Weightlifting Forums

Elle wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2025 8:46 am The frequency is low, but the volume seems high. Team Italy do the opposite, high frequency and low volume. A high number of monthly reps is useless for C. and it is characteristic of nations that use "special vitamins". In an interview C. said that the session must be short (40'), I don't remember exactly why (maybe for hormonal reasons).

"The way I train is good for people without drugs but the way other people train is for people with drugs" - literally everyone. I'm sure there will be another coach who has clean athletes who trains with lots of volume saying that minimalist training only works with drugs.

Volume per session is high for sure in the Chinese men's team, but frequency being low means weekly volume is not unusual. Increasing frequency is almost always a way to increase weekly volume.

I agree to an extent that extremely high weekly volumes (usually achieved through very high frequency) are characteristic to an extent of drug based systems like Bulgaria or much of the Eastern bloc. But on the other hand, Japanese and particularly South Korean lifters have enormous weekly tonnages and they have consistently produced good lifters in the current era with pretty stringent domestic testing (with rare positives) and no international positives.

It's a logical enough statement based off some basic assumptions but I don't think there's enough evidence to have strong beliefs about it one way or the other. My bias is definitely towards lower volumes but I can acknowledge it's only a bias.

I think with the high volumes we see from Japan and South Korea (and China) is due to their sport school systems. The impression I have from the SK textbook is that all the kids start training around the same age, everything starts with like 5x5 (5 total sets) for snatch, clean, jerk, pull, squat, presses, rows, etc, and grows from there on top of GPP before/after training. GPP work is fairly low intensity, acts as a foundation early on, basically becomes just a physical warmup later. Volume increases in accordance to increase in results (now you gotta do more sets to warm up to work weight). On top of the general rule of thumb I see globally of 2 sets at every weight building to your top working weight(s). A decade or so later we get athletes like Toshiki or Sang-yeon on social media with their fuck around and find out training styles.