How To Modify Day 3: Cleans, Legs, and Upper Pull

We recently put out the ultimate program for weightlifters who want to put on slabs of muscle without losing out on their performance. OlyBuilding is here to help you pack on muscle, and you might just find your performance going through the roof while you’re at it.

This program is also a choose-your-own-adventure of sorts. You can follow the detailed program as written, or if you want to take things into your own hands, we’ll walk you through that as well. Whether due to equipment availability, interest, or just having more fun with your workouts, this article is here to help you make the best modifications to suit your goals.

For day 3, the main focuses are the clean, some light lower body work, and then it’s all back, all day.

Modifying The Clean Portion

Cleans are implemented using on-the-minute training, so the easiest thing to modify if you are not looking to breathe heavily is to remove the clock, and just get the reps in. You could also try these as doubles or triples, and bump the percentages down as needed, just aim to stay close to the total amount of reps.

Another modification that can be made is to change the actual variation of the clean that is performed for a cycle, adjusting the percentages down as needed. Here are a couple of common variations you could modify to:

  • If you struggle with getting depth, then you can do a “stop clean”; receive the bar at parallel, then stop completely, then finish the rest of the front squat.

  • If you struggle with your pull technique, particularly being in the wrong position, then you could modify this to a “tempo clean” or “slow pull clean”.

  • If you jump forward or backward excessively, you could modify these to a “no feet clean”, by not allowing your feet to fully leave the ground at the top of the pull.

  • If you wish to emphasize a certain position in your pull, you could perform “block cleans” from that position, or “pause clean”, with a pause at the position.

Modifying The Legs Portion

The legs portion of this workout is a little lighter, we’ll be focusing on a heavy pause front squat, then drop setting for high volume front squats. If you wanted you could modify both to any of the following:

  • No pause

  • Zombie squat to work on trunk position and take it easy on the wrists

  • Hack Squat or Leg Press for a more bodybuilding emphasis

  • Goblet Squat, though you’d likely struggle to go heavy enough to yield any results

  • Crossed arm or strapped front squat, if you lack the mobility to do front squats heavy enough

Choose whichever one you like, BUT stick with it for the entire 8-week cycle. Jumping around in the middle isn’t great for strength progress.

Modifying The Upper Pull Portion

The upper pull portion starts off with a heavy strength exercise followed by drop sets of the same exercise, the chest-supported t-bar row. This could be modified to any exercise that is easy to go heavy on for the upper pulling muscles such as:

  • Bent over row, yates row, or Pendlay row

  • Weighted Pullup

  • Lat Pulldown

The next portion works a slightly different portion of the lats, and is GREAT for olympic weightlifters as it helps keep the bar close in the first and second pull of the snatch and clean. The cable lat pullover, or straight arm lat pulldown as it is sometimes called can be modified in a few ways, such as single arm, or lying on a bench, or if you’re lucky, on a pullover machine, but should NOT be replaced by a different exercise.

Following the pullover is a high cable row. This works well in the program as we are working all the fibers of the lat, and personally, nothing takes my lats to failure quite like this exercise. I have alos tried to find variations for this, but nothing quite works as well, so this is one of the only instances where I’ll recommend that you don’t modify.

We then finish this pull workout off with biceps! I program a bicep curl with the elbow fixed behind the torso, as I’ve found it to work the bicep as efficiently as possible. This could be modified to any of your favorite bicep exercises such as:

  • Dumbbell curls, hammer curls, or incline bench curls

  • Preacher curls

  • Cable curls

  • and anything in between

Hopefully, you found this useful for those of you who have picked up the program! If you haven’t picked up the 8-Week OlyBuilding Program yet, click the link below to get access today!

Brian chambersComment