Olympic athletes really should be payed attention to. It's important to realize, though, that they are doing "power" work so if you relate that to their ability on a corresponding "slow" lift it will probalby be much lighter.
But all that aside, the weigh they train (and I don't know how all of them train of course
) is completely different. I mean you won't see them doing their O lifts and derivative Crossfit style. Every rep is done with utmost explosiveness and quality. They don't work to "fatigue". You are not going to see them radid firing 5x5 reps of hang cleans. Even without planning just look at what happens when they go real heavy and the bar is on the floor between reps. You have a bunch of rest-paused reps. They are getting rest in between.
Ross, I wouldn't assume that really high volume is going to protect you from injury or necessarily rehab your current ones. But if you are actively injured I agree you should be lifting too heavy. But, for me, most of my seriouls injuries (pretty much every damned joint in my body) has come about becasue of the quantity over quality of volume based lifting and not to mention the repetitive strain couple with bad movement quality.
May sound hard to believe but I've only "hurt" myself lifting very heavy weights one time. And it was minor. And that was doing something really stupid.
One thing to take seriously is that most of us take heavier weights more seriously
. If you do a heavy double, you approach with an entirely different mindset than when you do volume stuff. Of course you can get hurt lifting TOO heavy but everyone knows we are not talking about that. Most restistance training injuries are not brought about from technical failure with heavy loads. Quite the opposite, actually.
Even if people don't move away from the volume mostly mindset, I would encourage them to wrap their minds around this idea of QUALITY.
There is a big difference between focusing on one or two heavy reps and focuing on getting all your reps and sets in, really quickly.