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American Masters Open 2014

What did you wear for Halloween?

This year, I dressed in a singlet and for Halloween I went to Savannah, Georgia, home of ghosts and all things Southern, to compete in the American Masters Open.

It was my first time at Howard Cohen’s gym and it was a marvelous experience. There is so much history that has passed though those walls. Pictures of legendary strongmen from the past grace the hall where we waited to weigh in. CJ Cummings American records are inked on the whiteboard over the office.

But All Hallow’s Eve was reserved for the masters, women and the oldest men.

I felt good going into this competition. First, it wasn’t my first rodeo anymore. I’d done a local, state and national level meet already so I understood the flow and the level of judging to expect.

Second, I liked my programming a lot more. I put on a bigger emphasis on strength in many different planes and ranges of motion instead of being contest-lift specific all the time. Yes, I have a lot still to learn and perfect with technique. But I felt stronger overall which makes me feel better under the bar. In the month prior to competition I PRed my front squat and hit my openers repeatedly and easily. That’s a great confidence booster.

In the end I didn’t make the lifts I wanted to, but I improved on my Nationals total and that makes me very happy. I did discover about myself that I have terrible public performance anxiety. On the one hand, the anxiety of performing makes me strong as an ox. My nervous system is so turned on that the bar flies like an eagle. On the other hand, it makes technique much shakier and so I miss lifts I could make under better circumstances. I’ve rarely had to go below a power clean in competition because the bar flies so high.

My advice to myself? More competitions! I’m going to be looking for more local meets to get more immunized against platform jitters. I’m going to try and lift in front of more people at a local Crossfit box instead of lifting so often by myself. I need to get used to failing and succeeding publicly. I remember having very similar performance anxiety when I first started operating, which has long since passed after thousands of repetitions of performing in front of the nursing staff in the OR. Now I just have to re-learn that confidence of staying on task in front of an audience in a different venue.

For the first time ever, I didn’t follow myself for all three lifts because I wasn’t the smallest nor the weakest lifter. That brought a new element to this competition and I really appreciated having the rest between attempts. It was also an ego boost to actually be out lifting some taller, heavier women. Maybe I need a Mighty Mouse Singlet. I definitely need warm up pants, a hoodie or maybe a blanket to stay warm while waiting though.

I did come home with a shiny new gold medal. And a renewed appreciation for the wonderfully generous and supportive people in this sport, from the fans in the audience who cheer for strangers, to the experienced competitors in the warm-up area who share their knowledge and advice and pats on the back.

So onwards. I already went back to lifting today 48 hours later, no down time. Hit 80% cleans 6×3 and some heavy deadlifts and moderate presses in the split. I am so thrilled that project “fix my jerk” is yielding results, so more jerk work in the split, behind and in front, with cleans and alone. More unilateral leg and arm work to wake up the sleepy right glute and make the shoulder “Russian Strong” in all vectors.

And Halloween candy for recovery. It’s a holiday after all.

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 🙂

Masters Nationals

For those who don’t compete, olympic weightlifting is divided into four groups: youth (the under 17 crowd), juniors (the under 20’s), senior (20-35) and masters (35 and above). These are not inviolable divisions. I watched a 14yo girl snatch a US record at the American Open this year (ostensibly a senior event) in the same session as last year’s 53kg masters champion who is 47 years old.

The competition I went to this past Friday was Masters Nationals, so a national level competition for lifters over the age of 35. It is further subdivided in 5 year age increments, so 35-39, 40-44, etc as well as the traditional international weight classes.

It was an amazing experience for a variety of reasons. First, to see 80+ year old lifters still competing with good form (albeit with more power receipts than full squats) was encouraging. Having found this sport late in life, it’s nice to know that there is still a place to compete and encouragement for people who worry more about hormone replacement than hormone surges.

Second, it was held at LSUS (Louisiana State University Shreveport) the home of Kendrick Farris, two time olympian and a nationally competitive weightlifting team.

But most importantly, it was the culmination of a year of training, studying, worrying, and discussing these two lifts for me personally. It was a chance to qualify to compete at the masters world championships in the fall. It was an opportunity to prove to my family that their support wasn’t in vain.

First, the good news. I am now the 53kg/45w national champion. I lifted a total that will allow me to go to Worlds and compete against some of the best lifters in my age and weight class from around the world.

But now, the analysis. As meets go, it was actually fairly awful for me. I went 1/3 on the snatch and 2/3 on the C&J and both were far lower than I had planned. My total was lower than either my first local meet and the Texas State Championships.

So what did I learn? I learned the timing of warming up. I’m a lifter who does best very warm. So I started a little earlier than everyone else with my foam rolling and standard warm-up maneuvers. But then the session in front of me went over and I ended up lifting about 30 minutes later than I had planned. Rookie mistake to be sure, but I probably should have been paying more attention to that. So I hit my opener easily in the back, then got cold, missed it on first attempt, went up a kg, got it, but was frazzled and missed the third attempt forward from overhead in the hole.

I noticed when I went to the back after finishing the snatches that I was sitting in what I consider a meek and sad position. Arms folded around my middle, kind of hunched over. So I decided to shake my disappointment at the crappy snatches by adopting a power pose – knees out, chest up and back, arms out to the side taking up space. It really did help me get back in the game and get focused on the second half of the competition. I convinced by brain (though adopting a physical pose) that I wasn’t pitiful and was still in the game.

Cleans and especially jerks are harder for me technically than snatches. I don’t work them as much because a) I like snatches more (and yes, I realize this is not a mature way to train) and b) since snatches were initially more challenging, I spent more time focused on them. So my C&J aren’t the big powerhouse savers for me that they can be for other people and that is most surely going to be a big focus going forward. How? Squats, leg power, plyo accessory movements and simply more reps from the floor.

My competition cleans have been overwhelmingly power cleans which means I’ve got a lot more kgs in me if I can just trust myself to get under the bar. What I noticed with both cleans and snatches this competition is that I can get even heavy weights up to my eyebrows, so strength ain’t the issue. Technique and speed most certainly are. Part of technique is keeping the bar closer so that I can just scoop under it after the second pull is finished. So there’s my homework for the next 5 months.

Jerks just need work. I just started playing with squat and power jerks, and who knows, maybe I’ll end up there because I’m much faster down in a squat than a split. But I am going to keep working on my split jerk for now, with more aggressive feet and moving back leg first and landing with front leg at 90 degrees, not with knee over toes.

With snatches I need to strengthen the overhead position. What good is it to get it overhead than lose it because you can’t lock it out? Sots presses, heaving snatch balances (learned courtesy of the Catalyst website) and static overhead holds around 200% of max snatch is my plan there, along with more behind the neck push-press work at “stop being such a giant candyass” weights (as opposed to what I often lift).

All this may sound very negative, but overall I’m pleased. I learned a lot about competing, about training about my weaknesses and even discovered a few strengths.

And if I choose to go to Copenhagen for Worlds in September, I’ll get to wear a USA masters singlet. That will be an extraordinarily proud day indeed.

If you want to see a slomo version of the snatches here it is:

Welcome to Strong Snatch!

Welcome to Strong Snatch, a place to discuss olympic lifting, share videos of your lifts to both celebrate and to garner constructive critique and to discover some of the many steps I have taken on the journey to becoming a competitive masters weightlifter. Masters weightlifters, by the way, are not necessarily “masters” in the sense of someone who has great proficiency. Masters refers to weightlifters over the age of 35.

There will be links to articles from which I’ve learned important insights (and why I thought they were useful).

There will be a place to share great product discoveries like favored singlets, shoes, chalk, etc.

And last a training log to keep me accountable and to have a place to track those “aha!” moments that come while learning such a technical sport.