Week 4, Day 1: Lower volume week, plus discussion of "jumps"

Clean and jerk: 6 singles
Back squat: 5RM
Halting clean deadlift: 1 heavy set of 5 reps

You read that right: no drop sets on the back squats today! Just work up to a heavy set of 5 today (2-3 kg heavier than last week). Thursday will have the same reduction in volume on the front squats. Next week will be a lighter week, with some max testing at the end of next week, so hit it hard this week, eat lots of steaks, and get lots of sleep and start preparing yourself to hit some big PRs! The 6 singles on the clean and jerk are again 6 singles at a set load. Try to increase the load 2-3 kg over that used last week if you were successful in all of your lifts last week. On the clean deadlift, work up to a single heavy set of 5 reps. You should take at least 3 warm-up lifts to get up to that heavy set.

I want to take a moment to talk about taking warm-up jumps in training as you work up to your heavy (or work) sets. First, we should establish that the purpose of warm-up sets extends far beyond just the obvious of "getting warm". Starting light and making increments toward your working weight for the day certainly serves the purpose of warming the body up to prepare for exercise, but if that were the only purpose of the warm-up sets then our dynamic warm-up would be sufficient for this, and we could just put on our working weight or that PR load and go for it. More importantly, the warm-up sets help to warm-up the movement itself and get the neurons firing like they need to in order to handle heavy weights. The lighter sets allow PRACTICING the movement, and sorting out technique issues and engraining good movement patterns with lighter loads that carry over into the heavy sets for the day. Taking huge jumps (especially approaching working weights) is detrimental to this whole process, because the bar will feel drastically different from rep to rep if the load on the bar is drastically different. This is no good, because we want each and every rep to look identical whether it is 50% or 100% on the bar. Taking smaller jumps, especially approaching that 100%, makes this easier to accomplish. It can be easy to be "surprised" by how heavy the bar feels when big jumps are taken, and this is absolutely NOT what we want to feel when lifting! Taking smaller jumps makes the bar feel more consistent from rep to rep, and will make technique more consistent from rep to rep.

The flip-side of this discussion is that an excessive amount of warm-ups can be detrimental to performance on the work sets for the day if the warm-ups are overly exhausting. What this means is that a balance must be found between taking smaller jumps and choosing a reasonable amount of warm-up sets. A good strategy is to take bigger jumps early on when the weights are lighter, and smaller jumps as the weights approach working weight. On the snatch and clean and jerk, taking much more than a 5 kg jump to a PR is probably a bad idea. You might get lucky and make the lift, but more than likely your technique will change significantly from your last lift because of the big increase in weight to something you are not used to. But taking 5 kg jumps all the way from an empty bar to working weight would be ridiculous, so taking bigger jumps early on is a reasonable thing to do. Also, it's important to master each warm-up before moving up. If you are trying to work up to 100 kg on the snatch, but 70 kg feels terrible and you miss a rep, don't just move on and put 80 kg on the bar, expecting to fix it on the next jump. These lighter weights are the time to work out whatever technique issues you may be having that made 70 kg dicey!

Squats are somewhat of a different story, because they are much less technique dependent than the snatch and clean and jerk. Again we want to warm-up the movement pattern, get the body used to having that heavy weight on your shoulders, and get the neurons firing like we want them to, but we don't want to overly tire ourselves out for the working sets. Also, we've typically already done a heck of a lot of squatting already in the workout with the snatches or clean and jerks, so less warm-up lifts should be needed for the squat specifically. Thus, larger jumps can be taken for the squatting movements. If it takes 7 warm-ups to get to working weight on the snatch, maybe only 3 or 4 warm-ups are necessary to get up to working weight on the squat, especially if you know exactly what weight you are shooting for on the squat. This should be sufficient to prepare for squat work, and if you need more warm-ups than that, perhaps the snatches or cleans were not challenging enough!