Month: June 2014

Goal Setting

A few years ago when I was first setting foot on my weightlifting journey, I joined a closed Facebook group of women who trained with weights.  Some were powerlifters, some aesthetic competitors, many were just women looking to be better versions of themselves.  I loved that group and have formed many deep friendships there that will last a lifetime.

But I’ve recently pulled back from that group in a self-imposed ban.  I found that more and more often I wrote frustrated missives in threads that might not have deserved it.  Too many questions from already thin women looking to be skinnier,not stronger, not more powerful, not better. Or women with a lot of weight to lose who had every excuse in the book for why it couldn’t happen for them despite “doing everything right.”

I believe the reason I no longer connect with the group is because my goals are different.  I watch the scale not because I’m seeking some magical unicorn number that will make all of my life’s problems disappear.  I watch the scale to make sure I don’t stray too far from my weight class so I don’t have to radically diet as I near competition and enter the heaviest part of my programming.

I spend hours every week watching videos, reading articles and practicing my sport.  My Instagram feed is a few close friends and over 100 strength athletes.  My goals are to match or exceed current US records for my age and weight class not to get the most likes on a bikini pic.

While not oblivious to looking good (I’m not immune to the occasional selfie either in the gym or before going out for a date night), it’s just not the obsessive focus of my attention.  I can be self-critical but I will say that I am happier right now with my body and myself than I ever have been in my life.

Knowing what your goals truly are direct not only how you feel about yourself, but how you should proceed obtaining those goals.  My husband was telling me about a squat session he had had earlier in the day.  I asked what his current 1 rep max was for the squat.  He said he didn’t  know and didn’t really care.  He’s not a competitive powerlifter, so what does that number matter?  His goal is to have stronger squats over time, not to reach a specific number for a single lift attempt.  He wants the powerful leg and hip muscles, not a trophy.

It blew me away, but he’s totally right.  I train largely based on percentages – percentages of my current best lifts and percentages of the lifts I want to make in competition.  But if that’s not your goal, why should you train that way?  Do high intensity/low volume programs have much meaning for someone who wants to look better at the beach?  Your max bench may impress the bros at the gym, but wouldn’t higher volume/lower weight training get you the big pecs to impress the ladies?

Know what you really want in your heart of hearts.  Then research how to get there.  Follow a program that aims toward that target and make sure you track your work to monitor progress and avoid stagnation.

Be the best of whatever it is YOU want to be.  And celebrate with unapologetic glee achieving your best.

Training With the Russians

I love new perspectives.  Talking to new people either lends new insights into your own thinking or confirms that your own thinking was on the right track after all.

With lifting this means going to seminars or teaching opportunities by different coaches.  I adore my coach and the many people from whom I’ve learned in the past, but again, you never know when you’re going to hear that new cue that really resonates with you.  Or when somebody will notice something specific about your mechanics that helps you overcome a plateau.

Last weekend I got to spend a day with 4 Russians: Vasily Polovnikov (holder of several Russian records), Oxana Slivenko (olympic silver medalist and two time world champion), Nikita Durnev (Master of Sport) and coach Vladimir Safonov (Oxana and Vasily’s coach).  Here’s what I learned.

1. Russians are bigger than you.  My first impression was holy shit! Russians are big and lean!  I’ve heard the criticism before (allegedly from the Polish coach of the American national team) that American weightlifters are kinda fat in general vs. their compatriots overseas.  But seeing the Russians….. dayam!  They’re very muscular almost in a body builder way (although more specific to weightlifting muscle groups), much more so than most Americans who tend to resemble bodybuilders in bulking season, not stage season.  Now in fairness, when I researched Polovnikov after the fact, it turns out he’s just coming off of a multiyear ban for positive drug testing.  And Slivenko now competes in Crossfit where the testing is much more lax than WADA testing.  So there’s that.  But they still had to put in the work.  The drugs don’t lift the bar for them.

2. Even superheros start with the bar.  We got to watch them train for a bit before the teaching started.  In all exercises whether competition lifts or accessory lifts, they started with the bar. Even the series of C&Js that ended well over 400lbs started with a 20kg bar.  Which leads to the next point….

3. All their reps looked the same.  Bar or 440lbs, all the reps looked the same.  They’re very technically precise.  I remember reading once about somebody driving with a professional race car driver.  He didn’t speed around the city streets, or take turns at sub-acute angles.  But the speedometer never varied one iota when he was driving.  And if you don’t think that takes technical precision, try doing it sometime.  Keeping your speed exactly in one spot.

4. They like good music.  ok, maybe this is not a generalizable point, but these particular Russians like EDM (or what they called, “club music.  With bass and a beat”).  It made my heart sing to see massive squats with “Antidote” blaring from the speakers.

5. They have fun, but get very serious as soon as their hands touch the bar.  These guys were very sweet (despite a disclaimer at the beginning that “if we’re not smiling it doesn’t mean we’re unhappy or angry”) and joked around often.  But when they started to lift, all their focus went into what they were doing.  No checking Facebook between lifts.  They lifted then they focused on what they were doing between lifts.

6. They teach their progressions off the floor (not from the hip).  The USAW approach is to teach the lifts from the power position which I understand, but to me, it makes more sense to learn the lifts off the floor.

7. They celebrate masters lifters who compete forever 🙂  They were surprised to hear that it’s only lately that the American weightlifting community has begun to notice the Masters.  Their attitude was that you could compete forever.  They mentioned Masters Worlds.  It warmed my heart.

Part 2 of USAW Sports Performance Coaching Certfication Lessons Learned

I mentioned the 4 fundamental mistakes in the last post, but I didn’t really specifiy them.  They are these:

Balance – where is your weight distributed relative to the bar and to your center or gravity?

Inappropriate muscle group tightness – my locked shoulders are but one example.  I can imagine others such as rigidly held arms, a stiff cervical spine holding your head (and thus your gaze) in an odd position.

Improper angles/positions – of limbs, torso, feet, head, hands, even eyes

Timing – a premature or prolonged pull or pull under for example.

My starting position off the floor was improperly balanced (too far back on foot) and had improper angles/position (not far enough forward over bar, buttocks too far down)

But here is a more subtle lesson I learned about position and balance.  We were practicing jerks.  The coach walked over and rocked my world with a single finger (no, not that way! Mind out of gutter people!).  He tipped my chin up about 1cm so I was looking at the exit sign hanging off the ceiling, not straight ahead.  Then he pushed my forehead back just a few millimeters to move my whole trunk back just a degree or two.  What happened when I did that was that my abs suddenly engaged and kind of locked up my whole torso.  Now I felt like a solid piston, so that in the dip and drive my trunk could much more effectively transmit the force generated by my legs to the bar sitting on my shoulder.  Voilá! Instant increase in jerk power with a tiny millimeter sized correction.

I’m still learning to finish my second pull (and by standing up, not bowing back so much).  Hopefully when I master this my little forward bunny hop will go away because I’ll no longer have to move forward to catch the bar.  I’m also drilling quicker feet sideways, not jumping up and forward.

My snatch grip got moved out a hair’s breath which I thought would be uncomfortable but which feels fine.

I’m playing with their suggestion of moving feet in a little more narrow in the first pull as a stronger pull position.

Another big lesson is one fundamentally of mental comfort.  In the snatch you can receive the bar at the bottom and then sit there a sec to make sure you’re secure then stand up. The weights aren’t as heavy, so the squat isn’t the limiting factor of the lift per se.  But with the clean, that front squat up IS a lot of the limiting factor, at least for me.  So hanging out at the bottom of the hole only makes coming back up that much harder.  I’ve got to focus more on catch and out, capitalizing on the stored kinetic energy in my legs and bar whip to help me out.  Pause squats are hard for a reason.  No purpose in making the clean recovery harder by “making sure” I’ve secured the bar.

Last but not least I was reminded of one great exercise and learned another, both with the purpose of getting under the bar faster.  The new exercise was the “shrug under”.  Basically you stand up with the bar (clean,snatch or jerk) then raise up on toes, shrug shoulders and DOWN.  No little dip and drive (this ain’t a high hang), just toes, traps, down.  This is an example here.

The exercise of which I was reminded (and for some reason seems to be blowing up my Instagram feed this week) is the “no hands, no feet” drill.  It’s a clean or snatch from the floor but no hookgrip and no moving feet.  I’ve heard it described with feet starting in the receiving position and in pulling position.  Here’s the US team coach Zygmunt Smalcerz doing a version here (which is kind of cool because, well, he’s just da man).

As a nice footnote to this post, I got my score on the final test in the mail yesterday.  100%.  Now I’m off to lift 🙂

Getting My USAW Sports Performance Coach’s Certification

I had a glorious weekend.

What did I do you ask?  I spent hours inside an un-airconditioned storage building in the hot Texas summer heat.

Before you start slowly backing away from the crazy lady, let me explain.

I went to Denton, Texas to participate in one of the USA Weightlifting intro level coach’s certification courses.  It was held in a well appointed (but not exactly chilly) Crossfit box.

Now this really is my concept of an ideal weekend.  I lifted weights all day, got pointers from a national level coach (Chad Vaughn’s coach to be exact), then ate delicious sushi and met up with some friends who live too far away to see often.

The main reason I went was for my own edification.  I’m one of the truly obsessed.  I could eat, sleep and breathe weightlifting, programming and nutrition all damn day.

But I also went to be a better advisor to the many friends who I am helping encourage (or dragging kicking and screaming depending on your perspective) to start olympic weightlifting.  I went so that I can offer constructive advice to other people at the gym where I train who are mainly Crossfitters who only dabble in the “olys”.  Maybe even to judge at a competition someday.

I can’t possibly summarize everything I learned, so you’ll just have to take the course yourself (which you should).

But for me personally in my lifting, these were some take home zingers:

1) in the set up, I’ve always retracted my scapulae a bit to “set” my back.  This is actually a terrible idea.  It kind of freezes the shoulders so they don’t move quickly and limits how much trap shrug you can get at the to of the 2nd pull because traps are already somewhat engaged by the scapular retraction.  So I learned to set my back more by holding a tight arch.  This was a lot better for force transmission and let my shoulders be a little freer so my arms could just be loose(ish) chains to hold the bar, instead of tight toothpicks.  As the manual for the course states: one of the 4 fundamental errors people make is inappropriate tightness in some muscle group.

2) another of the 4 fundamental errors is in what I think of balance, or where your weight is distributed.  I discovered that both my snatch and clean set-ups started with weight too far back in the foot (should either be ball of foot or kind of evenly distributed across a flat foot) and that I had my shoulders too far behind the bar.  I need to cover the bar more (shoulders forward) and stay there much longer than I was.  We were shown a wonderful video of the Polish national team practicing (from back when Zygmunt Smalcerz was still coaching in Poland) and one drill that resonated with me was a long first pull drill.  Like a single pull almost to a high hang position,  staying over the bar, pulling the bar into your body with your lats, knees back.  I think strengthening my posterior chain to do this well is going to revolutionize my otherwise hot-mess of a first pull.

Ok, that’s enough for tonight.  More in the next few days.  I’m still trying to apply strict rules to recover better such as going to bed early and eating enough post-workout, so it’s bedtime for me 🙂