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TRAINING FOR THE SUPERTOTAL
Articles, Strength and performance, Training
Nothing says that you are a well-rounded strength athlete more than having a high Supertotal. You literally can’t have any weaknesses; nor can you have poor mobility. You need strength, explosiveness and great work capacity. The later simply to be able to handle the workload required to excel in the 5 disciplines involved in the super total.
What is the super total you ask? It’s the combination of the powerlifting total (made up of your max on the squat, bench press and deadlift) and the weightlifting total (combined total of your snatch and clean & jerk). You could even go further by including the clean and strict press to make up a Mega total, combining the powerlifting total and the pre-1972 weightlifting total in which the press, snatch and clean & jerk were contested.
Some notable Supertotals include:
Mark Henry: 1460kg/3212lbs (400kg on the weightlifting total and 1060kg on the powerlifting total)
Mykhail Kokliev: 1457.5kg/3206lbs (450kg and 1007.5kg)
Shane Hamman: 1452kg/3194lbs (427.3kg and 1024.7kg)
David Rigert: 1362.5kg*/2997.5lbs (402.5kg and 966kg*) Rigert’s numbers are extrapolated to a degree. On squats he did a best of 300kg x 6 but never tested his 1RM. He also deadlifted 400kg but never pushed harder to save his back… for the weightlifting numbers I used his best competition lifts, he lifted heavier in training. And these were done at a bodyweight of 100kg or less.
Dimitry Klokov: 1338kg/2942.5lbs (890kg and 448kg) also at a much lighter body weight
Having a good super total is badass. It shows that you are a well-rounded lifter and overall athlete. So, it is certainly a goal worth shooting for. Big bonus: training for a big Supertotal will give you a very powerful physique.
WHAT COMMON ELEMENTS ARE THERE BETWEEN THE POWERLIFTS AND THE OLYMPIC LIFTS?
Powerlifters and weightlifters share two major things in common:
- Strong legs
- A strong back
Both are needed to excel in the powerlifts (squat and deadlift) as well as the Olympic lifts.
That’s good because if you focus your training on maximizing leg and back strength, it will transfer well to 4 of the 5 lifts involved in the Supertotal.
THE MAIN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE POWERLIFTS AND THE OLYMPIC LIFTS
Yes, leg and back strength are key for both portions of the Supertotal, but they are expressed through different exercises.
If you are to maximize your Supertotal you will likely need to use a “powerlifting-style squat” (low bar squat) as well as either a traditional or sumo deadlift.
Both of these lifts have a lower transfer to the Olympic lifts. The traditional deadlift can even go as far as having a negative impact on clean & jerk pulling.
Ironically, the sumo deadlift will have less negative carryover to the clean and snatch because the motor pattern is different enough that there will be no motor confusion during the first pull of the clean. Whereas with the traditional deadlift, the pattern is similar enough (but different enough) to pollute the clean pull pattern.
As for the squat, all weightlifters use an “Olympic squat” (high bar squat) and the front squat to improve their lifts.
Then there is the possible impact of the bench press on shoulder range of motion.
Granted, some weightlifters do bench press occasionally. In fact, prior to the removal of the press in 1972, most lifters did some bench and incline press work to support their overhead press (but look at the snatch and jerk position of lifters from that era, they tend to have the bar more forward overhead, having the muscles do much more work as opposed to modern lifters whose structure holds a lot of the weight).
But there is a difference between doing the bench press as an auxiliary lift and training to maximize your bench press. The former will likely not negatively affect your overhead mobility but the amount of work and muscular development from the later could. Especially if you have short arms.
RDL AND HIGH BAR SQUAT: THE HATFIELD SOLUTION
Fred Hatfield (Dr.Squat) is one of the all-time best powerlifters. His greatest feat undoubtably being a 1014lbs squat at 45 years of age (back when supportive gear offered minimal gains).
Dr.Squat didn’t do the low-bar, powerlifting style squat or traditional deadlift most of the year. The bulk of the year was spent doing high-bar squats (and safety bar squats which, I think, he invented) and stiff legged or Romanian deadlifts.
He would switch to the low-bar squat and traditional deadlift only when he would begin a meet preparation (8-12 weeks prior to the competition).
I think that this is one big piece of the puzzle when it comes to putting up a big Supertotal.
You should divide your training year into periods where you focus more on the Olympic lifts and periods where you focus more on the powerlifts. You keep training them all year round, but with different levels of importance.
Essentially, you’d have 3 types of blocks:
- Weightlifting focus
- Powerlifting focus / weightlifting maintenance
- Supertotal peaking
Due to the complexity of the snatch and clean & jerk, the weightlifting focus block should be longer than the other two; something like 10-12 weeks. You still build the strength necessary to lift big weights on the powerlifts by doing a lot of high-bar squats and RDLs while having some work (smaller amount) on the bench press and other forms of pressing.
The powerlifting focus block would be a strategy similar to what Hatfield did: replace the high-bar squat with the low-bar squat and the RDL with either the traditional or sumo deadlift. Increase bench press frequency and keep the Olympic lifts at maintenance level, mostly focusing on improving your technical efficiency. This block should last 6-8 weeks.
The Supertotal peaking block is where you prepare for your test. At this point all five lifts are trained pretty much equally, although it is possible to put a bit more emphasis on a lift that is holding you back. During this phase, assistance work is pretty much dropped completely to allow you to spend enough volume on all 5 test lifts. This block will lasts 4-6 weeks.
Why not just train all 5 lifts hard all the way through? Essentially training like in the Supertotal peaking block for the whole training cycle?
Because the amount of work during that phase is hard to sustain over the long term and also that level of volume doesn’t really leave any available resources for assistance work. This makes it really hard to correct weaknesses which are holding you back. Finally, the more big lifts you want to improve simultaneously, the slower the individual improvement on each lift. By focussing only on 2 or 3 lifts most of the time you will have a faster rate of improvement than if you push all 5 lifts hard at the same time.
THE WEIGHTLIFTING FOCUS BLOCK
I want to mention that this article is not a training program. I present information to help you design your own plan. The best plan will be the one that respects your reality (not everyone can train 5-6 days a week, or even 4, for example) and addresses your specific weakness(es).
In this block you would train very much like a weightlifter. I’m aware that there are several training systems out there. I would personally recommend using an approach similar to that of the Russians. Here, the focus is on technical mastery and accumulating plenty of volume in the 75-85% range. While the Bulgarian approach of maxing out almost every session can work with lifters who already have very efficient technique, it is far from being an adequate approach for someone still building mastery.
For the Olympic lifts I would recommend doing around 75% of your volume between 75 and 85% with around 15% done between 85 and 95% and 10% done between 65 and 75%. Please understand that if you are in the development stage with the Olympic lifts that strength can fluctuate A LOT, as well as potentially improve very quickly. This system doesn’t mean that you will never work up to your pre-cycle maximum. In fact, it’s quite possible that your previous max becomes fairly easy before the end of the cycle.
This is because we use the level of perceived effort/difficulty to regulate loads. For example, if we take our previous volume recommendations:
10% should be easy technical work
15% should be very challenging weights, while still maintaining proper technique
75% should be fairly challenging weights, but ones you should have no trouble always maintaining solid form over all of your sets.
Depending on the total days you will be training you can use several approaches. One that I like, that is similar to how Chinese lifters train, would be to have snatch days, clean & jerk days and total days (snatch and clean & jerk):
3 days per week
Day 1: Snatch and assistance (snatch assistance and high bar squat)
Day 2: Clean and jerk + assistance (clean and/or jerk assistance, RDL, bench press)
Day 3: Snatch + Clean & jerk
4 days per week
Day 1: Snatch and assistance (snatch assistance and high bar squat)
Day 2: Clean and jerk + assistance (clean and/or jerk assistance, RDL, bench press)
Day 3: Snatch + Clean & jerk
Day 4: Variation of the snatch to focus on weakness, variation of the clean OR jerk, squat, RDL
5 days per week
Day 1: Snatch and assistance (snatch assistance and high bar squat)
Day 2: Clean and jerk + assistance (clean and/or jerk assistance, RDL, bench press)
Day 3: Snatch + Clean & jerk
Day 4: Variation of the snatch to focus on weakness + high bar squat
Day 5: Variation of the clean, variation of the jerk + RDL
The assistance work should be 1 or 2 exercises to address your personal weakness in the competitive lift. It could be a pull (from floor, hang or blocks), a power variation of the snatch, clean or jerk (from floor, hang or blocks), a power exercise like a loaded jump or plyometrics (if you are stronger than fast), etc.
You will notice that I recommend utilizing only the high bar squat. The front squat is certainly a good exercise for weightlifting. But I find that the upright, high bar squat, is just as good and is more transferable to the powerlifting squat. If you have long limbs and a short torse, feel free to use the front squat once in a while.
I also recommend the RDL, which can be done either with a clean or snatch grip.
The “total” day is where more of your 85-95% (or very challenging) weights would be. On the lift-specific days you would use more lifts in the 75-85% zone. Since the total day is very demanding, I don’t recommend doing anything besides the two competition lifts.
THE POWERLIFTING FOCUS BLOCK
In this block, the goal will be to develop strength in the powerlifting competition lifts.
This means switching from the high-bar squat to a low-bar squat and from the RDL to traditional or sumo deadlift.
It also means moving the bench press from an auxiliary movement to one of the main lifts in the program, which will require added frequency and/or volume and investing some assistance exercises on improving this movement by targeting your weakness(es).
To this powerlifting cycle, you need to add a small to moderate amount of technical work on the Olympic lifts, to avoid losing your skill and technical efficiency on those lifts.
The Powerlifting cycle
While you can use any proven powerlifting program that can be done over a 6-8 week period, I personally recommend Fred Hatfield’s 80-days powerlifting program.
It is essentially a percent-based progression to be used on the competitive lifts (assistance work is planned separately).
You hit each competitive lift twice a week:
Workout A is the “easy” workout in which the loads and reps are easy to complete BUT you must do each lift with as much acceleration as possible (compensatory acceleration training)
Workout B is the challenging or hard workout
Squat and bench are trained together and deadlift is trained on a different day. The schedule will look something like this:
DAY 1: Bench B workout / Squat A workout / Assistance for the bench press
DAY 2: Deadlift B workout / Assistance for the deadlift
DAY 3: Squat B workout / Bench A workout / Assistance for the squat
DAY 4: Deadlift A workout
You can spread the workouts out however you want. Although I like to use something like:
Monday: DAY 1
Wednesday: DAY 2
Friday: DAY 3
Saturday: DAY 4
For the assistance work I recommend one multi-joints exercise targeting your weak point and 1-2 single-joint movements for key muscle(s) in the lift. Don’t overdo it, we still have the Olympic lifts to add.
The periodization scheme for the big lifts on the Hatfield program looks like this:
Week 1
A: 5 x 2 @ 80%
B: 5 x 3 @ 85%
Week 2
A: 5 x 2 @ 81%
B: 5 x 4 @ 85%
Week 3
A: 5 x 2 @ 81%
B: 5 x 5 @ 85%
Week 4
A: 5 x 2 @ 82%
B: 5 x 6 @ 85%
Week 5
A: 5 x 2 @ 83%
B: 3 x 2 @ 92%
Week 6 (only keep one assistance exercise per workout after this point)
A: 5 x 2 @ 84%
B: 3 x 3 @ 94%
Week 7
A: 5 x 2 @ 85%
B: 3 x 2 @ 100%
Week 8
A: 5 x 2 @ 85%
B: 3 x 2 @ 105%
NOTE: the Hatfield program also has a 9th week (the peaking week) which you should not do at this point. Keep your peak for the Supertotal block.
If you prefer to stick to a 6 week block you can use a periodization scheme based on the 6-week Russian peaking cycle. It looks like this:
In this plan you hit each lift 3 times a week. You would do the assistance work on day 4. Due to the sheer volume of this approach, I recommend doing the bench and the squat according to the periodization chart and then only performing HALF the number of prescribed sets on deadlift (e.g. if the periodization scheme is 6 x 3 @ 80%, you do 3 x 3 @ 80%).
For example:
Monday: Squat/Bench/Deadlift
Wednesday: Squat/Bench/Deadlift
Friday: Squat/Bench/Deadlift
Saturday: one assistance exercise for each lift
The periodization scheme looks like this:
Week 1
A: 6 x 2 @ 80%
B: 6 x 3 @ 80%
C: 6 x 2 @ 80%
Week 2
A: 6 x 4 @ 80%
B: 6 x 2 @ 80%
C: 6 x 5 @ 80%
Week 3
A: 6 x 2 @ 80%
B: 6 x 6 @ 80%
C: 6 x 2 @ 80%
Week 4
A: 6 x 5 @ 85%
B: 6 x 2 @ 80%
C: 4 x 4 @ 90%
Week 5
A: 6 x 2 @ 80%
B: 3 x 3 @ 95%
C: 6 x 2 @ 80%
Week 6
A: 2 x 2 @ 100%
B: 6 x 2 @ 80%
C: 1 x 1 @ 105%
Adding the Olympic lifts
Understand that now is not the time to focus on bringing up your snatch and clean & jerk. I know that it sucks to put some lifts on maintenance mode; but pushing them intensely will undoubtably prevent you from improving fast in the powerlifts.
This means that you drop most of the 85-95% range lifts and stick to the 65-75% and 75-85% zones. What I would recommend is using mostly the 65-75% zone and using that as an activation tool for your powerlifting workouts.
This means that with every one of the 4 sessions, you will do something like 4-5 sets of 3 reps with 65-75% at the beginning of your workouts. Do one lift per day. For example:
DAY 1: Snatch
DAY 2: Jerk
DAY 3: Clean on the 4th session (the easiest workout in your week, which would be day 4 in the Hatfield plan and one of the 6 x 2 @ 80% days on the Russian plan, or on the assistance work day) you do both the snatch and clean & jerk in the 85-95% range (3-4 sets x 1-2 reps).
So, the week looks like this:
DAY 1: Snatch 4-5 x 3 @ 65-75%
DAY 2: Jerk 4-5 x 3 @ 65-75%
DAY 3: Clean 4-5 x 3 @ 65-75%
DAY 4: Snatch/Clean & jerk 3-4x 1-2 @ 85-95%
THE SUPERTOTAL PEAKING BLOCK
This is the shortest block in your whole macrocycle (4-6 weeks). It also has the highest intensity (up to maxing out) and the smallest number of exercises (no assistance work).
Now is not the time to fix weaknesses; we want to invest all of our volume in maximizing performance on the 5 lifts involved in the Supertotal.
I recommend hitting each lift twice per week. Once for limit weights (for sets of 1, 2 or 3 reps) and once at lighter loads (around 80-85%) to avoid technique degradation that can come from maxing out.
There are many ways of spreading your exercises throughout the week, depending on how many days per week you want to/can train.
Let’s use a 4-days a week schedule, which is what most of you will be able to do (both from a time and recovery perspective). It could look like this:
DAY 1: Snatch ramp to max (for 1, 2 or 3 reps) / Low-bar squat (submax) / Bench press (submax)
DAY 2: Clean & jerk to max (for 1, 2 or 3 reps) / Traditional or sumo deadlift (submax)
DAY 3: Snatch (submax) / Low-bar squat to max (for 1, 2 or 3 reps) / Bench press to max (1, 2 or 3)
DAY 4: Clean (submax) / Deadlift to max (for 1,2 or 3 reps) Jerk (submax)
If you are using this set-up, I recommend the following split:
Monday: DAY 1
Tuesday: DAY 2
Thursday: DAY 3
Saturday: DAY 4
If you can train 5 days a week (from a time and recovery perspective) you can add a weightlifting total + bench day. For example:
DAY 1: Snatch to max/Low-bar squat (submax)/Bench press (submax)
DAY 2: Clean & jerk to max (for 1, 2 or 3 reps) / Traditional or sumo deadlift (submax)
DAY 3: Snatch (submax) / Low-bar squat to max (for 1, 2 or 3 reps) / Bench press to max (1, 2 or 3)
DAY 4: Clean (submax) / Deadlift to max (for 1,2 or 3 reps) Jerk (submax)
DAY 5: Snatch to max (for 1,2 or 3)/Clean & jerk to max (for 1,2 or 3)/Bench to max (for 1,2 or 3)
In which case this could be a good set-up:
Monday: DAY 1
Tuesday: DAY 2
Wednesday: DAY 3
Thursday: DAY 4
Saturday: DAY 5
For the weekly progression you could do something like this:
6-week block
Week 1
Max: Ramp to a solid 3RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 80%
Week 2
Max: Ramp to a solid 2RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 82.5%
Week 3
Max: Ramp to a solid 1RM
Submax: 3 x 2 @ 85%
Week 4
Max: Ramp to a solid 3RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 82.5%
Week 5
Max: Ramp to a solid 2RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 85%
Week 6
Max: Ramp to a solid 1RM
Submax: 3 x 2 @ 87.5%
4-week block
Week 1
Max: Ramp to 3RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 80%
Week 2
Max: Ramp to 1RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 82.5%
Week 3
Max: Ramp to 2RM
Submax: 5 x 2 @ 85%
Week 4
Max: Ramp to 1RM
Submax: 3 x 2 @ 87.5%
WHAT’S GOOD, GREAT AND WORLD CLASS?
While bodyweight obviously plays a big role, we have very little data about smaller lifters doing a Supertotal. So, I’ll keep the “ranking” general, without regard to body weight.
Good
Here I’ll use the Brawn standards for the powerlifts. In his book, Stuart McRoberts writes that most men should be able, with proper training to reach these lifts:
Squat: 400lbs
Bench: 300lbs
Deadlift: 500lbs
A lifter who is very efficient at the Olympic lifts should be able to clean & jerk 80% of his squat and snatch 80% of his clean & jerk. Since most of you are not Olympic lifters by trade I’ll lower the percentage for the clean & jerk to 70% of the squat (keeping the snatch at 80% of the clean & jerk).
This gives us:
Clean & jerk: 280lbs
Snatch: 225lbs
Our Supertotal becomes:
Snatch: 225lbs
Clean & jerk: 280lbs
Squat: 400lbs
Bench: 300lbs
Deadlift: 500lbs
Supertotal: 1705lbs (775kg)
You might reach 1705lbs with different numbers, but 1705lbs is respectable
Very good
If you can get 70% of the record Supertotal you can consider yourself to be very good. The record is 1460kg or 3212lbs. 70% of that gives us 2156lbs.
A very good Supertotal would start at 2156lbs (980kg)
Elite
To reach the elite level you will likely be to be a high-level lifter in either powerlifting or weightlifting. We are talking about reaching 80% of the record.
The record is 3212lbs, 80% of that is 2570lbs (1168kg)
Monster
If you can reach 90% of the record you are a total beast. This likely mean that you are close to world class in either powerlifting or weightlifting. Very high-level shot putters could also do it.
90% of the record is 2890lbs (1314kg)
The range then becomes:
Good start: 1193lbs (542kg) to 1364lbs (619kg)
Keep working: 1364lbs (620kg) to 1534lbs (696kg)
Average:1535lbs (697kg) to 1704lbs (774kg)
Good: 1705lbs (775kg) to 2155lbs (979kg)
Very good: 2156lbs (980kg) to 2569lbs (1167kg)
Elite: 2560lbs (1168kg) to 2889lbs (1313kg)
Monster: 2890lbs (1314kg) and more