Rachael Keilin

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.

It Starts With the First Pull and the First Pull Starts With Your Feet

It will come as no surprise to many of you that I have already purchased and read Dmitry Klokov’s book from Juggernaut (although it may surprise you that I waited a full three hours after it was published to do so).

While his autobiography is interesting, the best part is the series of training videos that come with the PDF. He doesn’t go into programming details or general training philosophy, but these basic “how to” videos are gold, at least to someone who is still learning like me.

One thing he emphasized was foot positioning. He likes feet fairly angled out, not straight forward. And if Klokov suggests it, you can be damn sure I’m gonna try it.

So I went from this:

with knees tracking forward like this:

to this:

with knees naturally tracking laterally like this:

Know what happened? Well first, it turns out it wasn’t as challenging as I thought. I figured that I had limited mobility and it would be difficult to pull this way but it’s brilliant. Because knees track laterally, they get out of the way without doing a stripper pull/butt first thing to get knees out of the way of the bar. They just float laterally and the bar comes up, easy peasy. It also helps bring shoulders forward over the bar a bit setting you up for a perfect second pull. Voilá! A love of angled feet was born.

Give it a try! If you were ever a gymnast or dancer in your previous life there are some elite level lifters who pull almost from a “first position” feet angle. Try it if you’ve got the flexibility.

A Review of the PUSH Band

NOTE: I AM NOT AN AFFILIATE NOR DO I HAVE ANY ASSOCIATION WITH PUSH STRENGTH. THIS IS JUST MY OPINON

Have you ever wondered if you’re pushing yourself hard enough? Or maybe going a little too hard, too often?

What if you had a way to measure the power output of your reps to see if you should add weight, decrease load or maybe stop and move on to a new movement altogether?

Enter the PUSH armband. Worn on your forearm, it measures the velocity of your movement and if you input the exercise and the weight, can give you an estimation of the power generated as well as peak and average speed of the lift (a difference that can be very important in the olympic lifts. More on that in a minute). It will also give you an overview of total energy expenditure during a workout as well as total tonnage. It will also track PRs (assuming you’re recording max efforts).

From their website, www.trainwithpush.com:

“Velocity Based Training (VBT) is a new training methodology that is taking the world of strength and conditioning by storm. Velocity Based Training helps regulate the load and volume prescribed, helps determine as well as whether the load applied is appropriate for the athlete and to also determine whether the athlete is reaching the point of failure, before they actually fail.

For decades, coaches knew that the speed of movement during training is important. Unfortunately, the vast majority of coaches had to rely on subjective assessment of the athlete’s movement. Tools have been available to measure velocity, but so far they have been difficult to use, difficult to transport, and often outside of the budget of most coaches. Until Now.

Velocity Based Training can be used to accomplish the following goals:

Avoid under- or over-training by monitoring speed of movement
Optimize training load and volume based on training goals (Strength, Endurance, Speed)”

The library of movement patterns the device will recognize is actually pretty huge. There are hang snatches, power snatches and hang power snatches in addition to snatches just for an example. There are deadlifts, wide grip deadlifts, sumo deadlifts. Behind the neck press and push press variations in addition to military press. There are no pause variations that I can tell, but I’m not sure that’s all that big an omission.

What is nice about it telling you max velocity/power and average velocity/power is that for the oly lifts you can get a better sense of just how much you’re really putting into the second pull when you look at the difference between peak and average. It’s as close as you can come in a reasonably priced device to the much fancier info you can get with $10,000 equipment in a lab. Some video programs will approximate this for you, but again, it requires taking video, marking what needs to be tracked and giving the video analyzer information on distances. Not nearly as easy as the PUSH band.

The app that comes with the device will analyze your set and give you advice based on the goal you set within your profile. It will tell you to move up in weight, deload or move on to another exercise.

For me it has been about 95% reliable in detecting number of reps. Sometimes it counts an extra rep if I jiggle around a lot in set-up, but there’s a feature to correct their number and it does appear to learn over time.

One of the things I really like about the PUSH is its’ ease of use. I admit that I am a little bit anti-complication (okay, borderline Luddite. Sue me). I sort of loathe my GoPro because there are simply too many settings and the editing software is great if you’re a movie producer and totally overblown if you just want to string some clips together with a subtitle. The PUSH is exactly the opposite. Lots of value for very little complexity in the accompanying phone app and device itself.

You simply turn on the device, bluetooth pair it with the phone (which happens much more seamlessly than the aforementioned loathed camera app) and you’re ready to start. You input the exercise and the weight then push start when you start moving, stop when you’re done. It does all the rest of the work automatically. You can see me hit stop and start on the forearm device in the video. No biggie.

One downside to needing an app to run the device is that I now need more stuff when I go to the gym. My phone to run PUSH app, the PUSH band, my iPod for music (since I can’t use the phone while it’s bluetoothing info with the PUSH band) and the stupid GoPro to film because I can’t use the phone. As quibbles go however, this seems very first world and goofy.

So here are screenshots of some sets of pause (I used the hang clean setting) below the knee cleans as recorded on the push and video of sets 7 and 8 so you can see what was happening and what the device recorded.

In the video I tried to slomo the first lift, normal speed the second. Compare the video to the recordings above of set 7 and 8. Interesting to me is that the first rep of set 7 was a power clean, yet it was the slowest and lowest power of the four lifts despite getting halfway to the ceiling. Also interesting is that set 8 (which was 3 warm-up sets then 5 working doubles) seemed like the best of all and if I hadn’t had other things to do I would have kept going or added weight based on this data. I guess this shows the power of getting the nervous system turned on and working at sub-maximal weight.

Here, just for interest, is a shot of the app when it gives advice on what to do for the next set:

Also notice the number at the bottom. It gives a countdown between sets of three minutes which is nice for me because it saves me from having to use a Gym Boss timer or something else to keep me from rushing back too quickly.

There is also a little conversation icon in the left lower corner. You can annotate the set recording with your own notes, observations, etc which is very useful when looking back.

Wearing the device is comfortable. Even with my wrist wraps, it’s barely noticeable.

~~Cost is around $100~~ which is half of a pair of Addipowers or Nike Romaleos 2 or about the same cost as an entry level olympic weightlifting shoe. Like the shoes, you’ll use and appreciate it daily.

Update 3/5/2016 I got my PUSH Band through a beta program or KickStarter long ago. The PUSH Band now retails for $289.

There is a desktop program that will be coming out soon that will work with the band and give you even more utilities like pre-programming workouts into the device and following multiple athletes (for coaches).

Support is awesome. When I first got the device, I had to email them two different times for set-up questions. They responded promptly and with all the info I needed.

Overall I’m thrilled with this new toy.

Bar Whip

Today was jerk day, among other things. I am happy to report that my jerk is slowly getting better, partially because of increasing upper body strengthening in various ranges of motion, partially by improving mobility and a little by just the sheer grunt work of practicing foot work.

But today my coach Jaremy Lynn (that’s him in the pic) introduced this idea to me. My weights aren’t giant red plates that bend the bar in the rack. So to help me feel whip a little more, he moved the plates out closer to the edges of the sleeve by putting in a few “spacer” lockjaw clamps. Voilá! More whip at the bottom of the dip. I think it’s a brilliant easy way to start getting a better feel for timing in the dip and drive.

My Stinky Squat is Getting Better!!!

My work on my wonky squat continues. It’s been about a month since I started dedicated loaded unilateral work at least twice per week. And guess what? The hula dance that my hips did (leaning into the weak glute side) is dramatically better! Not totally gone as you can see in the video, but not like I’m wiggling for dolla dolla bills at the club either. Hooray!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZdKS1Rtl5aU

I included some video of one of the many things I’m trying for unilateral strengthening. Today was box pistol squats. Why the box? Because my hamstring flexibility is still closer to a 15yo boy’s than it should be. So lacking complete straight leg forward mobility, I use the box to cheat and let my leg come down a bit. But yes, I’m working on the mobility, too.

Not shown but still a lot of fun was handstand work today. I like handstand training because a) it’s a little like static bodyweight jerk holds and b) it helps me with body awareness. I found out today that I don’t lock out my right arm which I thought I had been doing. As soon as I did, boom! I held the handstand for a sec or two.

Of note, I used the Eleiko app to combine the video clips because iMovie kept cutting out my legs when I tried to load it. Eleiko loads directly to YouTube, which is also useful. These bar makers are quite clever!

The New Eleiko App

Eleiko just released a fun new free app. I use it on the Apple iOS, it’s not available (yet) for the Android. It’s a weightlifting specific app that has many good features and a few issues that I hope it’ll address in future versions.
The good: there’s a video library of basic weightlifting exercises and two warm-ups featuring Apti Aukhadov. The videos come with a narrative explaining the key points of each lift as well as the ability to slow motion to see fine details.
The great: the app lets you import video or take new video for analysis. It lets you put together a string of sets into a single video which can be uploaded to YouTube. If you give the app basic information about your lifts and your vital stats, it will calculate what percentage of body weight a lift is as well as percentage of PR.
Most usefully, it lets you compare two lift videos side by side. The key element I like there is that you can coordinate the start point for both videos so that they run the lifts truly simultaneously. When you have two side-by-side videos you can take a snapshot to have a still photo comparison.
Things that need improving: I’d love a feature to capture a video of the side-by-side lifts instead of just a snapshot. And a more extensive warm-up section (although watching Apti do Cossack squats is almost worth the price of admission).
One fabulous bonus which warms my heart is a link to this frankie chavez amazing video about a master’s lifter. Makes me kinda teary every time 🙂