Accessory to the Crime

In my pursuit of helping others stop being weak and overcome things, I've always loved shifting accessory work around. In this, one thing I cannot stress enough is to not major in the minors. I will write a lot about accessory work (I intend this to be a three part series) but let me get this across first: IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE LIFT LOCKED IN, THERE'S NO REASON TO FOCUS ON ACCESSORY WORK. I can't repeat that enough. There are people who probably need to do next to no accessory work because they have the lift down and all they need are a few minor tweaks. There are others who may need to spend a lot of work on the accessory lifts to help them overcome sticking points and weaknesses.

When talking about accessory work, I want to classify the whats before the whys: let's talk about types of accessory work, because each type can serve our purposes.

1. Overload/ Overspeed- partials, banded work, chains, etc. These are sometimes used as max effort lifts themselves, but they serve the purpose of an accessory to the basic movement even when going all out on them.
2. Ballistic- reverse bands, plyometrics, speed versions of the lift.
3. Bodyweight- not exclusive of ballistic, obviously, but things like pullups, dips, third world squats, etc. 
4. Cable tower movements- anything done with cables
5. Machine movements- anything done with machines.
6. Technique focused movements- variations on the lift like JM presses, different stances for squat/ dead, close-grip bench, band-only movements, etc

Now, this is by no means an encyclopedic categorization, but most accessory work will fit in here somewhere. The order I've given them in is no hierarchy of needs or priority, don't let it trip you up. The fact is that which ones are most important depend on your goals and your needs. Someone who has a strength imbalance in their legs will need to do something different than someone who can't fire their glutes and they both will probably need to do something different than someone who has a sticking point in the lift. What I want to get at here is that you have to choose the medicine for the ailment, not just the medicine that feels good.

This categorization can help you also understand why some people can seem to dick around and get great progress, while others will fail. If your work is assisting the main lift to suit your needs, it'll always be better than someone else doing the same work and failing to meet their needs. People are mostly the same. We share a lot of the same general DNA, we breathe the same air, we synthesize food the same (unless we're keto, then magic gets rid of excess calories), but we see such great variation within even a family that to subscribe to an idea of "one-size fits all" is fool-hardy.