Agreed, although there seems to be some good results with a few jumpers doing cleans and snatches as their primary lifts (Edwards being perhaps the most extreme case; clean 335lb & snatch 245lb).
Yes, maximum strength is always helpful (if bodyweight stays reasonably low). I can’t see Mo squatting much over 500 for a max. I once read Mo’s max was about 500lbs for squat. But then you always have the guys that don’t lift much who are real burners.
Also, you have to be honest with yourself. If you are squatting 575, is that to parallel or is it a 1/4 squat? I know guys that 1/4 squat 700 or 800 but can barely parallel squat mid 300s.
Good point, my full squat is 410. 575 is a little less then half squat. I’m 5’8" and 178 lbs. But for a guy like me that needs weight training, I would like to know how strong those guys are. So strong was Ben at the top of his game (Bench, Sqaut, Snatch etc).
From people who have seen the training in 2004, Gatlin was squatting (for reps) in the high 300’s, occasionally into the 400’s (for reps).
Strength is great, but if you are squatting over double bodyweight and you’re in the high ten second area, do you really need to improve your squat 100lbs to improve your 100m time that much? I too need to work more on the actual speed component vs strength, but it’s clear most of the people with huge squats are not the fastest on the track (most likely neglecting high quality speed work), while the very best do both with quality (then again, at the highest level speed workouts ARE strength workouts).
What possible relation does Mo’s squat have to you? The answer for you is to get stronger in a manner that still allows your speed componants to keep improving. If the weights interfere with speed development, you’ve got a problem.
OH Yah! I love those Sport Specific guys too!!
Well if Mo and I have similar body types it could have a lot to do with me. I’m sure his training is different and there are a lot things I still have learn but that’s what it’s about, learning and then appling it. I agree with you, if the weights were interfering it would be a problem. But different things work for differnet athletes.
Just to put things into perspective, Mo ran 10.4xFAT in high school before doing serious weight training.
I never said one wouldn’t get stronger, only that it is not the real goal for the weightroom.
Squat numbers have no meaning by themselves, they don’t necessarily make you faster as any power lifter would tell you
Sorry but what you wanna exactly mean with “Sport Specific”? (I have a little problems with language 
)
Want you wanna mean that the main objective is to train for speed not for strength?
“Sport Specific Training” is the latest triumph of presentation over information that says everything you do should simulate your actual event.
Of course the most effective way to achieve this sporting utopian state is to have no off-season. Just pretend to play when you’re not playing.
You see a lot of this in Tennis, sadly, with players doing endless direction change work off-court to simulate on court moves till their knees and ankles are shot, diminishing the specific benefits gained from actual play.
I went to a major seminar in the US, and was left speechless at the corporate idiocy.
One coach met with general audience approval when he stood up to rebut me: “You don’t understand. We go for 80 min straight, etc, etc.”
All I could say was: “Good for you.”
His long season already gave him any specific benefits available. Simulating what’s already there in the off-season, leaves no possibility of working in the conditions necessary to improve speed, strength, explosiveness, or any other quality.
More of the same leads to… more of the same.
Well, not exactly! Eventually, overexposure leads to degradation.
Of course, nobody wanted to hear that.
They wanted benediction, not contradiction.
Excellent!
Training for increased creation and storage of elastic energy is more important than getting “stronger” in the sense of the amount of weight one can lift. The ablility to lift higher amounts of weight will still be there but it shouldn’t be the goal.
excuse my offtopic but this thread is pure gold.
continue please
Charlie please,could you explain to me the concepts “to the right” and “to the left” I´m hearing that words a lot ,but because the fact of my lack of experience I don´t know the meaning of that.It appears on your book CFTS?Note that language kills me but I try my best to learn 
Thats about the best thing you could have said! Its a total paradigm shift for them the only way you will get them to understand is to get them to change thier basic beliefs so best to start with simple things like “so you spend 80min practicing change of direction and specific conditioning how many times a week?”
“So in total over the year you spend how many hours practicing change of direction?”
“So you spend half your waking life practicing change of direction and you still need more practice? What does that say about the practice you are already doing!”
Ummmmmm, then sit down and hide under your notes because that is all they are useful for. 
On the force/time curve, explosive activities are to the left of the curve while endurance activities are to the right of the curve. You can see some of the graphic representations of this on the Vancouver 2004 DVD.
Principally, when training or rehabilitating, people it is often said that the exercises given should be activity specific (the Principle of Specificity). Obviously the most specific training that one could do is the actual activity itself. However, by blending the below mentioned list one can attain various levels of specificity into training depending on the level of the athlete and the stage of training.
According to Siff there are at least 10 ways a given exercise can be considered to be specific:
- metabolic pathways (eg. ATP-CP, glycolytic etc);
- movement pattern (eg. standing, lying prone, supine etc);
- range and region of movement;
- contraction type (eg. isometric, miometric or isokinetic)
- velocity of movement;
- force of contraction;
- fatigue (eg. mental vs physical, maximal-effort vs low intensity endurance fatigue etc);
- flexibility;
- biomechanical adaptation (eg. size and number of mitochondria); and
- muscle fibre recruitment (eg. various slow or fast twitch fibres).
The problem is that most of the people who are merely aware of this principle are unable to fully grasp it’s effect on a training program.
Training elements cannot be viewed as either ‘specific’ or ‘non-specific’, this is an arbritrary distinction, rather all training elements excist on a specificity continuum, with the given exercise on one end, and no activity at all on the other end.
The idea is not to restrict all training elements to highly specific, event simulating components, but rather to continuously vary training stimuli that lie on the specificity continuum.
The sport specific guys are the reason guys like us can charge what we charge; more power to them. To those guys I say here’s to you…
Keep having your basketball players do thousands of jumps in training because improving the jump skill will happen in 2 hours a week doing more jumping when it did not happen in a 30 game 75-80 practice session filled season under your guidance.
After that go and load those same structures using the same patters over and over in the weightroom.
Awesome… and when that doesn’t work (and it surely won’t) and the knees, ankles,feet, hips etc. breakdown then I can get a healthy referral fee from my well established network of therapists and orthos.
Thanks guys,
be sure to include your address on your responses to this post so that I may send you a nice X-mas card.