So this is off subject but hits a point about strength training. I'm old, like mid 50's. When I was young I was fairly strong for my size, bench pressing in the 300's at a weight of only around 185. But of course those days had passed a long time ago. A few years back I joined a crossfit gym. When it started most things were body weight exercises, they included quite a bit of pushups. I actually joined to rehab after rotator surgery. So months went by and one day they did a max bench and I was shocked to get 315 up. I hadn't lifted much more than 200 lbs in a decade or so. I was shocked that doing pushups ended up making me strong enough to lift that kind of weight. So point number one is that you don't have to lift heavy weight to be ABLE to lift heavy weight.
Point number two is this, after that the gym I went to changed their focus more and more to olympic lifting (because they finally had enough weights to go around). That led to me injuring the OTHER shoulder and having to have surgery. I no longer do crossfit
point two, too much heavy lifting can lead to injury. I realize that these are young men and frankly better human specimens than I ever was but I think the points are the same, There is more than one way to get strong.
Strength is determined by the neruromuscular system. Think of it as a breaker box in your home. Going through everyday life, you don't need all the electricity (strength) available to you to open the car door. Because using all the power you had for daily tasks would exhaust you pretty quickly, so we only use what power we need for the task. The general population can only use about 65% of our muscles maximum strength, athletes and competitive weightlifters can usually coax about 80% of their maximum strength. So its more than likely that your neuromusclar system "remembered" what it took to move that kind of weight. But it does take moving heavy weights more often to train the NM system to move increasingly heavy weights.
Not knowing your history, but I think this was a big issue with a lot of people in Crossfit. It's not the Olympic lifts that are dangerous, it's the AMRAP mentality, doing as many as you can, form be darned attitude that caused a lot of injuries. Olympic lifts are lifts that need absolute perfect form, and doing these lifts until exhaustion and loss of form is what usually causes the injury. Not heavy weights. There are thousands of people out there squatting over 600 pounds routinely and they have no injuries.
The way we get strong is through a stress, recovery, adaptation cycle. You stress the body, i.e.- squat 400 pounds, your body needs to recover (usually around 24 hours for the general population, but these are genetically gifted individuals) - through rest (sleep) and nutrition, and it adapts and is able to lift more or perform better the next time around. I am not in the know of how CSC was running the program, but it may have been an issue where our guys may not have been able to effectively recover before the next stressor (workout) was applied, thus causing overuse injuries and stresses to connective tissues. JMO.
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