Programming For Weightlifting (Part 1)

Programming for Weightlifting is not difficult (at the very basic level). There are only two movements you have to practice. The Snatch and the Clean + Jerk. Everything else is an assistance to help improve those lifts. As mentioned in the previous post, you want to Snatch before you Clean and Jerk. The reason being that the Snatch is faster and technically more difficult to complete than the Clean and Jerk and also requires the lifter to move faster over a larger distance. So you want to be fresh for this. The weight used in the snatch will generally also be lesser than in the Clean + Jerk and any later exercises. If you were to Clean very heavily first, you would be fatiguing your body when it comes time to Snatch, making it difficult to
hold good technique throughout the lift.

After the Snatch is complete you will normally move onto Clean + Jerk. The Snatch having warmed your body up for movements with lighter weight, you won't be cold going into heavy lifts. Sometimes the lift will be seperated into Cleans or Jerks isolated from the other half of the movement, depending on which area requires more work, or just to reduce effort on the lifter (Most people can Clean more than they can Jerk, so it may be that you Clean very heavily one day, but if you were to only Clean to a Jerkable amount, you would be limiting your Clean progress).



After the two competition lifts have been completed, you can move onto assistance exercises. These generally consist of Squats, Front Squats and variations of the two main lifts. And then once these have been completed, the less 'functional' exercises can be completed. Things like Rows, Bench Press, Chinups, exercises that don't have much direct transfer to the two lifts, but will give the person greater overall strength and/or size. Depending on their goals.

So using these concepts, we can assume that a very basic layout for an average day would look like:

Snatch

Clean and Jerk

Squat

Pull

And a person who chose to stick with just that routine multiple times a week would have a very succesful routine. There is no need for anything fancy like supersets, drop sets etc. You won't find bodypart days in a weightlifters routine either. They do not train their body, they train the two lifts they need to, their body is just the tool they use to complete those lifts and as such needs  modifying in specific ways.