It’s PR Friday! Here’s some media from last week’s Arnold NAPF Raw Challenge to get you inspired over the weekend.
AC’s log is consistently the most popular on the site. This comes as no surprise once you see his intensity on the platform and his constant interaction with his fans. Check out his write-up on the Arnold (there’s a surprise ending), and this video of his lifts:
Mike B also had a good meet at the Arnold and did a write-up on his training log. Check out his video here, and subscribe to his often-updated YouTube channel while you’re at it:
Matt Nolan finished second in his class and damn near pulled 733lbs. What do you think he’ll hit at Nats?
Big Chris has been real, real busy since the Arnold, so I haven’t seen any log updates or a video of his lifts…but at least he squats deeply:
Photo by Sioux-Z Hartwig-Gary
Marc wasn’t extremely pleased with his meet, but I was happy to see that he finished strong, posted some great stories about the Arnold, and perhaps most importantly, got a stellar picture of the crew with the legendary Ed Coan. I’m jelly. You jelly?
Matt Baller hit a new IPF World Record bench…twice. Here’s the bigger of the two:
Jennifer Thompson blew us all away again with a very impressive meet, including a PR squat and dead, and chipping her own World Record bench to 137kg/302lbs (@ the 2:00 mark in the video). Amazing.
USAPL’s website has been updated to include the Arnold results, along with a database of 2012 Lifter Rankings. Check it out.
In the Pro Deadlift challenge, Ian Bell won for the THIRD consecutive year, this time by less than 1 Wilks point. Dece.
How’d your week go? Tell us about your PRs and put up a video. Just copy/paste the simple youtube address in your comment for it to show up properly formatted. Just so: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTYAlMy57I” So easy, a meathead could do it.
Jacob Tsypkin has been fielding questions on our facebook page about weightlifting/crossfit/training/coffee/beardliness, and will compile 3-4 of them weekly for your reading pleasure. You’re welcome.
Gregor S asks, “Squatting every day: a good idea?”
Yes. No. Maybe. Sometimes.
View the option of daily squatting as a tool. I have used it to great effect in certain situations. It can work to break plateaus, it can work for lifters who are significantly better at volume than they are at intensity, and it can work, surprisingly, for lifters who have knee pain when squatting.
The key is doing it intelligently. You’re working up to a heavyish single each day (occasionally I’ll work in a double or triple instead.) If you feel great, go for a PR. If you don’t feel great, just hit what you can hit without getting ugly and call it a day. If you want daily squatting to be effective, you absolutely MUST check your ego at the door.
Andrew K asks, “What cues do you like to use for the jerk? How about supplemental exercises?”
Predictably, the answer is, “it depends.” It depends on what the lifter is doing right or wrong, what they’re good or bad at, and of course, what they respond to. With that said, some of the most common cues I use are:
“Drive it high and back” to get the lifter to be aggressive in driving the bar off the shoulders “Move straight” to cue the lifter to keep the hips and torso moving straight down/up/down “Step in front of the bar” to get the lifter to reach their front foot out to an adequate degree “Keep driving, keep reaching” to cue the lifter to stay with the bar, driving it as high as possible and to be active, rather than passive, about receiving and holding it.
For supplemental exercises, again it depends on what the athlete needs. Obviously the jerk from blocks is fantastic, and I prefer it from behind the neck for most people, as it teaches the lifter where the bar needs to be and, for most people, allows them to handle more weight. Of course, the jerk from the front rack is also very useful, so we employ both.
A fantastic exercise for improving footwork is Glenn Pendlay’s jerk ladder. This drill will help the lifter get used to the back foot landing first and “catching” himself with the front foot, as well as learning to remain rigid when going under the weight.
Lastly, the press from split is something all of my lifters do both when learning the jerk and in their warm-ups. It’s exactly what it sounds like: with the bar in the front rack, walk the feet out into your split position, and press. The most crucial part is that the press is EXTREMELY strict. There must be no movement of the legs, hips, or torso whatsoever. By doing this, the lifter learns where his body needs to be when receiving the jerk.
Stroup asks, “What is the minimal amount of weightlifting training a CrossFitter needs?”
In a word, plenty. Assuming we are talking about competitive CrossFitters here, my athletes do the snatch and clean & jerk heavy three times a week each, on average. That’s not including what they do in conditioning circuits. I think this would roughly hold true with most competitive CrossFitters.
Rudy Nielsen of The Outlaw Way wrote the following in an article about the importance of weightlifting for CrossFitters:
“Larson also has added up the total point values for every movement tested during both the 2011 and 2012 Games seasons. The snatch and clean & jerk are worth 20 percent of the total point value. If you add accessories, you have 36 percent of the total point value—read that again, except in all caps: THIRTY-SIX PERCENT. I can and will talk about exactly how the lifts develop the athlete from an overall perspective, but strictly from a sporting perspective, that’s a lot of points.”
Between that, and the ability of the lifts to improve an athlete in so many ways, I think it’s undeniable that if you want to be a good CrossFitter, you’ve got to spend some serious time developing the snatch and clean & jerk.
‘Merica
Jacob Tsypkin is a CrossFit and weightlifting coach, the co-owner of CrossFit Monterey and the Monterey Bay Barbell Club in Monterey, CA. He is available for weightlifting seminars and gives excellent hugs imo.
You could file today’s post under “Trying something new”. It comes from my friend Brendan: fed up with the corporate grind, he took a page from Steve Jobs’ book of “Do what you love”, and made a career change. Along the way, he also got into the sport of MMA. Here he details his progression into the sport and some of his training ideas, along with how it helped his gym lifts. – Brian
—
A very wise man once stated to me that I “just needed to do it, not to talk about doing it,
but just f***ing do it.”
If that doesn’t speak to you about how to live life then I don’t know what does.
My post meathead/football career exported me to a financial firm where days consisted
of shares settling, leveraging foreign currency, and Far East markets. I gained 40lbs and
hated myself.
One year later I quit, went back into training, and started Office to Octagon Inc. on an
ideal with little to no direction.
Within three months I started Olympic lifting as a director at InnerCity Weightlifting
where I was fortunate enough to work with nationally ranked lifters and at risk youth in
Boston.
By chance I was training someone who would later become a mentor figure. He served
as high-level management at a Fortune 100 and to this day eats, breaths, and sleeps
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
He introduced me to Kimura BJJ and by my third practice I was addicted and under
the instruction of Michael Fontes placed first or second in my first four competitions.
Everything in my training world was flipped upside down.
The whole concept of my strength training being compromised by overwhelming
amounts of aerobic activity was shattered. If anything, most of my lifts improved. In each
practice live fights take place, mostly towards the end after hundreds of repetitions of
particular techniques and positions. Fights range from 2-10 minutes and are balls to the
wall. The more I fought the stronger I became both mentally and physically.
In my first four months I went from 285 to 240, increased my strength, and grew a sweet
ass mustache. Friends of mine in the strength and conditioning world started to reach out
and ask questions about my training.
These are some of the evolving conclusions that I continue to work on.
Time under tension will increase aerobic and anaerobic capacity. I found this to be true
as a young lad moving furniture and interning/lifting at an athletic facility. After 8 to 12
hours of lugging heavy awkward objects up and down stairs, I would still be able to make
gains in the gym relative to copious amounts of time under tension and food.
So was the case with BJJ. I started to mimic fight rounds in my lifting programs by
picking a series of movements and performing a set number of reps, or over the course of predetermined time (Tabata). It was reminiscent of CrossFit but in a way safer, more
structured, and more specific to my sport. As I am sure the 70’s Big community knows,
specificity is key.
Placing emphasis on grip training in moving, training, and BJJ has and will continue
to pay dividends on all of my lifts and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to
incorporate grip work into all of their programming. If you can’t grip it, you can’t lift it.
Now back to how all of this began. Office to Octagon Inc. started out as my journey into
MMA via strength and conditioning and BJJ. Two years later my first amateur fight is set
for June 22nd.
The kicker is that I am putting the event together through OtoO and 20 other Boston
business types will also be competing, all while raising money for charity in the process.
Office to Octagon Inc. is now a 501(c)3 non-profit organization structured to allocate
funds to underprivileged youth obesity prevention initiatives, youth athletics, and youth
nutritional education services.
The art forms that make up MMA have all stood the test of time i.e. boxing, BJJ, Muay
Thai, wrestling, all the very things that we should be investing in and promoting to our
youth. They all embrace respect, discipline, adversity, and focus, exactly what the kids of
this country so desperately need.
In a time where the generations behind us now have a shorter life expectancy,
www.designedtomove.org, it is our duty to fight these odds literally and figuratively.
If you want to make positive changes and/or be good at anything you “just have to
f***ing do it”.
Brendan after his first BJJ fight
Brendan “Bonesaw” McKee is a CPT and CF-L1 trainer, and former NFL Europe athlete. He is currently the owner of OfficetoOctagon.com, MFD Training, and a OneResult.com contributor. His passion lies in helping underprivileged youths, and sculpting his extraordinary mustache.
Well, the weekend of the Arnold is over. Sadly, I did not attend this year, but I was constantly in contact with various field reporters and friends who were on-site, and I’m already looking forward to Arnold 2014, where I hope to be coaching several lifters. We’ll have a pretty big gathering of 70sBig folks for sure. Did any of you meet up and share mead? Were you able to watch the multitude of our community who competed? Did you get a cool shirt, at least? (Many thanks to my lifter Ben, who brought me one back!)
Last Monday, we previewed some of the female weightlifters (along with Jennifer Thompson…who, spoiler alert, broke her own bench world record!). Now, you can check out the results, since you couldn’t watch it live. (Note: I’m still waiting on the ACTUAL results sheet to be posted, but keep clicking the facebook pages below since that’s where I’ll be sourcing them from).
The Columbus Weightlifting Club holds this annual meet, which is no small feat. There are countless hours of work involved in putting on the Arnold Weightlifting Championships, so give them some credit. They have a team facebook page, but also an Arnold-specific one HERE.
Note that they recently asked “Only 361 days until Arnold 2014!! What would you like to see next year?” I suggest letting them know that livestreaming the lifting is something you’d be interested in, if that’s the case. I will be suggesting that, at least.
In any case, they posted most of the videos online relatively quickly. You can search through various parameters and find who you want to see HERE.
There are also some great photos from hookgrip.com. I don’t know these guys, but they have by far the best photos of Olympic Weightlifting you’ll see on the internet. Go to their facebook page and like them. You won’t be sorry.
Visit Hookgrip.com and their facebook page for many more excellent photos.
So, there are the links. Let’s open this up for discussion. How did you feel about not being able to watch the weightlifting on the internet? How do you feel about the coverage this event received? Did you know it was the Pan-Am qualifier? Whose performance was the most impressive to you, and which performances were you disappointed by?
