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Originally Posted by mofosu
Thanks guys. Also, can you guys tell me the difference between powerlifting and olympic lifting and strongman? Training-wise. Thanks.
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That's a huge question, the answer could fill a book easily. I'll give some basics.
First off, the 3 sports require different physical strength capacities. Powerlifting requires one-time absolute maximal (brute) strength. Oly lifting requires exceptional technique and great power and quickness, but in a one-time maximal effort fashion. Strongman is more of a strength endurance sport, where great strength (but not necessarily maximal strength) must be displayed for greater lengths of time (or more repititions). So those are the qualities that must be trained for each sport.
Powerlifting is first best trained by learning the 3 lifts and practicing them frequently, while using other assistance lifts for building work capacity and muscle hypertrophy, as well as bringing up weaknesses in the critical muscles for the 3 lifts. As a lifter progresses and becomes more proficient, technique work on the actual 3 lifts becomes less important, and other similar lifts must be incorporated to avoid burnout and target weaknesses (aka westside training).
Oly lifting is similar in that you must start with just training the actual lifts and using assistance exercises for hypertrophy and critical muscle targeting. However, unlike powerlifting, technique work becomes more critical as a lifter progresses, and assistance work becomes less important. The oly lifts are extremely technique dependent, form must be perfect, elite level lifters will train the core lifts up to several times a day. While they are taxing on the CNS and must be performed while fresh to maximize to form work, they are not as stressful on the muscle-tendon system as the powerlifts because lighter loads are used, but stress must still be managed well.
Strongman training has the wild card of using a seemingly endless number of events and often times the events a competition will use are not determined until very close to date of the comp. So first off you must train the
qualities that most of these events use, which is usually strength endurance. Maximal strength and speed can come into play as well. You also have to consider that plain ol' barbells and dumbbells are rarely used in these events, odd objects are most common. This taxing muscles (particularly gripping muscles) in ways that can't be done in the gym. Good old normal strength training is very important, but volume is usually lower than with powerlifting or oly lifting because days of actually practicing the events must be accounted for. You have the basics of stones, log presses, farmer's walks, tire flips, and usually a medley of some kind. You can usually bet at least 2-3 of these, so these must be specifically trained. If you don't know what other events will be held, it's best to just practice different events each week on your event training day, events that have a big carryover. Basically anything with odd objects that your push, drag, hold, carry, flip, etc. for time or reps.
Hopefully this sort of answers your questions. There are a lot of people on this board that can add to this, I'm sure I screwed some things up.