What three hours a week really looked like

The week

I competed from 2010 to 2019 on about three hours a week. Not three hours because three hours is optimal. Three hours because that's what a gym, a coffee company and a family left me. The limit did the choosing, and the choosing is the whole method.

Three sessions a week. That was it.

When I was a younger lifter I'd sometimes train up to nine sessions a week with California Strength, so three was a big change, and I want to be honest that it wasn't a change I made for performance reasons.

I had to take the kids to school most mornings, so mornings were out. I worked through the day. Some days I'd sneak out to the Caffeine and Kilos warehouse and get that day's session in there, on my lunch break or in the afternoon. Other days I'd train down at Excel before or after coaching classes.

There was never a good window. There was a window, and I used it.

What was in a session

Snatch. Clean and jerk. Squat.

I followed the California Strength program. They had a three day a week version and that's the one I ran. There was some accessory work in it, but it was mostly the snatch, the clean and jerk, squats, and variations of those three.

That's the whole list, and it's short on purpose. When you've got three sessions, the competition lifts and the squat take all of them. Everything else is something you'd be doing instead of the thing that moves the total.

What I cut, and what it cost

I cut hobbies. All of them.

For that stretch of my life, this was the hobby. I was running businesses, raising kids, and trying to actually be there for my family. Training didn't fit alongside a bunch of other interests. It replaced them.

The training cost is real too. A full-time lifter gets volume I never got. More time under the bar, more reps to fix things slowly, more room to be patient with a problem. Three sessions means you have to be right sooner, because you don't get as many swings at it.

I knew what I was trading. That's different from pretending there was no trade.

The rules that made it work

Three things held it together, and none of them are training.

It was written before I walked in

I never showed up to the platform and decided on the spot. The session was on paper before I got there, so the hard part was already done. If it isn't written, it doesn't exist.

I did the lifts that move the total

When you've got three hours you don't get to do everything you'd like to do. You do the work that shows up on the scoreboard and you skip the rest. Most people training more than me weren't doing more of the important work. They were doing more of the optional work.

I kept showing up for nine years

Nothing I did in any single week was impressive. Doing it in the weeks I didn't feel like it, through a gym, a coffee company, a young family and every reason to skip, is the whole story.

What it added up to

Ten national qualifications across nine years. A best total of 307 kilos in 2015, off a 134 snatch and a 173 clean and jerk. A Masters World Cup in 2019, with a clean and jerk 20 kilos clear of second place.

The full record is on the weightlifting page, and the room it happened in is on the California Strength page.

If you're trying to do this

Here's the part people don't expect me to say.

That's the advice. It isn't a training tip.

The three hours worked because three hours was the constraint, not the goal. I wasn't looking for a clever way to train less. I was looking for a way to keep competing without taking the time from the people who'd never get it back.

So if you've got a job, a family and three hours: three hours is enough to do something real. Write the sessions down before you get there. Do the lifts that move the total. Show up on the days you don't want to. And don't buy back training time with hours that belong to somebody at home.

If you want the technique side of it, I put out a free video every week for 52 straight weeks at The Lifting Fix.