January 2015 - Strong Snatch Masters Olympic Weightlifting

Want to be a Better Lifter?

You do if you’re reading this past the title.

Wanna know how to be better? Lift every day. The more work you do, the stronger you will be. Yes, some of that “strength” will come from not-very-heavy technique work and some will come from heavy singles and some will come from accessory work. But you will get better overall not by going to the gym 3 times per week, but by perfecting some element of your craft every day. Mobility and foam roller counts, too and sometimes that’s all your body can handle that day. But you should actually do some of that icky stretching and rolling on your non-gym days, don’t just rest.

I thought about this concept when my husband showed me this awesome article by Neil Gaiman. He was asked by an aspiring writer how they could become better. His response here is priceless. Substitute lifter and you’ll understand the gist.

On the top of a distant mountain there grows a tree with silver leaves. Once every year, at dawn on April 30th, this tree blossoms, with five flowers, and over the next hour each blossom becomes a berry, first a green berry, then black, then golden….

Building A Better Lockout

I forget precisely who it was, but I believe it was Coach Dan Bell who made a very important observation at the American Open in 2013. He said that many people had fairly horrific form, but that what he noticed was that the crossfitters could often overcome that poor form with good overhead strength.

I noticed the same thing, from a slightly different angle. At the Open you could almost tell the Crossfit trained women by the muscularity of their upper bodies. American women weightlifters don’t always look like strength athletes. You wouldn’t pick them out of a line-up as 100+kg jerkers. But the Crossfit women generally do look more like they lift.

While they may have been nice to look at, that wasn’t the biggest perk of those boulder shoulders. It was crucial because they could save lifts overhead that got a little ahead or a little behind because their entire trunk and shoulder girdle were very solid.

Which brings me to what I’m calling project Stronger Lockout. I think my core strength is good (both anterior and posterior) but I continually try to improve it with back extension work and other core specific exercises. So it’s pretty good at transmitting the force produced by my legs to the bar.

My shoulder girdle on the other hand (and I include some of the musculature of my back in this as well) is, like many women’s, fairly weak especially relative to my lower body. So I’m now on a mission to rectify this situation. I’m building a better lockout not by practicing only jerks, presses in the sagittal plane and triceps press downs.

I’m trying to build shoulder and trunk strength in many different planes and from many different angles. Eventually I’ll go back to focusing specifically on the jerk but only after I’ve made improvements in overall strength and stability. No more building pyramids on a base of sand. I want that base to be built out of bedrock.

Lots of “ninja work” as Nick Horton likes to call it. Pull-ups, push-ups, one armed presses across the body as well as above the head. And maybe the granddaddy of them all, the handstand.

I’ve published a few videos of the various exercises I’m doing previously if you’re curious to see what kind of work I’ve been doing.

More, Not Less

I’ll admit that I might be a touch biased since a) I”m mentioned in the podcast and b) I think the man is some sort of barbell whisperer genius, but this is a really important message for all my fellow masters weightlifters. There is an excellent new book out (you know which one I’m talking about) which emphasizes maybe a little too much taking it easy, resting the old joints, etc.

This ain’t that. Not even a little.

This podcast encourages you – yes, you, my 57yo friend who started weightlifting last year and you my 50yo former powerlifter mighty mouse who is just now starting to really focus on olympic weightlifting – to do more than the naysayers would have you believe. To lift every day and to lift to big numbers.

Listen and tell me what you think. Personally, it’s the embodiment of what I believe in my heart is possible for us all if only we let it happen.

Listen to it HERE

Powers vs. Full Squat Versions Of the Lifts

As a masters lifter, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

By definition, masters are lifters whose joints don’t bend as well. We’re not twenty anymore. Some of us aren’t even seventy anymore if you’ve ever seen any of the truly senior masters classes at Nationals.

That’s not to say that we all can’t get low and that after our 35th birthday we all need to default to split snatches and power cleans. But the kind of volume in a full squat that does somebody at the olympic training center just fine is a lot of stress for those of us with fully funded 401Ks.

There’s also the issue of learning the lifts as adults instead of as neurologically plastic children. We tend to be slower, more hesitant- maybe because we’re more cognizant of impending death from a barbell overhead in a deep squat. Maybe it’s not just fear, but neurologically more difficult to learn speed under the bar after a completed (not half assed) pull. And a lot of masters new to the sport are from Crossfit where I sense the power version of the lifts are taught more frequently, not least of which is because they’re easier to teach and learn.

So a lot of masters power the lifts. This is fully legal in competition and one could therefore make the argument that one never actually *needs* to do anything else. You’re red lighted for bent arms that straighten, not for catching it ramrod upright.

You also get a lot out of powering the lifts in practice. Because you’re not receiving the bar low, you – by definition- need to get it much higher to receive it at all. This fact of nature can help force one to really use hip drive. As John Broz once said, it’s called weightlifting not sneaking under the bar. Having to get the bar up-up-up makes you a stronger lifter.

However (and you knew there was a however coming), you can’t really ever hit your full potential if you never get low. You cannot get your true maxes as high off the floor as what you can raise high enough to power. So by always powering the lifts you’re leaving valuable kilos off the bar. If you never compete, this may be an irrelevant point and you will live out your days happily powering the lifts and gradually adding weight with very painless knees.

But if you get the urge to actually put on a singlet and get on a platform in public, then while you could power the lifts, in the long run you may not want to. You may be the competitive type who gets pissed when other people your size and age can lift more than you can. In that case, you’re going to want to get under the damn bar and receive it low. Not necessarily this low:

because if you’re reading this you are unlikely to be young and Chinese. But lower than above parallel. Maybe you only ever get to parallel and into something that would technically be called a power by somebody really picky. You’d still be ahead of the person who could only receive it with knees at 120 degrees.

So how do you do get better at doing this?

First, learn to pull with commitment and without fear. Tell yourself mentally at the beginning of your first pull that you WILL finish this lift, no hesitation.

Second, practice some of these drills. The first few are from Sean Waxman as published at All Things Gym here.

Personally, I think one of the best drills you can do is the No Hands, No Feet drill. I first learned it from the great Donny Shankle, but I’ve seen it reiterated elsewhere. It’s powerful to teach you to really “pull” by extending, not just jumping or bumping your hips forward. And it helps learn the timing between extension and reversing direction, because you don’t have the luxury of your feet moving.

You perform the drill by gripping the bar in a double overhand grip, no hookgrip. And then you snatch (or clean), but your feet don’t leave the floor. Maybe your heels come up a little, but they don’t slide laterally. You’ll be amazed at how close you have to keep the bar and you learn to feel when to start coming down.

Try it! And tell me what you think (or send videos and I’ll post’em).

One Time, At Weightlifting Camp…… part 2

I have a theory about why weightlifters are such great people.

Most sports are based on an antagonistic relationship between two opponents. Imagine football. Two teams, who each want something completely different from the other. One to move forward, one to push back. Their fans scream their support of their favorites and their derision of the other team. It’s “us” against “them”.

Now imagine weightlifting. In competition, you cannot change your strategy in any profound or meaningful way in response to what anyone else does. Yeah, you can play with stated attempts a little to gain a minute or two more rest between lifts. But realistically, it’s a sport where what you do on the platform arises from the training you put in before you showed up. You can’t suddenly add 10kg to your snatch just because somebody else is stronger than you are. In a very singular way you compete against you and your preparation, not against anybody else.

So weightlifting meets tend to feel much less like a giant sporting event, and more like a collegial get together of like minded friends. Complete strangers help each other out. Complete strangers cheer for your attempts. Complete strangers share a platform and maybe a protein bar.

Weightlifting also requires enormous self discipline. You’ve got to be a fairly mature and dedicated individual to repeat the same two lifts over and over again, making tiny incremental changes in technique and gaining infinitesimally small leaps in power (ok maybe some leap faster, but I leap slowly).

The people who gravitate to the sport are therefore not like the average athlete. They’re friendly, they’re smart and they’re kind. Winning!

At weightlifting camp the gym rules were written on the white board from day 1. They were:

-Be an adult

-Don’t be an asshole

-Don’t fuck up tomorrow’s workout

My interpretation of these is: clean up after yourself, nobody’s your mama and nobody else is responsible for putting your weights away where they’re safe from hurting somebody else by a stray bouncing barbell. Be positive and supportive, don’t whine and grumble and bitch when your attempts aren’t going the way you’d like thus making life miserable for everyone around you. And don’t bro out, trying to impress everyone with how mighty you are to the point where you’ll be too sore to lift tomorrow.

Because these are the rules, the people who stay to be part of the Asheville Strength family are a profoundly wonderful bunch. I met jaw droppingly strong people, both men and women. I met some who were just starting out, some who were visiting from other sports to train over school break, some seasoned veterans. All were supportive both verbally and by their actions. They help find and load weights. They encouraged one another. They teased each other lovingly to keep things light.

The coaches, Tamara and Nick, seemed to have an intuitive sense of what each athlete needed. They never gave anybody more cues than they could handle at one time. So nobody felt hopeless, like there was no way as adult learners we could possibly get all this which I often hear from my fellow masters newbies. They emphasized the important points, what you need to actually make a lift in competition. Not the minutiae of bar path and jumping vs. catapulting or whatever else keyboard jockeys argue about on YouTube.

What did they do for me? I hit two consecutive snatch PRs because Tamara loaded my bar blind and wouldn’t let me know what was on it. That let me get out of the scaredy cat part of my head that kept me from hitting lifts that I knew I should be able to make. And I cannot emphasize how important that accomplishment was to making me better going forward. They also encouraged me to get the bar a little more aggressively over and back on lockout among other good tips.

So I left Asheville with a whole lot of new friends and a competitive team to call my very own (squeeeeee!). So many people I’m proud to have worked with and with whom I’ll be honored to compete along side in the future.

Any wonder why I love this sport so much?

One Time, at Weightlifting Camp….part I

What did you do on New Year’s Eve?

In Judaism, we believe that what you do on Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, sets the tone for the rest of the year.

So my year is going to be awesome because this year (albeit on the Gregorian calendar’s NYE), I spent the end of last year and the beginning of this year in camp. Weightlifting camp. Lifting weights three times per day.

It all started when I got an email from the Weightlifting Academy in Asheville, NC. Nick Horton made an offer I couldn’t refuse: two days of an introductory seminar on how to do the basic lifts and then 5 days of three/day sessions of two or so hours each. The clincher for me – he said this was the experience for you if you secretly wished you could train like this all the time.

And, yeah, with all my heart, I really do wish that.

So off I went to beautiful NC. I’ve never been in the Southeast for any length of time before and I’ll say it is magnificent. The mountains surrounding Asheville are beautiful, the people are more interesting than almost anyplace I’ve ever been (and I grew up in NYC) and the food was fabulous. Where have cheesy grits been all my life?!?

But what was really great was the lift-eat-sleep-lift-eat-nap-lift-eat again cycle.

There’s so much I learned in this week that it’ll take several posts to encompass it. But here’s the biggest and the best.

I can do much more than I ever thought I could do.

I’ve done two-a-days when at the OTC this past summer, but only for 5 consecutive workouts. This took a whole ‘nother level of ovarian fortitude.

One of the very first things Nick Horton talked about was the myth of overtraining. His philosophy: “more is usually better (maybe not in chromosomes, but certainly in training).” To paraphrase Matt Perryman, if you lived in a communist country where the lives of your family depended on your medaling at an international event, would you train twice a day, every day, or would you train three times per week? With the right motivation, you can do what you have to do to be better than you are today.

But what’s your motivation? There were many years when I wanted to look better in a bikini. Now I have a far, far fiercer drive to put weight on the bar, to lift more tomorrow, more at the next meet, to brush up against national masters records. And to achieve this I need to not be afraid. Not be afraid of failing at an attempt, at failing in front of a crowd at a meet. Not be afraid of large weights held precariously over my head. I need to realize that yeah, I’m going to be sore. And to trust myself to know the difference between sore and injured and when I actually need to pull back.

I need to be focused and committed. That means not making excuses for skipping a workout just because I feel kinda meh. I PRed my front squat by 8lbs in the morning session on day 6 and it was a lot prettier than my previous lower PR. Did I feel meh? Hell yes, I felt like shit. My quads were ready to secede from the union and my knees were no longer on a speaking basis with the rest of my body. But I still PRed my squat with big girl red plates. Little, tiny, old me and all before breakfast.

So back to the big lesson. I can do much more than I ever thought I could do. Succeeding at this level of volume, making PRs in front and back squats, snatch and clean means that I am a stronger, better person than I thought I was. Going forward I’m just a little more confident. I’m able to pull that bar off the floor with a new level of commitment, not the, “oh gee, I hope I make this” wishy washy attitude I used to have.

No joke, the day after my PR snatch I was putting my previously very difficult PR over my head. Why? Because on that day, I was now a lifter who could snatch 3kgs more. So pssssshhhht that old PR was now just a ramp up weight. The difference is utterly psychological. And the greatest gift I could have received from my week at Asheville Strength.