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Joe Mills 20/20 Program; by Gary Valentine
Topic Started: May 1 2007, 01:07 PM (18,264 Views)
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Joe Mills' 20/20 Workout!
by Gary Valentine, MA, CSCS*D

"The woods are full of strongmen, but very few great Weightlifters!" this was the first of many aphorisms I was to hear when i began training with the legendary Joe Mills of Central Falls Rhode Island. He had so many of these humorous sayings that summed up his philosophy, and 10 years after his passing, I find myself thinking of, or using one of them almost daily.

Joe was 82 when he passed away in 1990, a Member of the Weightlifting Hall of Fame, National Champion in the 30's, and coach of some of Americas greatest lifters, Bob Bednarski and Mark Cameron to name but a few. For many New England Lifters, the trek to Central Falls to be taught Weightlifting and to socialize with Joe was an experience never to be forgotten.

The above quote rang true for me, and so many trainees that sought out his direction. I knew little about the sport in 1980 when I met him. AT 22 years old, I had lifted weights initially to improve my baseball playing, and did what everyone was doing at the time in the gyms - a bodybuilding/powerlifting kind of workout. I soon learned that size and strength were ok, but unless they helped you snatch and clean and jerk more, he was definitely not impressed. At 200 pounds or so, I had done the lifts on my own for about 6 months, learning from an old manual I found somewhere. My clean of 300 pounds was more of a high rounded back deadlift, and what I hoped would impress him made him cringe terribly! "You keep doing that you'll kill yourself" was his comment as I recall.

Style.
Technique.
Body speed.
Fluid motion.
Timing.

This is what he was teaching, with an insight that I continue to find amazing to this day. Today's researchers have discovered "Rate of Force Development" training, and "Task Specificity", as if new and startling discoveries. These were the foundations of Joe's philosophy.

"Sure you’ve got to be strong" he'd say sarcastically, "but if you don’t know how to use it, what good is it?!"

"Perfect practice makes perfect" he repeated constantly. Knowing that the biggest need for most trainees that came to him, myself included, was to learn to apply their strength to the Olympic Movements, he recommended the 20/20 workout. This consisted of 20 progressively heavier snatches and 20 clean and jerks, under his constant constructive criticism. This "got you in shape for Weightlifting" he said, and frowned upon the overemphasis of assistance lifts. "Endless drilling" he claimed was necessary to ingrain the proper motor pattern so that when maximum weights were attempted in a meet, all energy would go toward explosive effort, with no slowing sown of the movement due to conscious thought.

"Don't think, you're ill-equipped!" he remarked, half jokingly, but also to bring out the point that the movement had to be automatic.

"You play baseball right?" he asked, "When was the last time you thought about where your feet were while you were swinging a bat?!" That hit home with me, because I'd been playing ball since age 7, and the only times i was in a batting slump was when I started to think!

After warmup, you take approximately 70-75% of your best snatch. This is performed in exact competition squat style for 5 singles, about a minute or 2 apart. Usually you'd do one, turn to re-chalk for 30 seconds or so while hearing a coaching point, do another, then rest a few minutes while another lifter went and you discussed your lifts and what to work on. After five good singles were completed, you add 5 kg to the bar, and continue for another five singles. Then 2.5 more kg for another five singles. You've now completed fifteen lifts. At this point, if your style was good and the lifts were "pulling you up" - his criteria for a good training lift and the sign that you had more in you- you would continue with 2.5 kg increases for one single at a time until missing. If you made the 20th lift, you were close to your best lift. If you make 21 or 22 consistently, this was the sign to increase the starting weight, and therefore the whole sequence, by 2.5 kg. After a 5 - 10 minute break, clean and jerks were done in the same fashion. Some days you'll do just 15-17 of each lift, or once every week or two, depending on your recovery ability, you would push to 20+. Assistance lifts were something he did not recommend "while trying to learn how to lift weights". Believe me, if you put everything into this workout as you were supposed to, you weren't asking for anything more!

"You just did 40 of your pulls, squats and jerks exactly the way you need to, so go home and recover!" was his recommendation.

I've found this to be an incredibly demanding workout that truly tests your desire to be an Olympic Lifter! It is ideal for building confidence, and helping determine your openers. Always better to start a little lighter, I learned, and do them sharply. Used exclusively of course, it can easily lead to overtraining or staleness, so try it a few times and see where it fits for you. I learned from Joe that this sport is a perfect blend of all athletic qualities. Unfortunately, many people in it overemphasize the strength or size aspect, almost downplaying "technique" as some sort of trick or something. Joe knew that you had to have it all. If you had strength without style, you’d probably never realize your full potential, and injury was almost inevitable. All technique and no strength would not cut it either, but he realized that strength was movement and speed specific, so a workout like this was designed to apply all the strength you had.

Please give this a try! I'd be interested in your experiences. Feel free to email me garyv@optonline.net to tell us how it goes or with questions.

I'll end with another Mills quote that you'll need for this workout -"You’re never as tired as you think you are!".

I don’t know about that one! Good luck, and enjoy your workouts!

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Joe Mills 20/20 workout by Gary Valentine

Snatch and clean and jerk are done all in the same workout. All singles. This is great for sharpening technique, building confidence and learning to Olympic Lift!

Start with about 70% of your best snatch. Do 5 singles, about a minute apart, all competition squat or split style. This should be light and is basically still warming up, but do them fast and explosively. Mills said if it's light you should just get under it faster and feel it pull you up, setting the motor patterns for heavier lifts to come. After these 5 singles, add 5 kg and do 5 more singles, again, each one just like in a competition. The way you do these is the way you'll do the max.

Then add 2.5 kg and do 5 more singles. Take a minute or two between, whatever you need to pretty much recover and lift explosively.

You've now done 15 snatches. The 16th should be 2.5 kg more, the 17th 2.5 kg more, etc...reaching 20 which should be close to max. If you can do 21 or 22 and never miss, you should move the whole progression up 2.5 kg.

After all the snatches, take 5-10 minutes rest, then begin clean and jerk the same way. 5 singles with about 70-75%, add 5 kg for 5 more singles, add 2.5 kg for 5 more singles. Reps 16-20 should add 2.5 kg each. If you make all 20/20, this all should take a good hour and a half, and believe me, you won't want to do any "assistance exercises." As a matter of fact, if you think you are in shape for assistance exercises, try it!

It's best to start light and get in all lifts. You can always move it up. You could do just 15/15 the first few times or whenever you want a lot of good practice. Just stay with the 15th rep weights for lots of practice. The idea is that it is an easily organized way of keeping track of lifting progress, great for building confidence on the platform. He said that once you had a few more years of this type of workout under your belt, you could open in a meet with 10-20 pounds more than your 20th lift! I found this to be true in my last meet in March (1999), ending 20's usually with 110/152 kg, opened with 115/155, made 123/162!

Perfect practice makes perfect he'd say, and when you're used to doing heavy attempts tired, it's a relief when you are rested up for a meet!

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Reposted from the P&B Archives.

- Sean
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