How important are your ACCESSORIES? (And Why Is Your Answer Wrong?)

Yep - to get good at weightlifting you need to be snatching and clean & jerking at least 2x per week, with a heavy focus on technical competency, consistency, and quality work at meaningful loads.

But, outside of your competition lifts and the heavier elements of training, you need something else: ACCESSORIES.

Remember outside of technique work and heavy weightlifting, your training should encompass a wider range of movement qualities that will enhance sport-specific adaptations and success. And that’s exactly what intelligently programmed accessory work does.

You’d be a better weightlifter if you stopped rating your accessories a 3/10 importance, or skipping them altogether….

Incorporating different targeted exercises, at a wider range of load/intensities, and repetition speed is key to developing your weight lifting and becoming a more well rounded lifter!

This doesn't mean adding in a whole heap of random high intensity volume each week. It means structured, targeted, intentional training blocks over time that develop all qualities of: technique, proficient positions (mobility), maximal strength, and speed (or power, which will be determined by a balance between maximal strength/force and velocity).

Here are a few qualities those accessories your coach so diligently programs will build, and why you shouldn't be skipping them!

1. Movement Variation

Which builds a stronger, more resilient body & efficient technique. Accessories allow you to train movement patterns that the snatch and clean & jerk don’t cover well on their own.

They help you:

• Build control and strengthen all muscles

• Work on and correct asymmetries

• Reduce the risk of overuse of certain movements, positions and ROM’s

• practice “pieces” of your lifts without the fatigue of the full movement

• AND variation in your movement can be FUN! 
  

2. Maximal Strength & force production

The competition lifts alone won’t give you the maximal strength needed to lift heavy weights. Accessories like: squats, heavy pulls, presses, rows, hinges, lunges and core work are the backbone of your strength development.

They:

• Help build force production capabilities (more force = more load lifted) which is the development of raw strength that increases your ceiling for snatches + cleans

• Develop the tissues that support heavy lifting (more muscle and stronger bones, tendons and ligaments)

• Help build your fitness/conditioning, which improves your capacity to handle more volume

If you want a bigger clean? You need bigger squats.
If you want a more stable catch?  You need a stronger upper back, shoulders, and trunk. Accessories get you that.

3. Speed & Power

Weightlifting is power - it is moving heavy loads with speed. But to help you get more efficient at developing power, accessories such as jumping, speed squats, plyometrics, and will help you to learn to produce power and express it in your weightlifts.

These exercises allow you to train:

• Velocity at lighter loads 

• Rapid force production, and fast changes of direction

• For some, these might help you learn to produce force in the right directions (think vertical jumps to help with vertical dip and drive in your jerk) 

• Learn to absorb force better if you want to become either more springy or more stiff/tight

Develop strength and speed = develop power.

If you’re skipping accessories, you’re skipping a big chunk of the EXACT things that make you a stronger, more consistent, more technical, more powerful athlete.

Which may just be the difference between plateauing… and progressing.

If you want a program that actually builds all these qualities — this is exactly what MWBC programs do!


—MWBC Team