Thoughts & Insights Archives - Page 3 of 6 - Strong Snatch Masters Olympic Weightlifting

Let’s Talk About Weight….But Not the Kind on the Bar

Weight is a big deal in weightlifting. Yeah, that’s a “duh” kind of sentence, but for once I don’t mean what’s on the bar.

Scale weight, specifically, YOUR scale weight, is a big deal, too.

Weightlifting is a sport divided by weight classes. So how much you weigh determines in which of the 8 men’s classes or 7 women’s classes you will lift. Somewhat obviously the shorter you are and the heavier you are within a given weight class, the more you will likely lift because you’ll have proportionately more muscle and shorter lever arms to move the weight.

For masters athletes, weight classes can be a particularly painful subject. While it it’s generally true that the heavier you are the more you lift, as a proportion you would lift more with additional weight if that weight were primarily made up of muscle, not fat. A combo of fat and muscle still makes you stronger, but there is a point of diminishing returns if the majority of any body weight you add is only fat.

Masters are going to have a much harder time putting on a higher ratio of muscle than fat. Assuming your supplements don’t end in the letters “-ol” or “-one” and have to be injected with a needle, then your hormone levels ain’t what they used to be. And without the hormonal signal to tell your body to take all that protein you eat and turn it into quadz, then extra calories will put on some muscle but almost always with a fat component, too.

Dieting off the excess fat to make a certain class without strength losses is also a little tougher the older you get. Metabolisms slow (although not as much as sedentary age matched cohorts! Go us!) with advancing age, so the habit of living above your weight class and dieting down before competition can be tricksy at best.

The human body is about 60% water if you’re a lean man, 55% water if you’re a woman (women are statistically less lean than men and fat carries less water within it than lean tissue). This can be manipulated to change the scale number for weigh-in without sacrificing muscle mass, but there are limits to how much you can dehydrate in a week and not compromise performance. The powerlifters that weigh-in 24 hours before have a huge advantage over us in this unfortunately, since we only have 1-2 hours between weigh-in and lifting.

So if you started playing this game later in life, you may not be coming in with the percentage of muscle that the folks who have been lifting since they were 12 get to have. I’m not saying it’s impossible to build muscle past a certain age – that would be absurd. But you may have to accept a higher body fat percentage and scale weight to go with all your shiny new muscle.

For many of us this may be a socially hard pill to swallow. I consciously gave up my 102lb, size 0 self to bulk up to 117lbs of lots of muscle. That was a 15% increase in body weight. The transformation took about 18 months. Six months for the scale to change to 117, 12 or so months to recomp -slowly- all that extra weight into muscle.

While a lot of my clothes still fit, not all do. An argument could be made that what fits, fits a lot better with juicy quadz and a booty to fill them out, but if twiggy women are your jam, then you’re SOL with me. At my height (5’1.75″) if I could get up to 58kg with a lot of muscle, I’d be thrilled. But my concern is that most of that extra scale weight wouldn’t be muscle at my age and I wouldn’t be competitive in that class. I’d just be bigger and need a whole new wardrobe and get my ass kicked every time I hit a platform.

But having said that, I will caution first time competitors about getting too wrapped up in all of this. My advice to first timers and for people not competing to qualify for a national or international event is to not worry about it at all. Let the chips fall where they may. Eat a great dinner the night before, and you weigh what you weigh the next day. There will be enough stress involved in figuring out the flow of a meet, of conquering nerves on the platform and wearing a singlet in public. You don’t need to walk in HANGRY and dehydrated, too.

If you like to geek out on statistics, check out the data HERE on All Things Gym. It’s a compilation of all the heights and weights of the senior lifters at the 2012 olympics. Again, I’m not sure you can use it as gospel for what you should weigh to be competitive at a given height as a master, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Motivation

I’m in a lot of women’s fitness groups on Facebook. We talk about lifting, we talk about food and occasionally we talk about things unique to female lifters (I’m willing to bet no men’s group ever had an extended discussion on whether or not one should care about visible panty lines in spandex pants).

Occasionally, somebody reaches out for motivation. They used to be gung ho to get to the gym, now they can’t get up the gumption to get off the couch. Or they’re going, but less frequently and putting in less effort. The truly desperate gave up months ago, ate their way through the holidays like a snowplow on a rescue mission and now don’t know where to begin again.

I get asked the question about getting their mojo back because I’m a gym junkie. Left to my own devices (and if those pesky bills would stay off my ass for a while), I’d be in the gym 6-8 hours per day, happy as a clam. Work, being a wife, being a mom and being a friend mean that while the full day thing doesn’t happen often, an hour or two usually does, 5-7 days/week.

I don’t have a Harry Potter wand to wave and make all your motivations return. But I have some advice. Actually several pieces of advice.

First, set actual and measurable goals. With a deadline. What’s the best way to do this? Compete. Nothing cuts through fuckarounditis like a deadline and the possible public shame of failing in front of an audience. Not “feeling the gym happies”? Too bad. Let fear drive you. When you’re drinking champagne and celebrating after the fact you’ll appreciate the swift kick in the butt that is competition.

Second, consider your support system and to whom you are accountable. If the answer is nobody, that might be your problem right there. Not everyone is self-driven. In fact, as a species we are very sociable and tribe like. So hire a coach, join a Crossfit box, make a pact with someone who belongs to your gym or maybe even join a challenge online. Find other people who will expect you to show up and cheer on your efforts when you do.

Third, fake it til you make it. There are numerous studies showing that if you do something consistently, you’re psychologically loathe to “break the chain”. So promise yourself you’ll go to the gym every day for a week. Get an old fashioned wall calendar and put a big X on every day that you do it (or a sticker or a smiley face or whatever). Visually and psychologically you will not want to leave a hole in a continuous pattern by skipping a day. Sounds silly but it actually works. My perfect example of this is the 21 Day Squat Challenge run by Nick Horton and Tamara Reynolds.

Fourth, and maybe most important of all, find something you actually love. Going to the gym because you want tighter thighs is not, in reality, much of a motivator for the long haul. Going because you have fallen passionately in love with ……… (fill in the blank) is a completely ‘nother thing. Rock climbing. Weightlifting. Bodybuilding. Powerlifting. Curling. Yoga. Maybe even (gasp!) running. Or maybe your groove is needing constantly varying stimuli. Great. Then do all of the above (accepting that you’ll never be great at any). I spent my 20’s and 30’s forcing gym work (read: endless treadmill hours) because I wanted to look better to other people. I have spent my 40’s having to be dragged out of the gym by my family or my pager because I can do 1,000 repetitions of a snatch and never be bored. The rabbit hole of technical lifts makes my geek heart sing. Find your bliss and your heart will sing, too.

What To Do When You Can’t Snatch

Yesterday I ignored what my body was trying to tell me and I kind of tweaked my knee doing squats. I don’t think it’s a bad injury but for once, I’m going to try to be an adult and lay off of it for a day (or two).

Does this mean couch time? Nay nay!!! Just because I don’t want to load my knee while flexed doesn’t mean I’m throwing a pity party for one. It just means doing other stuff for a bit that in truth I should probably be doing more of anyway.

So today was putting all my joints through a full ROM (mobility work, yay!!!), then half an hour of handstand practice which I’m convinced will help my torso stability under load (sound like a jerk to you? Yeah, it did me, too). Then a little triceps and ab work. Because I’m incapable of being in a gym and doing nothing for lower body, I did some reverse hyper sets. A loaded back and booty is a happy back and booty. Or maybe that’s just me.

Supplements I Like

I’ve often been asked by other women in lifting groups or in forums what supplements I take. Let me be the first to say that as an older female athlete I’m willing to try anything not on the WADA banned list if there is some proof that it will actually raise testosterone or growth hormone naturally.

Alas, the list of actually effective supplements is fairly short. So forthwith, my daily supplements.

Let me start with caffeine (and my utterly adorable photobombing fur baby, Taffy). I don’t really like pre-workouts because they make me jittery which makes technical lifts like the snatch harder, not easier. But I do like to drink a Monster about an hour before lifting which gives me a little caffeine boost. I prefer this sugar free version mainly for the taste (which is actually divine, like Fresca’s grown up grapefruity sister). It only has 140mg of caffeine which is less than a mug of brewed coffee. The perception is that Monster is one step away from meth, but this is absolutely not true. It’s basically two Coke’s worth of caffeine, not a crack pipe.

Either right before or during a workout, I’ll drink BCAAs (branched chain amino acids) to improve (hopefully) muscle growth especially since I often work out minimally fed.

Immediately after working out, I drink Arginaid. It’s 4g of arginine, an important amino acid in the nitric oxide pathway. I came to love Arginaid when I was working in a wound care clinic. I saw some really remarkable wound closures after starting patients on it twice daily – wounds that had previously failed to heal in months of therapy. My supposition is that since muscle growth comes from tissue injury (exercise) and subsequent repair, why not give the cells the building blocks they need for that repair? Subjectively it seems to have helped recovery tremendously, especially since I’ve upped the volume to daily training.

My evening regimen consists of fish oils to aid in recovery, boost mental prowess, prevent heart disease, make me leap over tall buildings in a single bound, etc. etc (insert all the magical claims made about fish oil in the past here). There’s a great t-shirt that says, “if it can’t be fixed with squats and fish oil, you’re going to die”. If a t-shirt says it’s good, it’s gotta be good for you, right?

Nighttime also means Vitamin D because I beat most vampires for lack of sun exposure. I wear SPF 30 every day and have for two decades. This is why I’m also mistaken for being 30. I’m not going to change, so I supplement with vitamin D.

Zinc and magnesium are two of the only supplements shown to help testosterone production so you bet I’m going to take them. The magnesium in the form of magnesium citrate as found in Natural Calm also helps sleep (which is why I drink it at night) and “regularity”. You’ve got to be careful with it for this very reason. Overdo it on the first day and the next day you won’t get out of the bathroom for very long. Start with a judicious dose and work your way up.

DIM is to help prevent breast cancer as it (in theory) helps shunt estrogen metabolism toward a “better”, less carcinogenic form of estrogen (there are three naturally occurring forms). It is found in broccoli in case you want to eat your supplements instead of swallowing them as pills. DIM has also been used by some women who have been diagnosed as “estrogen dominant”, i.e. their estrogen: progesterone ratio is off kilter causing a myriad of different symptoms. DIM is purported to help some of these symptoms.

Ibuprofen is my bestest friend. Let’s not kid ourselves here. I’m 46 years old and shit hurts. My shoulders take turns as to who wants to be the problem child. I think my knees have secretly called adult protective services behind my back. If I took time off for every ache and pain, I’d never lift. So I take my ibuprofen when I need it, sit in warm tubs or take hot showers and see a massage therapist regularly.

When I remember it (which isn’t very often, maybe twice per week), I’ll eat two Fred Flintstone gummy vitamins. They’re yummy and I figure they fill in any nutritional gaps I miss.

So there you have it. Looking at them all together, it seems like a lot. But they each have a purpose and it doesn’t take much time nor offer much risk, so why not try them?

What supplements do you take? Let me know! Let’s learn from each other 🙂

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.

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.