Female PLer's training routine I found interesting...

[Garrett Smith]

DVS, I know you're a big fan of hers, I found this piece of her Critical Bench interview interesting...
http://www.criticalbench.com/Kara-Bohigian.htm
2) Critical Bench: Tell everybody about your best bench, squat, and deadlift and how did you train to achieve those INSANE maxes?

Kara: My best lifts are: Squat- 553 in competition - 606 in training one week before my knee injury :(

Bench- 385 in a full powerlifting meet - 405 in training and hope to make it official in a bench meet soon.

Deadlift- 501 in competition. I never deadlift until the warm up room at a meet.

I have a very unconventional training regimen but it's garnered favorable results thus far. I train as an Olympic lifter which involves completely raw, rock bottom front and back squats, power clean & jerks, snatches, clean pulls and snatch high pulls. Throw on a squat suit a few weeks out and I'm all set. For bench I use a Metal Militia/Kennelly hybrid which is kicking serious ass for me at the moment!

I strongly recommend integrating some Olympic movements into any routine. Not necessarily the full lifts even , but explosive high pulls and high bar, ass to floor squats can really make a difference.

[Dave Van Skike]

she's dreamy. i know she competes in both pl and ol. her husbad is a highland games athlete. the stuff i've read about how she trains is pretty inspiring, all over the board, how she manages to train narrow and compete in wide geared squat is freakish.

[Jamie Crichton]

That's awesome. Raises some interesting questions about carry-over of lifts to different disciplines!

[Garrett Smith]

Matt Foreman wrote about his carryover from his typical OL routine into his PL numbers in a PMenu issue. Actually, he just competed in a raw PL meet earlier this month and I believe he set some age group state raw PL records with little to no specific training.

[Dave Van Skike]

That's awesome. Raises some interesting questions about carry-over of lifts to different disciplines!


don't get super confused though, she's called Bench Press Barbie for a reason, her full geared bench will make you cry. From what I've seen of her training she's not what you'd call a typical Oly lifter, she trains a lot of explosive movements but also SM type stuff and does appear to spend time in the gear. Kara might get away with it, not many are at her level though.

I think a lot of Oly lifters could have a lot of fun at local meets in the raw categories, raw records in general across the different feds are very low.

[Jamie Crichton]

Oh believe me, it makes me cry big time. I've never been a strong presser anyway. But what is really good to see is the effectiveness of mixing disciplines. My training involves a lot of variety and sometimes I get concerned that this isn't the best way to go about it - often you read people saying 'train everything and you'll get good at nothing'. But if as you say she trains weightlifting, powerlifting, strongman, and gets the results she's getting, than that is great. The only thing missing is gymnastics!