former article on the Catalyst Athletics website, so you might have seen it before. Regardless, this is what a basic Calpian week looked like. I’ve included every set and rep I did that week, warm-ups too (everything in kilos).

Week of 9/20/93 (Matt Foreman)

Monday
- Snatch- 50x3, 50x3, 60x3, 70x3, 80x3, 90x3, 100x3, 105x2, 110x1, 115x1, 120x1, 125x1, 105x2, 110x1, 115(miss), 115x1
- Clean Pulls- 120x3, 150x3, 190 4x4
- Back Squat- 150x3, 187.5x5, 197.5x3, 207.5x2, 190x5
- Seated Good Mornings- 140 2x8

Tuesday
- Power Clean- 60x3, 60x3, 90x3, 90x3, 110x3, 120x2, 130 3x2
- Rack Jerk- 90x3, 90x3, 120x2, 130x1, 140x1, 150x1, 160x1, 167.5x1, 172.5(miss), 172.5x1

Wednesday
- Clean and Jerk- 60x3, 60x2, 90x2, 90x2, 110x2, 120x1, 130x1, 142.5x1, 147.5x1, 152.5x1, 142.5x1, 147.5x1, 152.5x1
- Clean Pulls- 180 3x3
- Push Press- 60x3, 90x3, 90x3, 110x3, 115 3x3

Thursday
- Snatch- 50x3, 50x3, 60x3, 70x3, 80x3, 90x3, 100x3, 105x3, 110x2, 115x1, 107.5x3, 112.5x2, 117.5(miss), 117.5(miss), 117.5x1
- Snatch Pulls- 140 3x3
- Stop Squat (back squat with a one-second pause in the bottom)- 120x3, 130x3, 180x2, 197.5 3x3
- Seated Good Mornings- 145 3x5

Saturday
- Clean- 60x3, 60x3, 90x3, 90x3 110x3, 120x2, 130x2, 140x2, 145x2, 150x2, 140x2, 145x2, 150x2
- Clean Pulls- 185 3x3
- Front Squat- 60x3, 110x3, 140x3, 165x2, 175 3x3
- Seated Good Mornings- 140 2x8

Needless to say, we trained very, very hard. Please understand that this was a program designed for young athletes in the prime of their athletic lives. If you’re 38 years old and you try to do this program, it’ll probably eat you alive. However, you can definitely get some good ideas just from looking at our overall template and how we arranged our workouts.

And let’s nip the misinterpretations in the bud…

Now, let me give you a list of things I’m NOT saying:
This system is better than any other.
Power snatches and block work are stupid.
Percentage training doesn’t work.
Programs that train differently from this are doing something wrong.

None of those are true, and they’re certainly not the point I’m trying to make. Make sure you understand that I’m not disrespecting or contradicting any other training methods with this article. There are multiple ways to skin a cat. What I’ve given you here is not the ONLY way. It was simply OUR way, and the results speak for themselves.

When you’re learning about weightlifting, it helps to get a look at a wide range of successful methods. Some will say 2 + 4 + 12 + 1 + 1 = 20. Others will say 17 + 3 = 20. They both get to the same end result, but they use different combinations to get there. The only ones you need to be wary of are the ones that haven’t demonstrated the ability to consistently add up to 20. You also need to be realistic about trying to replicate the methods of programs that are using some kind of galactically advanced calculus equations that are completely out of your league. Am I saying we can’t learn from China and Bulgaria? No. Am I saying we can’t imitate their training programs verbatim if we don’t have their complete system? Well…yeah. Duh.

If you really want to grow in this sport, you need to accumulate a lot of information. There will be times when you need to stick with a system and swear by it as gospel. And there will also be times when you need to make changes. All of those stages will be influenced by the new things you learn. This article is another opportunity for you to learn something. Got it? Good.