2H swings included? I find grip strength limits my explosiveness with both 1H movements. Double 24kg snatches are more explosive than a single 32kg for me. It may simply be my tiny carny hands as an anomaly though.
I think they can work. It is somewhat of a moving target. I'm just rambling here, but thinking back to the extended time I used it for my training approach (with Al's guidance), and how things changed over time. In the beginning it's about teaching your body to do a hard effort and recover and repeat. So I think when you start, many different movements can work, and monitoring breathing and heart rate and things like that are really useful to monitor. Even before that when you have no idea what to monitor, using the clock for OTM or on-the-1:15 or -1:30 is sometimes the best way. After a few weeks you get to where you feel the senstations a little better, you feel when your breathing recovers, your heart rate comes down, and your muscles are fired up and ready to go again. Then after a few weeks of this you can start to actively use your breath to recover better and more quickly, using a deeper diaphragmatic recovery breath and deliberately taking fewer breaths between repeats. You also find other active rest strategies that are best for you to help recover faster (grip recovery opening/closing the hands, shaking the limbs "fast and loose", walking, etc.) Your body starts to get
really good at recovering to go again. Then you can really work the muscular endurance aspects to do more repeats. With more repeats comes more overall reps which means you fine tune your technique and become more efficient. THIS (in my opinion) is when it becomes much more important and effective to use the snatch as opposed to 1H swings, 2H swings, or anything else. You can really dig in here and do some solid work with many training adaptations occurring. As you continue to work this, the effort gets easier with this efficiency and eventually you increase the weight (just like with S&S) to do the same thing with the next heavier weight, slowly working in the heavier weight to a greater number of repeats.
So through all that, the prevailing theme is -- do something
very hard and explosive that uses a lot of your muscles, for reps, for about 15 seconds, fully recover, and repeat.
Back to the 2H swing question, to relate to my examples above where I said 24kg was my A+A snatch weight, 32kg my A+A 1H swing weight, I would say that 40kg is my A+A 2H swing weight. And 7 might be the sweet spot for number of reps in a repeat for 2H swings. I don't think there's enough data on 2H swing repeats to say for sure, but that would be my guess. If you do a set of, say, 15-20 heavy 2H swings and focus on being very explosive, you can
feel when that explosveness goes away. You can still swing for more reps, but the alactic power has already been depleted and the energy is more glycolytic at that point. (If you do swings that are not explosive, or do this when you're not fresh, you are less likely to be able to feel this point.) Try it and see. If it's at swing 8 or 9 for example, then 7 swings is probably the sweet spot for repeats.
And like I said, 2H swings can probably work for a while as can many other things, but I don't think they have as much potential in the long run for continued adaptations. Snatches, on the other hand, seem to have no limit to how long and how well they can work. Harald and Neal and Al and others have been using them for several years now and are
still pushing forward into new territory.