Category Archives: Coaching

AC Discusses the Press

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You all know and love AC. For the next few weeks, we’ll be posting some of his coaching articles on the individual lifts. In this first installment, AC discusses the Press, a lift he’s pretty dece at. He’s hit 285 for a single, and 260×4…at under 220lbs bodyweight. So, you know, maybe he kinda knows what he’s talking about, and stuff. I heard he also likes Batman. – Jacob

 

We’re going to talk about the Press. Soon, I’ll also talk about the entire process of Squatting and Benching. Yes I capitalized those words, because fuck you, that’s why. The first thing we talk about when we discuss the Press is grip. When most people Press their grip is usually way too wide. The forearm should be perpendicular to the bar. That’s 90 degrees. Not angled in and NOT angled out. Better external rotation can be achieved with a perpendicular grip. With that said, just because you are gripping it where you are supposed to doesn’t mean that external rotation magically happens. Justin talks about this HERE. That should give you a visual of what to do with your grip and your elbows. You should also have an erection by now as well. It’s hard to explain the grip via writing so just watch the video in the link I have provided.

Moving on, the elbows have to be cued. Some of you have your own cues. I just say to myself “Elbows in” or “Elbows.” Remember – if you know the meaning behind the cue you can shorten it to one word. If your cue is “Anal,” but you know what that means (elbows externally rotated), then you can yell “Anal!” to yourself all day. With a compact wrist and the elbows in, the drive from chest/chin (depending on anatomy) will be much faster and easier. That’s assuming you haven’t been Pressing with internally rotated elbows. Remember that you can get strong doing it the wrong way, but you can get even stronger doing it correctly. After all, you want to be able to break backs, don’t you?

If only Batman knew how this was gonna turn out.

Before you even begin to Press, you have to have a slight lean at the hips. This is NOT over-extension of the spine. Your whole body leans back. The easiest way for me to describe this is that it’s almost like stretching your hip flexors. Keeping your back in extension, you lean your hips forward. This obviously happens at the beginning. This sets the bar up for a vertical path with nothing in its way. Your huge dome and chin no longer risk getting hit. This lean is also important for something that happens later in the lift. So, as you are pressing the bar, you also want to keep it as tight to your face as possible. This is achieved by aiming for your nose. A nice cue to say is “Nose.” The bar gets pressed back in a vertical fashion instead of out in front of you, which would be bad news bears. Once the bar starts to clear the face/forehead, the next thing you are going to do is “Punch” your body “Under” the bar. At this point you are no longer leaning and you are physically driving yourself under the bar. This will get rid of the lever arm between the bar and your shoulder. From there you are just pressing it out for the last few inches.

Now we are at the top of the press. When you are at the top you should continue to “Reach” the entire time. This little reach/shrug causes upward rotation of the scapula. This little movement clears the shoulder up for any impingement that might occur. This is also when the breathing happens. First, there is a big breath for the first rep when you take it out of the rack. Then, when you have completed a rep, another fast breath occurs before you lower the bar. This might take a few days to get used. Consider the bottom of the Press like the bottom of the Squat – you don’t want to re-breath when you are rebounding. At the top, it is a quick exhale-inhale to regain whatever air you have lost during the rep.

Now for the “Rebound.” The rebound is best described as bouncing your triceps off of your armpits. This is very similar to the reflex that happens at the bottom of the squat. For some of you this may get tricky. If you remember all the leaning and shit you did before, you now have to reverse it on the way down so you are set-up again for the next rep, just like you would on a Deadlift.

There is a quick how-to guide to Press. The easiest way to learn is have a coach with you that knows what he/she is doing. I hope this can be of some help to those of you that wanted this write up. I can’t promise that you will Press as much weight as you want to, but with patience and perseverance you can conquer all of your goals. Everyone is different. Some people are stronger than others. Hell – I fucking hate tall people because I wish I was taller. So remember to play the hand you are dealt.

AC pressing 275 and 285 for singles. No big deal.

Tsypkin Thursdays #4

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David C asks, “If you were going to hire/follow one of the bigger CrossFit coaches out there to help you prepare for the Open, Regionals, and Games, who would you choose?”

Rudy Nielsen of Outlaw.  In part because he has a deep and sound understanding of how to program effectively – but there are a lot of people with that. What Rudy has that a lot of others lack, is a deep and sound understanding of how CrossFit – the SPORT, not the fitness program – functions. He doesn’t debate silly shit like “is CrossFit too strength biased” or “has too much cardio” or whether the “definition of fitness” is legit.  He observes the parameters of the sport, and trains people to compete in them.

 

Dave F asks, “I am training the Olympic lifts three times a week, one day being committed to the snatch, one day to the clean & jerk, and one to both. What is a good rep scheme for a novice?”

First: if you are a novice, I do NOT think that 2x/week per lift is enough. You need to be doing them 3x/week so that you can learn the patterns and learn them well.

About rep schemes…don’t worry about them. Focus on sets of 1-3, get a lot of good reps in, and when you feel great, go for a new PR, whether it be a single, double, or triple. If you’re training alone, don’t do so much that you are exhausted for the last third of your session and do nothing but shitty reps.

 

Vee G asks “I was trained using the ‘scoop method’ ala Coach Burgener.  A lot of my fellow weightlifters have been taught in a style more similar to Coach Pendlay’s, which does not teach the scoop. What are some advantages/disadvantages of either technique?”

I’m assuming that by the “scoop method,” you mean teaching an intentional rebending of the knees – sometimes referred to as the double knee bend – under the bar before the second pull.

Did someone say scoop method?

I personally do not teach the scoop/double knee bend as such. I teach the lifter to move into the correct position, and the knees move into the right spot – slightly in front of the bar – just before the lifter extends into the finish. It is my opinion that teaching the intentional double knee bend only serves to confuse new lifters, slow down the transition, and lead to the lifter pushing the bar forward and shifting the weight onto the front of the feet too early.

Although there are certainly good coaches who have made this method work, I cannot see any advantages this way of teaching has over those which do not coach the lifter to intentionally perform the double knee bend.

Editors’s Note: Please remember to ask Tsypkin anything your crazy little heart desires on our facebook page. Otherwise, he’s going to have to come up with his own questions to answer, and that would just be crazy. 

 

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 has excellent taste in shirts and gainz.  

 

Tsypkin Thursdays #1

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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. 

 

Agility Ladders

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The majority of people in what I call “the online training communities” are general strength and conditioning trainees. That means they are lifting, doing high intensity conditioning, but not much else. They may be competing in powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting or CrossFit, but those sports or competitions feature testing movements that are repeated over and over in training, albeit in different variations. Unfortunately some athletic elements are neglected, no matter how much CrossFit wants to claim athletic supremacy or strength trainees want to claim magical athletic prowess just because they are stronger.

(Here’s a completely inarticulate video about agility ladders. Watch Chris on the ladder — he’s very deft for a 310 pound guy)

General strength and conditioning training doesn’t include many dynamic movements that require re-positioning the body in space. Or any activities that require reaction to visual or other sensory stimulus. And there especially aren’t any rotation or lateral shear stresses on the spine, though we won’t be getting into that today. Instead, we’re focusing on those important athletic skills under the umbrella of “mobility” like agility, speed, balance, and overall kinesthetic coordination. These skills aren’t present in most general types of training, but are prevalent in high school, collegiate, and professional sport training programs. And I think it’s something everyone should utilize.

Agility, or foot work, drills are the easiest activity to add to your training. They aren’t significantly stressful, they can be done in a short amount of time, and can be done as part of your warm-up. Agility drills will also be a safe way for your lower leg structures to adapt to actual activity — stuff other than walking around and squatting. The drills will develop overall coordination, improve balance, and do so dynamically. It’s one thing to think, “I have good balance” when your feet are planted firmly under your shoulders, but it’s another thing entirely to move quickly and need to change direction without losing your balance. At the very least this is useful in a worst case scenario (dodging a moving car, fighting someone, etc.).

Agility ladder drills are a great way to perform foot drills and can be performed as part of the warm-up. I suggest doing your mobility work first, then go ahead and start on the ladder. Drills can be done for 5 to 10 minutes as a general warm-up before moving to your lifting schedule. Whatever drills you perform won’t be debilitating to your lifting, and if it is you are probably out of shape and need to do some conditioning work anyway. If you were going to lift maximally, then I would excuse you from agility work, but if you don’t compete in a strength sport I would have you do agility ladder drills as part of your warm-up every day. Especially for team sport athletes and soldiers.

I’m not going to get into the drills here — this is more of a post to teach the utility in doing agility ladder work — but some of the good ones include one foot in every hole (forward and lateral), one foot in every other hole (forward or lateral), single Ickey shuffle, double Ickey shuffle, and hop scotch. Running through each of those seven drills once will only take a few minutes. You can do two reps of each drill to get some more work in. The best drills are the single and double Ickey shuffles with the single version being the best. It’s excellent at teaching a person how to shift their weight laterally, how to maintain balance while changing directions, and improves foot speed. These drills can also be used as high intensity conditioning work, and you could even time your rest periods. If you aimed to use ladder drills as conditioning, then it would be okay to do them at the end of your training session (though your skill and agility development will be inhibited when you are fatigued).

Briefly, a point of emphasis in all agility work, including ladder drills, is to keep the feet under the hips. If the feet extend out in front, behind, or to the sides of the hips, then the base of support diminishes. Change of direction is dependent on having your feet under your center of mass to quickly apply force to stop or start, so keep the feet under the hips. To use the single Ickey shuffle as an example (which is what Chris and I do in the video above), must people will step too far lateral with their outside foot preventing a good base to push off that foot to move in the opposite direction — Chris does this a little bit. Keeping the feet under the hips is the key to agility and lateral speed. It’s also useful to burst into a ten yard sprint after completing the last segment of the ladder drill — it will teach the transition from agility or lateral movement to linear speed.

You can find cheap ladders on Amazon or sport stores, but I am partial to ladder segments that don’t slide up and down the straps. It can be quite annoying setting up a ladder with segments pushed around in a big bungle fuck. Most ladders are about 10 yards long, and that’s all you would need for training (we used a longer one in the above video).

If you want a new, interesting, method to warm-up and develop important athletic skills, then try out an agility ladder. When I played football I prided myself on my foot work and lateral speed, but that was probably due to the fact that I was linearly slow. Throw it in as a regular warm-up, or put it at the end of your workout for conditioning (doing agility work when tired is better than no agility work at all). Focus on a good, athletic body position (knees/hips bent, slight forward lean) with the feet under the hips. You’ll improve your coordination, perform conditioning that isn’t laborious, and ultimately improve your athletic ability with regular work.

Just Because You Can…

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Ah the internet; it makes everyone an expert. It, for some reason, gives people the impression that other people give a shit about their opinion and reflects the growing individual narcissism in western culture.

Over the years I’ve noticed how an athlete will achieve some success in training or competition and have the narcissism to think that they need to start preaching to their fans. And I don’t mean, “Hard work pays off, ya’ll” (which would be equally annoying), but crappily coaching or teaching things that are largely based on their personal observation for what worked for them. While being a good competitor can be a segue into being a good coach, the former does not imply the latter.

Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you can teach or coach it. 

Performance and coaching are two very different things, but for some reason athletic success gives the athlete the impression that they are an expert. Coaching is an orgy of art, science, communication, personality, creativity, and tact. To do it well is a very rare thing.

Yet it happens: an athlete experiences a bit of success and are suddenly in the world giving advice, speaking definitively, and taking people’s money. Let me be clear that I don’t care that they are entering the “field” that I work in. What bothers me is that the advice or products they expunge are vapid and fair at best.

You may be reading this with a particular offending person in mind, but my observations aren’t directed at an individual. As a coach — and one who studies and practices the craft on multiple levels — it’s just silly to see an athlete suddenly decide that their success puts them on a pedestal. But this isn’t about me just being irritated, this is about you not being duped.

When you spend your money and time — the latter of which is arguably the most important — learning from someone, make sure it’s because they can provide you with effective knowledge that challenges you to get better. Don’t go to them just because they can bench press more or do conditioning workouts faster than you.

Does Eli Manning, Petyon Manning’s 2-time Super Bowl winning brother, look like a guy that can coach?

This poses another question: should the coaches you learn from be high performers? Not necessarily. I can end this discussion by saying that Greg Glassman is no bastion of fitness, yet tens of thousands of people have gone to him and CrossFit over the years for fitness knowledge. I always laugh at how Tommy Tough Guys will scoff that a coach can’t lift or perform at a given level. Well, I’ve got news for you: Peyton Manning’s coach can’t throw a football like him! Yet the coach provides the gameplan and guidance for Peyton Manning to utilize, develop, and execute successfully.

And that’s what a good coach does; he sets an athlete up to be successful. A coach doesn’t need to be able to do what his athlete can. Now, a fitness or lifting coach should still practice what he preaches on a fundamental level. A coach shouldn’t ask his trainees to do something that he would not be willing to do, relatively speaking. For example, it’s not really effective to be fat and preach about clean diet or tout strength training as important for longevity and then not train.

It’s important for coaches to practice what they preach, but being a good coach isn’t about athletic prowess. It’s about communicating and teaching the nuances of training to yield improvements in performance. No where in that description did it say, “They need to have accomplished x in the sport.” So the next time you see an athlete going out of their way to give advice — especially if they’ve recently experienced success — turn off your giddy hero worship and pay attention to the validity of what they are saying. Confusing sport success and coaching ability is like confusing a cooked sausage and a turd.