Block 1 #11 - short day

Power clean + jerk 90/3+2 x 2 105/1+1 x 5
Clean pull 105/4 x 2 117/3 130/2 x 2
Seated good morning 70 - 4x4

So the workouts for this stage are scheduled to have hard days on Mon/Wed/Fri and easier/lighter/shorter days on Tues/Sat. I like this for increasing volume because you get 5 quality workouts a week and still can recover. I understand why Sheiko programs the way he does and why Nathan only does 3 days per week: the Olympic lifts basically leave no fatigue from one day to the next while powerlifts will mess you up. I also like the way that the hard days are concentrated: much more volume on the hard days than the easy days in order to allow recovery. This is also what Sheiko does, in that you don't do 85%/2 x 3 on Monday then 70%/5 x 4 on Tuesday. You do them on the same day and recover the next. Only when one day is "full" do you add an additional day to increase the volume, rather than adding more workouts distributed evenly across the week whenever you want more volume. The Russians even go so far as to resort to 2-a-days on the high volume days (at higher qualification) rather than moving the additional work to one of the light or off days.

Another interesting thing is that high intensity and high volume tend to go together. If a workout is very high volume then there is a good chance that I'll be doing 90%+ lifts in it even though I'll be doing tons of work before and after. I don't really have a good explaination for this, it's just an observation. This occurs more frequently in the preparatory phase though. In the competition phase volume is lowered and intensity is higher: 90% lifts almost every workout (about 2/3 of the workouts I think, off hand), so you don't do an entire workout in the one of the lifts then go for 90%+.

Ok, I need to actually work today so I guess this post is over.... If anyone wants to talk about how this may relate to powerlifting go ahead, I like discussion and we haven't had many lately.