Category Archives: Olympic Weightlifting

Your First Lifting Meet

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I started a little series called Your First Weightlifting Meet that went into detail how a trainee should prepare for their first Olympic Weightlifting meet. I will follow up that post with some general stuff you should know about the meet itself. There will also be a powerlifting version of this post, and it will be either written by or commented by my friends (and powerlifting veterans) Andy Baker and Phil Stevens.

Today, I’m just going to give very general guidelines for competing in either sport. This will not be comprehensive on purpose as it will help you start thinking about what will happen on meet day.

Get Someone To Handle You
No, they aren’t going to have their hands all over you, pervert. “Handling” someone at a meet means you are their platform coach, and you will be dictating their attempts. If you are going into your first meet, it would be preferable to have an experienced lifter helping you out. I understand that this is a luxury for most people, but if you can weasle your way into it, your experience will be profoundly different.

A good platform coach will count your attempts (weightlifting) and/or know where you stand in your flight (powerlifting). They can update you on this knowledge so that you know when to hit your warm-ups in the warm-up room, or they will even dictate your warm-ups. They will be your objective friend, deciding what jumps you should make in your subsequent attempts. If this is someone that has been working with you, they will also be able to help out with your technique. In other words, having a platform coach will make you feel better. I’ve been fortunate enough to coach with and be coached by Rippetoe at meets. He is very good at challenging his lifters when they need an extra kick in the ass. My friend Josh Wells has helped me out a lot as well, and I don’t know if I would have had the small amount of success I have had without them.

Be Smart
Choose an easy opener, especially on your opening lift of the competition. You should gracefully execute your first snatch and you should fucking annihilate your first squat. This will set the tone for the rest of your day. You will do something that you know you can do. This means you are hitting a routine snatch — something you’ve done in training plenty of times. In powerlifting, this should be something you know you could do for a triple. You want it to be easy so that you get on the board. If you bomb out (or miss all of your attempts on that lift), then you don’t total. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen.

Your second attempt can match a gym PR so that you can bring your competition total up. The third attempt should be your PR attempt. If you play it smart, then you’ll add to your total with each lift. Your goal in your first meet should be to go 6 for 6 in weightlifting and 9/9 in powerlifting. This means you’ll play it a bit conservative, but this is fine in your first meet. It leads me to my next point…

Have Fun
For fuck’s sake, you’re in your first lifting meet. You don’t want to go home disappointed, so purposely set yourself to enjoy it. You want to walk away knowing that there was more weight on the bar. If this happens, then you’ll already be thinking about PR’ing at the next meet. You’ll feel so razzed and accomplished. This is what is supposed to happen. The last thing you want is for your first meet to turn into a shit storm. So be conservative with your attempts. Open with something that is painstakingly easy. It should be so easy your teeth hurt. Do something moderate on the second attempt. This means that you would have had to have done it before. Third attempts are when you do something hard. Stick to this template. Have fun. For fuck’s sake.

Weight
Oh, yeah. Don’t cut weight. That’s silly. You don’t need one more thing to worry about if this is your first meet. If you think you are going to be competitive in a certain weight class, then you will deal with that later. Just sign up for the meet, don’t worry about your body weight, lift well, and then take stuff like this into consideration. Don’t be silly, just set yourself to have a good day.

The previously mentioned Andy Baker will also talk about how a novice would tailor their linear progression to get ready for a meet, so stay tuned for that.

Your First Weightlifting Meet – Part 1

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Thankfully some of you are now committed to compete. This is good. Now we are going to talk about what you are going to be doing in preparation of that meet. We won’t get through all of it today, but consider it a little series to look forward to. I just want to go over the last week of training before a weightlifting meet. My friend Phil Stevens (who is in town right now with Charles Staley) will be our source for getting ready for a powerlifting meet.

You should be set up on some kind of strength program. If you are a novice, you should be on some kind of linear progression to get the most out of your body’s potential for strength gain from a local and systemic standpoint. Even a weightlifter should be taking advantage of some kind of linear progression, and it is easy to derive programs from the Starting Strength model.

What your program will consist of is dependent on if you know the lifts or not. Go back and read some of my posts on Getting Into Weightlifting, because you need to be taught the lifts. The programming for an early level weightlifter is dependent on so many variables, and it leaves the scope of this post (perhaps it will come later if you want to hear what I have to say). In any case, the lifts need to be learned and you need to have a decent amount of strength (which is sort of a relative term, but I digress). We are going to assume you are set up on some kind of strength program that incorporates the lifts. If you are not currently doing the lifts, you should probably progressively add them to your program to eventually look something like this. Easing your way into doing more snatches and jerks is a good idea so that your joints and structures can adapt to the new kinds of movement. I know I have had acromioclavicular joint (there is a little ligament that holds your collar bone to the shoulder blade, and it is near that pointy tip of your shoulder on top — for you non-anatomy folks) problems when I go from not jerking a lot to jerking a lot (stay focused in that sentence). It would prevent me from jerking heavy — usually nothing over 120 kg. I never had an issue with my wrists or elbows, but some may, so it is better to be safe than sorry.

Bill Starr said: Patience + Persistence = Strength

Now, let’s assume you are on a strength program that incorporates the lifts (my novices use the program I linked above). You really don’t need to do any tapering until the week of the meet because you are a novice. Tapering is something that will be dependent on the training advancement of the athlete (meaning what stage they are in their requirement for adaptable stresses) as well as other things like possible injuries or overtraining. However, in most situations, you will only need to change your program the week of the meet, especially if you are a novice.

The week of the meet you have a basic outline. Assuming the meet is Saturday, you will go heavier on Monday, medium on Wednesday, with an option of going very light on Thursday. Monday can either be a “max out day” if it isn’t clear what the person will open with or if there is potential to easily hit a weight that is higher than what the lifter has done in training (this person would be less experienced with the Olympic lifts, or they are still progressing quite well). If they are a bit more advanced, then the lifter would work up to the weight that they want to open with conservatively.

The opener for the snatch should be something the lifter can smoke and annihilate, especially if this is their first meet. You want confidence, you want ease, you want to put on a show. Shit, it doesn’t even matter if you are only power snatching and cleaning — that is preferable with some novices. I will say that again — you do NOT have to squat your snatch or clean. I see lots of new weightlifters unnecessarily squatting their lifts, which makes them slow and inefficient. There is no rule that demands you squat, and if the weight is light enough, there is no reason to do so. In my first meet, I power snatched 115, and 120, and did not finish my pull when I missed 125. So open with something easy, and power snatching is okay.

Work up to something that is very reasonable for the first attempt on that Monday training session. Do the same with clean and jerk — because you do NOT want to miss your openers. You don’t want to get into a rut at the meet, especially if this is a hobby for you. You want to set yourself up to be successful instead of being stupid and going for weights that are too much of a challenge. Remember that what you did in training means jack shit, you have to have it count in a sanctioned competition. Your third attempt may even be something under what your gym PR is, and that’s okay, because your goal, especially in the first meet, is to hit your lifts, have a good time, and feel confident that you had more left in you on that day. I promise it will be better than bombing out (I have had both scenarios, just trust me on this one).

Wednesday’s training session consists of working up to your last warm-up. This means that in both Monday and Wednesday, you are going to warm-up as you will on Saturday. For most people this means they will be taking less warm-ups, so just go ahead and get used to that on Monday and Wednesday. The idea on this day is to not miss any reps, continue the high you got from Monday’s training session, hit an easy last warm-up, and call it a day. One of my lifters, 15 year old Kyle, had a really good Monday and Wednesday training session. He didn’t PR on Monday or anything, but everything was running smoothly. This gave him excellent confidence while going into the Bill Starr Memorial Meet, and he PR’d on snatch, clean and jerk, and total. He had a really good day because we handled his week delicately to get his confidence high. I was extremely proud of him.

Thursday’s training session is only going to be some light stuff. If it were me, I would only snatch around 80 and clean and jerk 120 or so, and I did 130/157 at the meet. In other words, just some nice, easy light stuff to get some technique practice. If the lifter has specific cues they have been working on, this is the time to work on it. Realistically, this day isn’t necessary. If you need another day of technique to be comfortable, then keep it, but I dropped it out of my training (because I wanted my AC joints to rest).

That would constitute what you could do to prepare the week of the meet. There are plenty of ways to go about this, but I have found this little method works pretty well to get a beginner ready for a meet. However, the whole thing is dependent on the training program leading into this week. Over the next few days, I will get into what will happen the day of the meet, as well as some other considerations.

Bill Starr Memorial Weightlifting Meet — 2010

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The Bill Starr Memorial Weightlifting Meet was at the WFAC this past weekend. No, Starr isn’t dead, and the meet is a memorial to his lack of visiting (says Stef, the meet director). The meet went pretty well for most of our lifters. Here is a quick recap.

15 year old Kyle started lifting at the WFAC around last September, and has improved pretty consistently in his total due to getting stronger. After the Texas State meet in January, he went back on the linear progression with an emphasis on improving the technique in his lifts. Sometimes this is frustrating because it may require the lifter to drop weight on his lifts, but the payoff is worth it in the long run. This was the case for Kyle, who weighed in at 106.2 He had PR’s in snatch, clean and jerk, and total at this meet. The last week of training leading up to the meet went really well, and Kyle was hitting his lifts smoothly — he was definitely in a groove. This carried over on Saturday as he cruised to a 76 kg snatch, then stepped up big with a 96 kg clean and jerk — both gym and meet PR’s (a gym PR is something you hit in training while a meet PR is done officially in competition). Nice lifting by Kyle, and congrats on the 172 kg total.

Sammerr is a 21 year-old 94kg lifter, and things looked good for him as he hit his opening snatch at 112 kg. I wasn’t able to watch him lift since I had to warm-up during this time (there was only one session in this meet), but he ran into some trouble and didn’t hit another snatch. He was frustrated during the break (the period between the snatch and clean and jerk sessions) since his gym PR is 120. Nevertheless he came out and hit 140 for his opening clean and jerk, matching his gym PR and setting a meet PR. He attempted 145 on his second attempt, but apparently missed it on the clean because he didn’t finish the pull. This led to a heated lecture from Rip (Rip and Josh were handling most of the lifters). Sammerr’s goal was to clean and jerk 150, so Rip decided to give him 147 on the third attempt to force him to step up in a big way. After hearing about the 150, Rip said, “fuck it” and told announcer Tom Witherspoon that Sammerr would attempt 150. I don’t exactly remember what Rip said to Sammerr next (I was mentally preparing for my opening attempt), but I remember him jabbing his finger in Sammerr’s chest, probably saying, “Now go finish the goddam pull and get this fucking weight.” Well, Sammer stepped on the platform, finished the pull and stood up with a hard front squat. Amongst all of the yelling from Rip, Josh, and I, he reset his breath, dipped, and nonchalantly drove the weight up — it didn’t seem like it was going to be enough and then all of a sudden it was overhead. Three thumbs up made it a good lift, and Sammerr finished with a respectable 262 total in his second meet.

Quincy is a 105+ lifter who is getting back into training after a layoff. Rip and I encouraged Quincy to go on primarily a strength training program — in this case, a linear progression — with some Olympic lifts sprinkled in a couple months ago. Josh had been cleaning up Quincy’s technique earlier in the week, and Quincy has the potential to do 140/170 right now. I watched him do 130/160 earlier in the week, and this is exactly what he did at the meet. Not bad for his first meet back, and I fully expect him to improve his total by at least 20 or 25 kilos before the next meet in nine weeks.

I came into this meet hampered by set backs, as is the case for all three meets I have done. After the Texas State meet in January, I went on the Texas Method and was progressing my squat and deadlift pretty well until a low back injury occurred from squatting the day after airplane travel. In the last ten days of preparation for this meet, I could not jerk over 120 — it seemed like the acromioclavicular ligament in my shoulder was unhappy with a few things, which gives me one more thing to consider in my programming. I wasn’t snatching very well, and was only cleaning without the jerk in the last week of preparation.

I dropped a day of training last week and figured I would go for broke at the meet with a strategy of opening conservatively with the best case scenario to qualify for nationals. The qualifying total at the end of last year was 287 for the 105 kg class, so this was my goal. I had been watching my friend Brent snatch (who did not have a great meet and seemed to have some kind of shoulder issue on his jerks), and sort of forgot about warming myself up. I had to speed through my warm ups, power snatching 60 a few times on a 20+ year old York weightlifting bar. I power snatched 80, then proceeded to miss 100 and 110 on the bar. I was baffled by the misses as I don’t usually miss warm-ups. I may have been unfamiliar with the bar, but whatever the case was, I wasn’t sticking it at the top. After a talking to from Josh (who coached me through the warm-up room and my attempts with Rip helping), I hit 115 as my last warm-up before heading out to the competition room.

I wrote 120 down as an opener, but had planned on moving it up to 123, and this is what I did (you cannot lower your attempts, but you can raise them). The platform that we were lifting on is one of the platforms that I train on all the time, so when I approached the bar, I knew I would have to pick something to look at since there was now a head judge in my face with 20 people or so behind him. I picked a spot on the judge’s left shoulder, set-up, and stroked 123 kilograms like a kitten. I called for 127 on the second attempt, which would match my gym PR that I had hit many, many times and it would be a 2 kilo meet PR. The approach was the same, and it was business as usual. I had apparently smoked this weight because Rip wanted me to go to 132 or 133, but I told him about the necessary 287 total I would need for nationals, and if I hit 130, then all I would need was a 157 clean and jerk, which I could do on my second attempt. He agreed and told me to seal it up with this next lift.

The best I have done in the snatch is going 2/3 last October, but that thought never came to mind. I approached the platform with the same set-up, found the judge’s left shoulder, got set, and stuck the weight just as routinely as the first two attempts. I was pretty happy with the snatch performance, especially with the trouble I had in training…not to mention I dropped 130 on my neck in December when my left shoulder “turned off”, which didn’t feel good.

The clean and jerk warm-ups went well, and Quincy, Travis (a guy who trains at the Spoon Barbell Club near Dallas), and I used the same bar. 150 was written down as my attempt, but I planned on taking 153. Josh coached through this portion and chalked my shoulders as Sammer was getting his “un-fuck yourself” speech from Rip before he hit his 150 clean and jerk. After Sammerr’s good lift, the bar was loaded for me, and I made an easy clean — so good in fact that I over pulled it and the bar landed higher on my clavicles than it ever has, which allows the bar to press on the carotid arteries. When I jerked the weight, I couldn’t really see, but got the weight over head easy enough. I walked over to Rip, and said, “I couldn’t see on the jerk.”
“It’s okay, you don’t need to see.”
Fair enough. My second attempt was at 157, and if I made a good lift, then the qualifying total would be wrapped up, which was all I could ask for earlier in the week with a sore back, hurting shoulders, and bad training. I don’t remember anything profound about the clean, routine as usual, and the jerk was stuck ovehead, albeit a bit goofy. It looked good enough for Rip to suggest that I go to 163 for my final attempt. This would be a big meet PR, and would be near my old gym PR of 165. I went out to the platform, adrenaline surging while thinking about one or two cues from Josh and Rip. I finished the piss out of the pull on the clean, so much that it landed high on my clavicles again. I had a pretty tough front squat, yet it wasn’t ever in doubt. The problem was the pressure on my carotids, because my vision was fading — apparently my head was beet red. I exhaled three quick bursts, breathed in deep, and started the dip for my jerk, yet everything felt weak, and by this time my vision was totally gone. I dumped the bar dumped forward, and toppled to my left like a dead tree. I haven’t seen the video (there will be video of the meet soon), nor could I see, but I remember the noise my lifeless body made as I plopped on the platform as my elbow slammed down. It felt like I more or less rolled like a tea cup, because I was back on my feet instantly, although I staggered two steps. I felt like I had my balance, but Rip nonchalantly commanded, “Take a knee”, so I did. I was slightly bummed that I missed my first chance at going 6 for 6 with a huge increase in the clean and jerk, but I quickly put it in perspective, especially since I couldn’t really have done a better job. If I was at least a half second faster in my transition from the clean to the jerk, I might have staved off the collapse. It just goes to show how much efficiency is important in these movements, and efficiency and mechanics are what we emphasize in coaching. But hey, I went 5 for 6 at 130/157 for a total that qualifies me for nationals, so it was a good birthday present.

I don’t have any pictures (I was coaching/lifting, give me a break), nor do I have any video yet (although it will be here eventually). In the mean time, watch Alexander Kurlovitch and his efficient mechanics in this 250 kg clean and jerk. He catches the clean precisely in the the position that he will jerk from.

Getting Into Weightlifting — Part 3

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But I am a lady, I do not have testiclÈs!

Note: It is PR Friday — post weights gained, lifted, consumed, etc.

A novice can train heavy on a regular basis because they are not lifting a significant percentage of their genetic potential to disrupt homeostasis more than a couple days. Read that sentence again, because there is a lot of shit going on. A novice, defined as someone who adapts to stress on a daily basis (as opposed to a weekly (intermediate) or monthly (advanced) basis), will program things differently than an intermediate. Once intermediate status is achieved, things will get individualized…i.e. more complicated.

An intermediate will have particular recovery limitations that others may not have, and this must be accounted for. As of right now, I do not think there is any good way to efficiently increase strength while getting adequate practice in the Olympic lifts. Increasing the back squat, press, bench press, and deadlift are going to help the Olympic lifts go up, but those “slower lifts” will not increase as fast if the Olympic lifts are practiced adequately during the week (adequate probably means at least twice a week). In comparison, when the focus is to increase those “slower lifts”, you cannot adequately put enough time into getting that “adequate practice” in the snatch and clean & jerk since recovery is a finite thing. This means that you either have to cycle the emphasis on a regular basis or strength train until x weeks out from the meet.

Tommy Suggs used to do the latter, according to an old article written by Bill Starr. He would get strong in training, and then six weeks out from a competition he would get back into doing the lifts and refining his technique. The method seemed to have been useful for him.

Not everyone is an intermediate though, and very few people get there legitimately. Lets say you are a novice, or you train novices. Well, I may have an outline you can try. It has worked for us at the WFAC. It is assumed that the lifts have already been taught.

Monday
Clean and Jerk heavy
Snatch for sets across

Tuesday
Squat
Press
Chin-ups

Wednesday
Off

Thursday
Snatch heavy
Clean and jerk singles across

Friday
Squat
Bench
Deadlift

The lifter will be fresh on Monday to clean and jerk heavy after the two days of rest. A novice will be able to squat the day after doing the Olympic lifting, and deadlifting is done at the end of the week because if it was done any earlier, it may interfere with the other pulling. The sets across for snatch or C&J should/could be timed — on the minute for a snatch (between 10 and 15) and every two minutes for C&J (for 10 reps). Doing it in this manner accomplishes a few things (not in any particular order); A) it uses medium weights so that completed reps build confidence, B) the higher reps are technique practice, and C) it gets the lifter used to lifting on a clock, which will be important in competition. The heavy snatch or C&J days can be five singles across, or just working up to a heavy single (ideally increasing that single week to week). Remember that any increase is still an increase, so it may be 2.5 or 1 kg per week in the later stages — the point is to drive the weight up and PR.

This program can be followed for quite some time — it is what quite a few of the lifters here in the gym did, and got pretty strong. One of my lifters named Bryan, who was mentioned in Rip’s article, The Novice Effect, squatted over 500 for three sets of five and clean and jerked 155 kg in the gym using this program. A novice can recover from this work load because they are a novice. In fact, I used a variation of it at one time while I added 5 kg on my clean and jerk every week all the way up to 165 kg in the gym (I was an intermediate though, and it didn’t last long). The point is that it still includes two strength days while working on the lifts twice a week. More strength will improve your total — remember that.

From Brent:
This is Dmitry Klokov, born in 1983, was the 2005 World Champion and 2008 Silver Medalist in the Beijing Olympics. His best competition total is 423, and in this video he snatches 193 and clean and jerks 230:

Getting Into Weightlifting – Part 2

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Whether or not you have an “every day coach”, you will have to figure out how you are going to program the Olympic lifts. There are plenty of programs you can find that include, but are obviously not limited to international teams (Bulgaria, Greece, China, etc.), the US Olympic Training Center, or standard stuff you can find in Milo or online resources. I caution any of you to get very interested in advanced programs designed for successful national teams. Typically these are advanced lifters who have been in a system for 10+ years and they require the kind of volume and intensity that is present in their program in order to undergo an adaptive stress.

The rest of us are not so fortunate, whether we are talking genetics or childhood exposure. Since the Olympic lifts are an expression of strength (as opposed to primary strength movements), a strength emphasis should be inherent in the training program. For some reason the previous statement is borderline blasphemy in some weightlifting circles, yet it is the same message that has been touted by Tommy Suggs and Bill Starr since their competitive days. Starr recently wrote an article that touches on the matter for the Starting Strength website called, Keeping the Strength in the Strength Program (any article by Starr is a good read — it has been said he has forgotten more stuff about strength training than we will ever know).

In any case, the thing that is going to help a beginning weightlifter get better at the snatch, clean, and jerk is getting stronger, thus strength training is incorporated into the program. Now, depending on your relationship with your coach, this may be contradictory to what they teach. The coach may want you solely on their program. It may be a situation where you see them less frequently which means programming is up to you. Maybe you cannot even perform the lifts unless you are at the coach’s gym because of equipment limitations. Whatever your circumstances may be, improving your strength is vital to increasing your lifts, and this is should always be the heart of your program.

Tomorrow I will leave the fuzzy conceptual strength stuff and give some vague outlines that a beginning weightlifter could try. In the mean time, discuss the topic, and if any of you are experienced weightlifters or coaches, you can share what has worked for you or your athletes.

Here is Olympian Kendrick Farris, a really fucking strong 85 kg lifter. In this video he deadlifts 280 kg (616) — he attempts a double.

Here he smokes the piss out of a 170 kg power clean and jerk: