Rachael Keilin

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 🙂

Daily Training 5/12/14

Today was the first day of the lower body half of decreased volume strength training (as opposed to working the classical lifts).

It looked like this:

warm-up:

reverse hyper 3×8 with 30lbs

hanging leg raises 3×8

Workout:

Box squat (wide stance, toes turned out, sitting back, knees back on to 15″ box, then pause and up, chest up, knees out, firing glutes throughout but especially at the top) – figuring out 2 rep max (I could only keep really good form to 103×2. I could do more, but not with precise form)

Glute ham raises (no extra weight) 4×6 (feet dorsiflexed so toes only on the backstop)

Banded stationary lunges 3×10

reverse Hyper 3×10 with 50lbs with a 1 sec hold at the top. Last set with toes pointed.

The idea is limiting workout to one hour and no more than 7-8 movements. Maximizing recovery between sessions, but also maximizing effort while I’m working.

I had a blast. New movements are fun, the sore feeling hours later from a job approached with vigor is rewarding.

Not as fun? The day before a huge thunderstorm front rolled in so humidity was a jillion percent and a temp of 88F

Discoveries – still learning how to “test” movements with biofeedback. My back is much weaker than I’d like, so something to focus upon. Unilateral leg work is hard but I suspect very necessary for my leg strength discrepancy (right is strong, left which is 1/4″ shorter is weaker).

Fitness Summit

This past weekend I traveled from the thriving metroplex of 70,000 people where I live to Kansas City, MO for the Fitness Summit. What is that you asked? A two day conference with presentations by some of the biggest names in fitness writing. And by writing I mean books, blogs, e-products, social media.

I went not as a fitness professional (my day job lets me cut people into small pieces and not get arrested), but as an avid learner. My re-cap:

1) Nutrition– unless you’re an endurance athlete, nutrient timing is probably unimportant provided you are taking in adequate nutrition overall. Immediate carb-protein meals are not necessary if you ate within a few hours before your workout. The 24 hour total seems to be a much more important goal. Having said that, even Alan Aragon drinks a protein shake post-workout to hedge his bets (and I’m not giving up mine coupled with Fig Newtons for carbs, mostly because I just really like Fig Newtons).

Meals act differently than protein powders (which is kind of duh, but worth mentioning). They act like a slow release protein pill vs a more immediately absorbed and available bolus of protein via powder/shake.

There’s a muscle anabolism threshold of 6g leucine which equals about 20g of whey protein, so little dribbles of food/protein aren’t as useful overall.

Calories matter. Period. No bullshit – clean vs. not, paleo vs. PopTarts – calories matter. And the only way to know what your calorie intake is is to know what your calorie intake actually is. Therefore tracking, maybe not for prolonged periods of time but at least until you really understand how much you’re eating, is crucial. My take-away is that if intuitive eating got you fat, your intuition isn’t that good and you should try really examining your diet and quantifying it instead.

2) Self-Assessment – my two favorite talks were by Mike T. Nelson and Dave Dellanave on heart rate variability and biofeedback testing of movements. I have no intuition when it comes to fatigue. I’m of the “if one is good 20 must be better” school. So if training is not going so well, do two-a-days! Which only led to a lot of burn-out and a not so hot performance at nationals. So I’m paying a lot more attention now to the physiolgic “cost” of working out and trying to optimize rest and recovery. HRV gives a nice overview of how your body is doing over weeks and months. Biofeedback testing tells you what the “cost” of doing a movement is in the moment. If you push past what isn’t testing well you’re far more likely to injure yourself. Mike mentioned the iThlete program for tracking HRV (you need equipment, it’s not just heart rate you’re looking at) and Jen Sinkler mentioned BioForce.

3) Exercise – Bret Contreras gave an interesting talk on lever arms, muscle insertion points and why his squat sucks compared to his deadlift (answer – long femurs suck for squatting, long arms are good for deadlifting). Tony Gentilcore gave a nice talk on training women the bottom line of which is that challenging them in the same way you would men seems like a pretty good idea. Give them the same heavy compounds plus pull-ups that you would men. He felt that women tend to be quad dominant and gave some good posterior chain strength variations to counterbalance that.

4) Science – one thing I liked is that there was a lot of discussion about exercise studies themselves. About how they tended to have very small sample sizes (and why), rarely were performed on elite or even advanced athlete and caveats to interpreting the data. The primary caveat was short vs. long term results. Lou Schuler talked about a whole book he had written back in the day based on “scientific” evidence of testosterone and GH rise after certain exercise and how to capitalize on that phenomenon. Except it turns out that it’s a very short term effect and has minimal long term impact on muscle growth or strength development.

5) Fitness Professionals– this may be self-evident to many of you, but fitness professionals are by and large fairly attractive people. This actually surprised me. Why? Because I think of “fitness” as getting stronger and being better, but not really in terms of aesthetics anymore. I know looking good is the main reason most people go to the gym and I’m not totally unaware of being attractive myself, but it’s just not my main focus anymore. And most of my fitness heroes are not shredded beasts. They’re just beasts. So I was surprised to see so many beach-ready bodies.

The interesting thing to me was a snarky comment made by another attendee on Facebook who said something along the lines of “looks like bulking season for everybody. How’s that IIFYM working for you now?”. The aesthetic competitors looked at the same group I did and saw fat where I saw lean, saw unattractive where I saw shapely. Personally that just turned me off even more from the idea of ever competing in bikini or figure (not that I had even the remotest thought of ever doing so). I find a 600lb deadlift attractive, a 440lb clean and jerk, a 1.5lb bodyweight snatch. I’m less impressed by visible muscle striation and body fat so low you can see capillaries. Function over form, performance over pec size. But to each their own.

A Detour into Strength

I’ll talk about the things I learned at the Fitness Summit in another post. But having gone to the Fitness Summit is relevant because that means in the last 4 days there were two days of dehydrating travel (flying means I shrink up like a prune that rolled into the back of the pantry out of the bag without anybody noticing for three years. How do I know what this looks like? Yeah, that’s how often I clean my pantry). It also meant sitting cramped up in little plastic folding chairs. And no lifting.

So I came back today dry (like two pounds of water weight lost dry) and not particularly well rested and guess what? 3 sets of Snatches in, I had to abort. They tested well in theory when I applied biofeedback testing to them, but they actually sucked a$$ in practice so before I had a meltdown, we switched gears.

I tried what were essentially banded rack pulls, but I prefer to think of them as banded snatch extensions. I get the fancy latter title because I practiced getting knees out and back, then explosively standing up and of course all that with a snatch grip.

Then fun with sleds. First, a weighted pull through 4×10, then turned around and did more of an extending-with-row-at-the-top thing 4×10. 85lbs added weight. Both were helpful for learning to dig in with heals instead of pushing off forefoot. Both were also helpful to remind me that exercising in 81F heat in Texas kinda sucks the same a$$ my snatches did. And it’s only Spring.

Finished with sumo belt-weighted deficit squats. Squatting sumo stance on boxes with a weight belt and a 25lb plate, 3×20. Yeah, 20. I, who counts reps thus: 1…2…3…1 too many….2 too many…cardio. I did cardio today.

The short version of all of this is: I need more basic strength. I’ve been so focused on technique learning the olympic lifts that I feel that I’ve let a lot of just general strength go by the wayside. Yes, my crappy squat got less crappy. But my deadlift got worse, my OHP didn’t make much progress and all of that translates into things that should feel easy with the olys taking much too much effort.

So I’m going to focus for a while on light weight technique work and a lot of heavy strength work. Assuming that my poor back extensors and glutes aren’t necrotic and dead by tomorrow 🙂

Starting a New Cycle

If you read my post about masters nationals, you know I wasn’t too wild about my performance. Totaling lower than your first meet at a national event is not a good thing. I know progression is not always linear and that even much more elite lifters than I have off days where they don’t total at all in important meets.

But in this case, I had been feeling off for a few weeks before the event, so it’s time to change things up. As my wise husband said, it’s time to re-think all assumptions. This includes diet, rest, programming, accessory work, mobility and flexibility.

There are many months until my next competition. September at the earliest and if I don’t feel ready for Worlds, then the masters American Open after that. I’m trying to decide between going to worlds no matter how well (or not) I would do just for the experience and to see Copenhagen, or waiting it out another year to see if I can give the current champ a run for her money.

So since I’ve got plenty of time, let the tweaking parade begin. First is programming the training for the lifts themselves. My coach and I have settled on a high volume but only 3x/week set-up. In the past I did well with high volume work, so I’m willing to try it again. I’ve also contacted a superstar of a strength coach to help me think outside that box again for developing raw strength (not just speed and technique) and to start working out some of my imbalances, with overhead strength being high at the top of that list. I might add some static strength work. I’ll certainly focus much more on mobility and trying to find new ROM, especially at the ankle and thoracic spine.

I might also try leaning out a little for summer time, both for the bathing suit aesthetics and to then try and build back to competition weight but with a little higher percentage of muscle than fat. It’s been suggested that I may be eating more protein and more calories than I really need to maintain and even build strength and that it’ll be possible to progress without feeding myself like a bodybuilder in bulking season. And since tomorrow I’ll be planting the first wave of our garden, the food quality will certainly improve for the next few months.

I’m going to continue to try and get good and adequate sleep (which are indeed two different things).

I’d like to get my USAW sports coaching certification this summer more as a learning tool for myself and so that I can offer more directed critiques to anyone who wants to post here. I really like the idea of paying back some of the immense value of free knowledge I’ve found on the interwebz by being of value to others in their journey.

And last but not least I look forward to an amazing program put on by USAW this summer for masters lifters (30 in all) to train at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for a few days. Once I pick my jaw up off the floor, I think it’ll be a seminal experience of my lifting career to date.

Stay tuned! I’ll share what I found worked for me and what didn’t.

RS Slomo snatch x 2 at 55lbs

This is RS, a fellow masters lifter, with a 55lb double.

Things I notice in this video: the arm bend is a little early and arms are still a little bent in receiving position. Technically this is more of a power snatch (receipt with knees above 90 degrees) with an immediate overhead squat (OHSq). Feet are going a little wide which is fine at this weight, but may make it hard to come out of the hole when the weights get heavier.

A good drill for addressing both the early arm bend and feet going wide is the “no hands, no feet drill”. Without a hook grip (this will help improve grip strength as well) and without moving feet, perform a snatch from the floor. It forces a good hip drive because you can’t cheat by getting under the bar by spreading feet wide and you can focus on the turnover without the hook grip.

A video demonstrating that drill with Jon North and Donny Shankle can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ProSkFvyWHA

Lydia Valentin, my superhero

There are many men I admire in weightlifting. Donny Shankle, Kendrick Farris, Pyrros Dimas.

But there’s nothing like having somebody with whom you can actually identify. Not only the fact that she is as strong as a grizzly, but the fact that a) she is a she, not a he, b) is a girly-girl, c) is fun and irreverent on international platforms (she has winked at the judges, made a heart sign after a gold medaling lift).

For those of you who don’t know her, may I introduce Lydia Valentin, Spanish olympian and the 2014 European champion in the 75kg class. She wears a lot of pink in training- see this “day in a life video” here:

She is gorgeous and medals in international competition with teased blonde hair and thick black eyeliner. As a mascara addict, this is important to me. I am now the proud owner of a (pink) Lydia tank top from Hookgrip.com . Someday I will lift PRs in this tank because she is that inspiring to me.

In addition to just being cool, gorgeous and stylish, she is also a perfect lifter from a technical standpoint. Here are her snatch and clean and jerk from the 2014 European championships held this month in Tel Aviv, Israel, the c&j in both real time and slomo. In slomo you can see how precisely she uses the bar whip both in the bottom of her clean to come out of the hole and at the top to reset for the jerk.