How To Modify OlyBuilding Day 1: Snatch and Legs

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 1, the main focuses are the snatch and lower body strength and hypertrophy.

Modifying The Snatch Portion

Snatches 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 snatch 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 snatch”; receive the bar at parallel, then stop completely, then finish the rest of the overhead squat.

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

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

• If you wish to emphasize a certain position, you could perform “block snatches” from that position, or “pause snatches”, with a pause at the position.

Modifying The Legs Portion

The legs portion of this has a TON of variance here, so buckle up. First off, the program has you taking a heavy pause squat double or single. This could be modified in any way you want such as:

• No pause

• Increasing the reps

• Changing the bar type

• Box squats

• Swapping for a hack squat or leg press

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.

The leg portion then has a high volume leg press, which can be modified to the barbell squat if you want to be more olympic weightlifting specific, or you can swap it out for a hack squat as another bodybuilding-style exercise, or a belt squat if you want to give your back a break and just focus on the legs.

Next, we move into a single-leg squatting exercise, the bulgarian split squat, which can be modified for any other single-leg squat exercise such as:

• Reverse lunge

• Single-leg leg press

• Single-leg hack squat

• Smith machine split squat

And finally, we finish the workout with high-volume leg extensions. This exercise is great because of how simple it is to take your quads to failure, and because of this, I have not found many variations that will have the same effect. I would avoid skipping or modifying this if possible.

You’ve probably noticed that the leg day portion of this workout is very quad/anterior chain biased. If you have a strong base there, then you could modify this to be a posterior chain-focused leg day with the same structure. This might look something like this:

1. Oly: Snatch

2. Heavy strength: Deadlift, trap bar deadlift, snatch deadlift, or deficit deadlift

3. Drop set: barbell or dumbbell RDL’s, or good mornings.

4. Single leg: single leg-rdl or good morning

5. Finisher: Hamstring curl prone or seated

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!