12 Week Program

No, I'm not talking about a 12 step program to help cure your addiction to stuffed animals, I'm talking about Olympic lifting. On August 24th, I'm going to start a 12 week cycle, in which there are 3 micro-cycles; strength, power, and competition. I spent a fair amount of time developing it, and now it's time to see how it works. My own ideas about training are meaningless until they are applied successfully. So, hopefully the next 12 weeks will give me the insight into what needs to be tweaked, changed, or thrown out entirely. I'm going to post the workout the night before (e.g., Monday's workout will be posted Sunday night), and if I'm bored enough, I'll put in what percentages I did during the actual workout. Hopefully it'll be fun, and if you have any comments, I'd love to hear them.

For the next week and a half I plan on doing whatever I want, but getting some sort of a base with the purpose of not being entirely unprepared for the 24th.

A little bit about my program; it was compiled out of things I experienced from Burgener, Fleschler, Garcy, and Cioroslan, along with influences from Zatsiorsky, Pierce, Stone, Simmons (not Richard), Glassman and others. Most of the exercises are tailored to my needs as a lifter, so it may not be able to benefit everybody, though it's still pretty well balanced. The whole goal is to make a lifter who will be strong in all areas and maintain physical longevity. Like surfers who pride themselves on being good swimmers, fisherman, body surfers, etc., I want to create something similar with O-lifters; a great overall weight lifting athlete. It may work great, it may fail miserably, but it's at least worth a try. There's a lot of variation (which I personally like) to keep the body guessing and the mind from going numb. That's basically it in a nutshell.

A major component of the program however is intensity.  I could write the greatest program in the world for somebody (not that this is it) and it wouldn't make any difference if it were executed poorly, with minimal effort and drive.  So, make sure that you push yourself when you need to, rest when necessary, and do whatever you can to become a well oiled machine.

I also developed an Excel program that I call "The Randomizer." I'm going to post those workouts as well. It's pretty much a hopper, but with the majority of the exercises helping to cure me of my major weakness, conditioning.  It's not meant to be included with the 12 week cycle, it's just another option for anybody who was interested in something different, but didn't want O-lifting only.