Meet taper for weightlifting
Hello Rip,
there have been several threads about meet tapers for powerlifting competitions and your advice has been to keep the taper phase rather short. Since I am going to have my first weightlifting meet in September I was wondering about three things:
1) Is tapering for weightlifters any different than tapering for powerlifters because of the more explosive nature of the competition lifts?
2) I have basically been following a Texas method style program on M-W-F with the two lifts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the beginning I had to decrease the intensity of the olympic lifts quite a bit in order to still recover from training and hit all the planned PRs. I have begun hitting PRs in the competition lifts three weeks ago and they are progressing in 2.5 kg increments at the moment. Is there any point in time before the meet where you would scale back a bit on the strength lifts in order to get accustomed to heavier weights in the clean & jerk and snatch?
3) In your experience, how much does an average, intermediate level weightlifter on this type of program gain from the taper? A conservative estimate would really help me to determine a proper opening weight once the time comes.
On a side note, your advice helped me a lot with my cleans (and snatches as well). For the most part, jumping back is not a problem anymore.