Thoughts & Insights Archives - Page 2 of 6 - Strong Snatch Masters Olympic Weightlifting

Credit Card Breach at USA Weightlifting

Over the past few years I’ve had a few incidents of credit card fraud, resulting in my credit card provider canceling my card and re-ssuing a new one.

A few days ago, a woman on an olympic weightlifting Facebook group asked if anyone had suffered credit card fraud after making purchases from the USA Weightlifting (USAW) site. She specifically mentioned fraudulent Starbucks gift card purchases made on her account and I immediately thought of my case.

Over the years I have used my credit card often on the USAW site and purchased apparel, meet registrations, annual membership, a coaching certification, and Masters Camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. I specifically recall having fraudulent Starbucks cards purchased on my affected credit card.

I commented on the Facebook post as did several others that had the same type of fraud and all had used their affected credit card on the USAW site. Perhaps an official from USAW was on the Facebook group and looked into it or perhaps one of the group members contacted USAW.

Today, August 20, 2015, I received an email from USAW:

Dear USA Weightlifting Member,

According to our records you have purchased goods or services on USA Weightlifting’s website in recent months. We have learned that incidents of credit card fraud have been reported from some members after using one of our online processors. These reports specify small charges for Starbucks card reloads

We have investigated the reports and believe that the breach has occurred in MyCart, the shopping cart that we have used for many years for the purchase of coaching course registrations, banners, event merchandise/tickets/banquets, camps and miscellaneous payments. We do not believe that the problem stems from HangAStar, our on-line member and event registration system, but we have made reports to both service providers.

We are now in the process of rapidly moving all of our credit card processing from MyCart to an alternative provider.

We encourage you to be vigilant in reviewing your financial statements and report any unauthorized charges to the issuing institution.

Most importantly, we apologize for any inconvenience and want you to know that we are actively working to resolve the situation by changing providers.

Yours in Sport,

USA Weightlifting

For those of you that have recently purchased goods or services on the USAW website, keep an eye on your credit card statements for suspicious activity.

I’ll try to learn more about this specific merchant account provider mentioned by USAW, MyCart, and I’ll add any updates I have to this post.

Why Pancake Good Mornings Matter

My husband once told me a story about a very, very strong guy. I’m pretty sure he was a bodybuilder. One of those giant jacked and tan dudes.

This behemoth was mighty in the gym. But he leaned over to tie his shoes one day and wrenched his back, keeping him out of the gym for weeks.

Why? Because it’s not enough to be strong in a single plane with a limited degree of range of motion.

To have healthy joints, you need stability. To have stability, you have to have strength and control in the entirety of the range of motion of the joint. Particularly at the end ranges of motion.

Think about the olympic lifts. Think about where you catch a heavy clean. Is it just below parallel? Hell no! If it’s very heavy, you’re catching it at the bottom of a front squat. Olympic lifters need strength and flexibility to reach those positions and to get in and out of them with power.

So you don’t just have to be strong. You need to be strong and mobile and stable from one end range of motion to the other for most of your joints.

Which brings me to this fascinating exercise, the pancake good morning.

Like the Sots press, it takes any and all hip drive out of the equation which can be humbling when you can’t load it as heavy as you would the standing version of the exercise. But it also highlights any limitations you have in hip mobility and stability.

When I tried it, my hamstrings seemed to be the limiting factor. I couldn’t go face to grass like some of the videos on All Things Gym (seen here) nor could I do them with a completely flat back.

But even with just 55lbs, I was sore in my hammies the next day. And now I have something new I need to work on in terms of optimizing my lifts through better range of motion.

If you look back through some of my old posts (for example, here) you can see where I built a better lockout overhead by building my shoulder strength in a variety of ways, not just barbell presses.

What are your limitations? What are you doing to fix them? Let me know!

Fear is the Mind Killer – More Lessons From Weightlifting Camp as I Prep for the World Masters Cup

When I first saw the start list for the 53k/45w class at the Masters World Cup in Dallas I thought I had forgotten how to breathe. There were seven – SEVEN!- women entered and while most of us were tightly clustered in terms of previous totals, the entrants included the multiple time world champion in the class, Joanne McManus from Great Britain and the current American snatch record holder in the class, Sandra Arechaederra.

Now let’s stop a moment and contemplate how ludicrous my reaction was. Yes, I’m more used to be one of only a few at any given competition and yes, I’m used to being pretty good. But why the panic?

Keep in mind that if you were lying on a stretcher in front of me with multiple gunshot wounds to your trunk, I would calmly and efficiently assess whether or not you needed a life saving operation while simultaneously wondering if the cafeteria would close before I was done in the OR. How do I know this? Because I’ve actually asked the clerk to call the cafeteria to set aside some banana pudding with ‘Nilla wafers while I was waiting to go to the OR for a gunshot wound to the belly.

I know how to keep calm under pressure. I also really like banana pudding with ‘Nilla wafers.

And I’m not afraid to be in public in revealing clothing so it’s not the singlet that bothers me. My closest friends call me Dr. Buttfloss in honor of the string bikinis I prefer at the beach.

So why the panic?

Because this was going to be my first competition with a lot of competitors. What if I were finally revealed as a fraud? This is what’s known as imposter’s syndrome. Where you live in constant fear that others will realize that you’re a fraud and don’t belong in whatever situation you’re in. That you’re never as smart/capable/pretty/strong whatever as others have thought you were.

There’s also a profound sense of the unfamiliar. Blood, guts and alas, poop, are my daily life. They don’t particularly scare me (unless I can hear the bleeding; that’s really bad). But put me on a platform to lift weights in front of strangers and my mouth goes dry, my hands shake and my heart races.

None of these things are conducive to making successful lifts. The adrenaline helps make all my cleans high powers in competition, but the shakes have caused me to miss snatches and jerks.

So I need to spend more time doing what my coach Nick Horton described at camp this week as noticing the emotion, but not letting it affect you. Recognize it, acknowledge it, but don’t let it have power over you. He recommends meditation as the mental tool for sharpening that skill which is something I’d like to pursue. In the short term, I think just practicing the mantra of “this is weightlifting, not facing execution by guillotine” will help me defuse the mental tension.

Because let’s face it. I love the sport, but it’s just weightlifting. If I go 0/6 the worst thing that will happen is that my dad won’t have cool pictures to edit in photoshop. No one will die, my kids will not love me any less and in fact might love me more because they’ll feel sorry for me.

So as I finish the last 10 days of prep toward the World Cup, I am trying to learn to be a little bit more of an adult about my lifting and the competition. I want to go in confident, but not cocky. Excited, but not terrified. And I’m avoiding donuts because I’m still a kg over weight. I am learning to love baked kale chips.

May the best woman win.

BELIEVE!

I just got back from another week of weightlifting camp in beautiful Asheville, NC with Tamara Reynolds and Nick Horton. I have much to share, so I’ll spread it out over several posts. But this is the first and most important lesson. I think of it as “BELIEVE!” shouted with a southern preacher’s passion.

We started every session of camp with a didactic session. Sometimes it was technical, i.e., this is how you place your feet in an ideal jerk receiving position. Sometimes though the lesson addressed the mental aspects of lifting.

During one lesson, Nick asked us to visualize making a lift that was just beyond what we could currently do. He wanted it visualized in perfect detail: walking to the chalk bucket, chalking up our hands, stepping up to the bar, adjusting our grip, grinding feet into the floor, setting our back, then each phase of the lift ending with perfect lockout.

So I tried to imagine a 45kg snatch. I had done 43kg once before and 46kg was my holy grail (because that translates to three digits, 101.2lbs, in freedom units. ‘Merica!).

Literally my visceral and immediate response was, “I can’t do that.” Now keep in mind this is in my imagination. In my imagination, I can have carnal relations with Russian weightlifters. In my imagination, I have ridden flying horses. But somehow my mind balked at making a 45kg lift. So apparently I think my chances are better with Klokov and Pegasus than making a sub-bodyweight snatch.

Now this is clearly a problem. It’s why I have almost always made PRs when I didn’t know what was loaded on the bar. Because my doubting, sabotaging brain could be put on silent and I could let my body do what it knew it could do and lift that damn bar.

It’s particularly pernicious for someone who trains alone like I do. I don’t have an external voice encouraging me or chastising me into trying scary lifts. So I tend to cat out to paraphrase Nick Horton (whose three rules of snatching are lockout, hit your hips and stop being a pussy).

I have found recent success in stopping the recording of every attempt in training. Meaning, I finish with my warm-ups (for snatch, up to 77lbs/35kg) then just start adding random and differing small amounts to the bar so that I don’t know exactly what’s on there. I find I ramp up to a higher daily max with this strategy because again, I’m not staring at that scary number on the paper in my log book before addressing the bar.

In Asheville, I tried Nick’s way. I visualized making that lift. I visualized locking out HARD. I visualized guiding the bar down when I was done in victory.

Then, on day 4 of camp, I walked up to a bar loaded with 46kg. I knew it had 46kg. I had just made 44kg which was a PR and instead of loading 45, I went on up to 46. 44 had been easy and I knew, knew knew knew, that I could do 46. I believed! And I did it (although the lockout may not have counted in competition, I’ll still take it).

A double PR. A PR in actual weight lifted (three digits bitches!!!!) but also a PR in confidence. I felt like an actual adult making that lift because I did it with knowledge aforethought. I couldn’t be prouder.

Do try this at home kids. Try visualizing successful lifts. Try visualizing making technically better lifts if there is a part of your lifts that doesn’t move like it should. Try visualizing standing on a platform in competition to start taming those meet day nerves. And believe that you can succeed because you can do more than you think you can.

BELIEVE!

Shoulder Mobility Work

My shoulders suck.

They just do. But their suckitude has helped propel me into learning new things so I suppose I should be grateful (in a begrudging old lady sort of way).

My left shoulder impingement syndrome meant I learned how to sumo deadlift. Hooray! Still one of my favorite lifts.

But my current right shoulder issues forced me to actually be an adult and start doing preventative maintenance so it didn’t keep me from jerking for three months.

Someone recently asked me what I did for shoulder mobility so I made her this video. This is what I do every day as part of warm up. Some of it is muscular warm-up, some of it is CARS (controlled articular rotation) of the joint. It only takes about 5 minutes and I feel like it’s well worth the time.

I also do hanging work (look up the Ido Portal hanging challenge) and scapular shrugs which have helped open up my tight lats and traps.

Nothing fancy, just finally taking the time to make some needed improvements.

Masters Nationals 2015 – Passover, PRs and PMS

Despite it’s being over a week past, I am just now sitting down to write up my experience at this year’s masters national championships. I apologize for the delay, but I went straight from nationals to a week long trauma job (hooray!) which kept me too busy to contemplate lifting (gasp!).

So many things were challenging going into this year’s meet. Passover started 7 days before. For those of you not familiar with the Jewish holiday, it celebrates the exodus from slavery in Egypt. Which is lovely except it’s celebrated by NOT eating leavened bread. Fleeing pharoah’s wrath meant grabbing dough before it had a chance to rise and getting the hell out of Dodge. Or Cairo as the case may be.

Lovely, but anybody who knows me knows I eat a lot of leavened stuff. Donuts. Fig Newtons. PB&J sandwiches. This holds especially true after weigh-in. I don’t live very much above my weight class, maybe a kg or two, so making weight means cutting back salt and carbs for a few days and limiting water the day before competition. Right after weigh-in, the re-feed begins with lots of simple carbs (Newtons!) and Monster.

But what was different on this day vs. all other days (you’ll get the reference if you’ve ever been to a seder)? No Newtons. No Lenny&Larry cookies. No Pop Tarts. And none of those yummy carby treats to fuel up after the preceding week’s workouts. Ugh. I think I ate my weight in matzah brie and matzah cashew butter and jelly sandwiches.

Now add challenge #2. This was PMS week. So I retained water like a sea sponge on Mercury. Not good for making weight. It also meant that forgoing the donuts was extra hard because donuts and PMS go together like, well, donuts and PMS.

Challenge #3. I wafted into Monrovia on a cloud of Advil and Aleve trying to nurse what I could out of an extremely painful shoulder injury.

All in all, I was nervous.

But guess what? I won. By 1kg, but I won. And I did well-ish.

I missed my first snatch for a little re-bending of my inured arm (I can hear Nick Horton yelling at me to LOCK OUT even as I write this). So I went out and locked the living shit out of snatches two and three. But alas that meant re-trying my opener which meant I didn’t get to try my super big third attempt. No biggie, went into cleans 3kg ahead. And I hit my 40kg snatch which was my dream lift not that long ago.

We went lift for lift in the clean and jerk though, with her opening bigger than I did. So it came down to each of our last lifts. I had wanted to do and think I could have jerked 53kg. But to be safe I needed to make 54kg so that’s what I tried. The clean was kind of ugly, but I made it. But then missed the jerk. She went out to do 54kg, made the clean (prettier than I did truth be told) then missed the jerk.

And that’s the moment that I became a two-time Masters National Champion.

I PRed my total. I beat last year’s total by 14kg. FOURTEEN KG!!! I PRed my competition snatch, although I’ve done better in training. I PRed my competition clean. I matched my recent competition jerk. And my singlet totally rocked.

I’m pretty ecstatic really. And now I’m all kinds of fired up to go to Dallas in August for the Masters World Cup and see if I can hit a triple digit total. I have amazing coaches, I have a super supportive team and I have goals.

And I once again have donuts. Yee haw!!!

Next year…… threepeat.

Competing in Charlotte

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;

but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt

I got to do my first meet with my team, Weightlifting Academy, this past Saturday. I think in the end we had 13 lifters there and it was more fun than I can even articulate (but I’ll try, because, after all, I’m writing this and you’re reading it).

First, let me tell you what it means to me to be on a team. I was that kid in middle school/high school/college/medical school/all of life who at best exercised occasionally to burn off some caffeine or to try and look good in shorts. I was never an athlete.

I have always self identified as a geek. If there was an olympic medal for reading, I’d be Ilya Ilyn. Seriously. I can (and often still do) read about a book a day. My husband jokingly says his next wife will be illiterate since I spend so much money on books. I love history and physics and linguistics.

For whatever reason, my self identity was binary. I could be a geek or I could be the hot chick, but not both. I could be well learned (pronounce it with two syllables) but not have smarticles AND be an athlete.

Fast forward to today. Now I geek out on weightlifting technique and articles about recovery. And I can finally see the many facets in my reflection. The geek, the athlete, the raver (I love trance and progressive house music, don’t judge), the *ahem* mature beauty, the wife, the mom, the doctor, the lover of fast cars and cute cats. It’s all in there, it all has a place.

Which brings me to my team. So now in my 40’s, I am a member of an athletic team for the first time in my life. It doesn’t hurt that this team has at its’ helm two other people who think that thinking deep thoughts is a worthy endeavor. But it’s still a weightlifting team and you still have to compete.

Last Saturday I got to do something scary and nerve wracking with the love and support of my team mates. It’s not easy to wrap yourself in spandex and lift weights in front of a crowd. As Teddy said above, the credit goes not to the internet warrior criticizing your crappy clean, but to the person who dares greatly and gets up to challenge themselves in the arena.

But how much more wonderful was it knowing that I had people who would cheer me on from the stands and who understood every minute of what it took to get on that platform? People with whom to share a warm-up space and rocky road cookies. People who had tape in case I forgot it and who helped me shake off two failed snatch attempts. A coach who said I should go for my shiny new competition PR clean and jerk.

And people for whom I could scream from the stands after I was done. I have a team. I have people.

I actually got teary when I saw my name on the schedule for Masters Nationals in two weeks and saw “Weightlifting Academy” by my name instead of “unattached”.

I am a proud member of the #AshevilleStrengthLegion, some of the most awesomest people in the world.

My First Arnold Sports Festival

For those of you who have never heard of it, the Arnold Sports Festival is like Lollapalooza for athletics. Held in Columbus, Ohio, 50 some odd sports have exhibitions/contests and there is a giant arena of vendors with all things gym related. While the aesthetic sports predominate (because Arnold), it’s a Pan Am qualifier in weight lifting so it draws pretty big talent. I enjoyed it, but with some qualifications. Forthwith, my impressions.

1. You can, in fact, live on pre-workout and protein bar samples. There are literally dozens of booths each promoting their proprietary blend of pre-workout energy supplements, recovery drinks and protein protein protein. So my lifting girlfriends and I went from booth to booth sampling the wares. There are restaurants somewhere in the bowels of the convention center. But we lasted two days on eleventy million milligrams of caffeine and protein bar samples. We may never actually poop again, but we were wired for sound. Fueled two awesome workouts with my besties. Best of kind was a cheesecake bar. Worst of kind was some “no cow” (I guess no whey?) bar that tasted like grass. Without the gr. This made my friend exclaim loudly, “I need something else in my mouth right now!” which made several men turn immediately in her direction. Hilarity ensued.

2. Not all strength sports are the same. when not trying to see if I could actually hear color from caffeine overload, I was watching the events. A tiny bit of the aesthetic stuff and a lot of weightlifting and some strongman. Strongman is ridiculously cool. The middleweight women did yoke carries with 450lbs. Alanna Casey, who won the middleweight division, practically ran 120 feet with her yoke. It was jaw droppingly impressive. She is roughly two inches shorter than I am so in my opinion she’s a goddess. We’ll talk about the weightlifting in a minute. But the aesthetic stuff was interesting to me. Male bodybuilders are so big in person that they barely look like we should be counted in the same species. But male or female, all the aesthetic people were leeeeeeeaaaaaannnnnn. I hardly look in the mirror and think, “gigantor”. But these guys were missing any semblance of subcutaneous fat. And they were all dark orange.

Clearly all of them put in gym time-lots of gym time- to get where they are. But it’s odd for me to think of fat loss as a significant portion of a sport. It was like a contest for who could diet the best, certainly not who was the strongest. And it was off putting for that reason. Judging is somewhat subjective, not the objective “you locked this out or you didn’t’ of powerlifting or weightlifting. Women are judged every millisecond of every day for how they look. Why would I subject myself to more scrutiny and more negativity on this front? Why not reach for what you can do rather than what you look like? Which leads to….

3. My heroes don’t take selfies in bathrooms. Every time I went to a bathroom during the festival, someone orange was taking a selfie in the mirror. In the hotel lobby waiting for the shuttle from the parking garage, there was a woman taking a selfie. In the bathroom at the airport leaving the last day, there was a lady taking a selfie in the mirror of the airport bathroom. Every bathroom in the convention center had somebody taking selfies in the mirror. If you search the hashtag #ASF2015 on Instagram, you will see hundreds of bathroom selfies. I follow a lot of weightlifters on Instagram. Know what they posted pics of? Them hoisting mighty weights. It goes back to what you find important. Is it the ultimate narcissism of posting pics of yourself on IG to see how many likes you can accrue? Or is it what feat of mastery of sport you can achieve after years of training.

4. Weightlifters are amazing humans. And the sport is growing. While on my quest to become the single most caffeinated person alive, I came upon a booth where a man looked familiar. Then I thought, “that’s Anthony Pomponio. Oh shit, THAT’S ANTHONY POMPONIO!!!!” who is a current olympic training center resident and utter badass. And who could not have been sweeter to this fangirl. He introduced me to the medical director of the company and was just very humble in the face of my calling him a god (because yeah, that came out of my mouth).

Words cannot even describe Tatiana Kashirina. During the introduction to the athletes in the class, she just stood smiling like the adorable 21yo girl that she is, with her long braid behind her. But then she got on the platform and performed 6 technically perfect lifts with 10kg jumps between attempts. 10kg jumps. That’s the stuff legends are made of. And she was no where near her world record lifts. You know the meme that says, “somewhere some girl is warming up with your max”? This girl- who is not yet old enough to rent a car- is that girl.

During the men’s Pan Am qualifier session, there was standing room only. And the spillover crowd into the adjacent hall was 25 people thick. I took a picture of the crowd to show just how underestimated the crowd turnout was. I wanted to send an email to ESPN to take note and maybe consider broadcasting highlights of nationals. My friend looked around to see what I was photographing and turned to me and said, “is that Donny?” And there, in the middle of the crowd, just standing unmolested by fans, was one of the icons of American weightlifting. Not standing in a booth with a long line to have him sign something, not hanging out with an entourage, not orange. Just a single guy, enjoying some really good examples of the top of his sport. After much goading from friends, I went up to him and thanked him for all the great content on his blog and for being such an inspiration. And he was very cordial in return.

Seriously? Best. Sport. Ever.

How To Learn How to Snatch in Under 3 Minutes

I had a friend in a private Facebook group ask my advice on learning how to snatch. Like so many people, she was stuck with analysis paralysis.

Every tutorial I’ve ever seen makes snatching seem sooooooo hard. And at some level, it is. For people who are trying to have technically proficient and maximally mechanically advantageous movement patterns, it is hard. An olympian and U.S. record holder recently posted some technique work she was doing to perfect her clean. If she’s still technically refining her lifts, you know the average Joe can spend a lifetime learning.

But when you’re just starting out, is all of that necessary? I would argue no. And not just no, but hell no. First, you have to learn the basic mechanism of getting the bar from the floor to overhead. Otherwise you’ll just get lost in the detail and you’ll quit. And quitting means fewer people in the sport which is bad.

So this is a video for rank beginners. In particular, rank adult beginners. The assumption is that you’ve already figured out what your grip width on the bar should be (there are a lot of tutorials on that out in the world) and that you’ve actually seen a snatch performed. With those two in mind, this video will take you to the getting it overhead position.

I take none of the credit for this series of cues. They were learned from Nick Horton and Tamara Reynolds who are fantabulous coaches and amazing humans all around. I just put them on film for a friend (hence, the “Hi, Abi!” at the beginning of the video). I think they encompass the essence of the snatch.

In essence:

-start with your shoulders right over the bar, arms look straight when viewed from the side

-bring the bar up to your thighs by moving your knees back and out of the way – “shoot your butt back”

-stand up and pull the bar into your hips (the “power position”) with your lats

– jump with the bar pulled into your hips

-then lock that bitch out overhead by “spreading the bar apart”. End of story.

Please don’t leave a thousand comments about why it’s important to externally rotate the humerus to keep elbows out and protract the shoulders and keep thoracic extension and initiate the movement with leg drive and keep torso angle stable etc etc etc. I know all that. You, if you are saying that, know all that. But it is not essential to learning how to snatch at the very beginning. So let the beginners get a few under their belt before they’re bombarded with the stuff it takes a lifetime to perfect.

And don’t bitch about the “jump” cue. It’s hard for adult learners to understand explosive muscular power in any other way. So shhhh and let the newbies enjoy.

Pistol Squats

If you look back through some old posts you’ll see that fixing my wonky squat has been a project for the last year. I have (I think, after much research and contemplation) weak thigh abductors relative to adductors and a weak glute on the left, weak quad on the right. These imbalances may be due to scoliosis and/or a slight leg length discrepancy. Or maybe I just like to hula when I squat, I’m not sure.

But to help fix it, I’ve been doing a lot of unilateral work, particularly pistol squats. What one year ago was impossible, I can now rep for 10 on each side. And because a friend jokingly challenged me to do so, I tried an overhead pistol squat with a bar.

But here’s the thing: while I don’t recommend adding this to your training regimen, per se, it’s a fun test that illuminates weaknesses. Do you have weak dorsiflexion of the ankle that you compensate for by having great thoracic mobility? Guess what, you’re gonna tip over when you’re on one leg. Do you have powerful legs but crappy shoulder mobility? Great mobility all around, but weak quads? It’s a tipping you’re a going.

So give it a try if for no other reason than because it’s kind of fun and it might show you things about your snatch mobility that you didn’t know. Personally, it made me feel a little badass. Which then led to hitting 90% snatch singles which I had been missing in the past month or so. Hooray!!!