Help With Scheduling Oly Lifts Into a Diverse Program

Hey all,

First, thanks to anyone for your time and for your advice. This may not be a conventional question, and if it’s been answered before my apologies (I tried searching but admittedly I sometimes blank on what to search for). Anyways, I am currently making a diverse program in terms of my training. My hope is to improve my physique, sports performance, and overall athleticismm, but also have a little fun in my training. My issue right now is that I’m not quite sure what to do the day before my Olympic lifts. This is the first week of my new program, and I am doing plyometrics the day before but I feel like this might take away from my oly’s. I’d like to incorporate conditioning work, but am kind of stumped as to what I should do. Here’s the basic premise of my program:

Monday: Chest and Back Hybrid Training (lots of pull ups and push ups done in circuits (it’s been very effective for chest development and overall physique and I’m quite happy with this).

Tuesday: Plyometrics

Wednesday: Olympic Lifting finishing with squats

Thursday: Yoga

Friday: Same Chest and Back workout (vain I know, but it’s doing wonders for my physique)

Saturday: Shoulders/Arms/ and a few hours of squash.

Sunday: Rest for now, may become 2nd day of oly lifting

I was thinking of maybe doing a sprint/walk TABATA protocol for conditioning on Tuesday (the legit 20 on 10 off 4 minute protocol) but again am concerned about taking away from my Wednesday training session. I’m obviously not a pure oly lifter or bodybuilder…to be honest I want to look good and perform well in athletics while still enjoying my program (I’m doing this shift because I’ve gotten really bored with standard training programs and this provides me an opportunity to meet people in the fitness community, which is also important to me). Thanks again for any help!

No disrespect but you sound like a crossfitter with no box to call home.

You haven’t provided any details about the rep scheme and volume, which is fine, but could be useful if you wanted equally detailed feed back in kind.

So… Here is what I would say. With such a wide focus, you will likely not progress especially fast (after th beginners curve) so I don’t know that I would devote an entire training day.

Consider combining with your plyo day and give yourself another rest day. Unless you’re juicing-- have at another session or 4.

Otherwise, I can’t see anything out of line for someone just wanting exposure to the sport.

Supply some training videos if you would like critique!

Hey Drew,

Thanks for the response. No disrespect taken; frankly I expected to be flamed much worse. I suppose you could call it crossfit…in the sense that it’s training across a variety of disciplines and sports…and I have no major beef with crossfit programming, just crossfit culture (the sense of entitlement I see in that community bother me…and their idea that they produce the most fit athletes I think is just flat out wrong). I very much appreciate your thoughts and input on my question. Below are some thoughts/ideas I’ve had if it’s of any interest to you.

My goal for training is to have a good natural looking physique and be athletic, and for oly lifts…I want to be proficient at the lifts and hopefully over the next year or so put up respectable numbers (I’m pretty long limbed and have never been elite in terms of strength, so right now I have no serious aspirations of competing …just want to take advantage of the physique and power benefits of having some oly lifting abilities (honestly, I think it’s one of the best ways you can balance out over compensations and strength throughout complete range of motion, when done correctly)). However, I might sign on for the Sunday class as well, to get in a second day of lifting (Do you think twice a week would yield decent results or is full dedication to oly lifts the only way to see strong results in your opinion?).

I’ve joined a weightlifting club and have two coaches who compete (1 is in his late 20’s, the other is a 65 year old masters competitior who has done the pan am games and still lifts in masters competitively, so I feel pretty lucky to have that). These guys are going to take care of the programming and technique for me so I didn’t provide any details in regards to that, and also because I’m still at the beginnning stages (working on technqiue, no true 1rm established…so not much to speak of there). I more or less posted this here to see if anyone had any thoughts or ideas on how to round out the program or how best to train the day before oly lifts without taking away from that training day, and maybe inspire people to pursue fitness in a way that’s is unconventional but fun.

Anyways, I’ll update my progress here and let you know how it works out for me. And, I’m thinking I’m going to ditch plyo and do 2 boxing/arms days for the extra conditioning (good cardio, and fun, without being really explosive like plyo). It might exhaust my shoulders bit for the jerk, but I’ll adjust my programming as necessary if my lifting progresses to a point where it’s an issue.

Program
chest/back circuits monday friday,
boxing/arms tuesday/saturday (with some stretching and band work at the end to work on flexibility issues for the oly’s)
yoga thursday,
oly lifts on wednesday and potentially sunday, with maybe a squash session in the late afternoon.

Every 3 weeks I’ll take an active rest week to let my body recover and I’ll have a pretty nice refeed and carb up one day on the weekend to assist all the training. I’ll maybe skip a day of boxing here and there for extra recovery.