I got some bad news for you. If your intention is to get gorilla like strength in the classical lifts, squat, deadlift, snatch, clean, bench press and the press, then simply doing those lifts is not enough. You have to add assistance exercises. These are a small select group of effective exercises that stress a particular muscle group (Your weakness) in order to develop strength to assist the main lift.
While strength progress has, and still can be, made by consistently slaving away at the classical lifts, it is far more effective and efficient to introduce the assistance exercises early on in your training cycle. Assistance exercises are heavily used in eastern bloc training programs, the Russians employ a wide arrange of hip hinge exercises, reverse hyper, 45 degree hyper, GHR, Good Morning, Deficit Deadlifts, in order to supplement the Olympic lifts. The Chinese weightlifting system regularly employs bodybuilding style training at the end of their arduous sessions, in order to strengthen legging muscle groups and iron out any imbalances. This generally tends to consist of several select exercises, a lot of weighted pull ups, dips and, dare I say it, even bicep work, in the 10-12 rep range for around 4-5 sets. Westside Barbell, a monstrous powerlifting gym based in Columbus Ohio, that has shattered many, many records heavily relies on variations of heavy good mornings and tonnes of volume in the assistance exercises, the ratio being 80% special exercises to 20% classical lifts, to keep there 1,000lb squatters and 800lb dead lifters super strong.
Feeling convinced? Stay tuned for part 2 where I will give a list of specific exercises that will help you smash through plateaus and break PR’s!