My group of friends that are involved in this website are competing at USAPL Raw Nationals in Denver this weekend. The five us will be flying there tomorrow from different locations. I’ll be flying from Panama City, Florida where I recently moved to, AC will be flying out of Georgia (he goes to school at Georgia Southern and his family lives outside of Atlanta, and Chris, Mike and Brent will be flying out of Dallas (Mike and Chris are coming from Wichita Falls and Brent lives north of Dallas). There shouldn’t be any confusion as to where any of us live now.
Raw lifting in the USAPL is relatively new, and in order to qualify for nationals you simply have to total as a raw lifter in a USAPL meet. USAPL is prevalent for its “low end gear” competitions since it resides under the International Powerlifting Federation’s (IPF) ruling. None of the aforementioned lifters are interested in competing in gear, and it isn’t something I’m interested in doing or coaching either. We may look for a new federation in the near future, but as of right now we’re just focusing on this weekend.
Belligerent Brent will be competing in the 82.5 kg class and will lift at 9:00 AM on Saturday. He’s the only one of us that will be lifting on Saturday. I imagine there won’t be any hi-jinks on Saturday since AC (100kg, 9:00 AM), Mike and Chris (110kg and 125kg, both at 2:00 PM) all lift on Sunday. I’ll be coaching them in their sessions, and it will be a lot more easy going than the Texas State Meet was (results and write up).
Don’t fret, though; we’ll have cameras rolling and AC will be directing. There were some folks that didn’t know I was in Peoria for USA Weightlifting Senior Nationals and would have come had I mentioned it, so you guys are welcome to attend and cheer them on. All of my friends are young and pretty strong and should do decently at the meet.
And since I’m announcing things, I’ll direct your attention to the schedule for the 70’s Big Workshops on the Services page. AC and I will road trip through California in early August. There are two workshops during the weekend of August 7th near L.A. and Monterey, and we’ll help out with some coaching while we’re there. We don’t have a workshop scheduled the weekend of the 14th, so if anyone wants to host us we’ll be in the bay area.
Later in the month we’ll be in south Florida at Fort Myers, then I’ll be headed up to western Canada in Kelowna, BC in the last weekend of the month. We’ll also have some stuff going on in Atlanta as early as September, and I’ll announce that as soon as we finalize it.
We’re also going to start Live Webcast Presentations that are pertinent to both Workshop material and reader requests. The audience will be able to ask questions via chat throughout the presentation as well as a Q&A section at the end. It’s too early to tell if speedos will make an appearance.
On top of the webcast theme, we’re going to have Chat Room Q&A which will allow users to ask us questions on whatever; training, programming, advice on bullies, how to become a bully, etc. If it gets popular, we’ll have themes for the chats and perhaps special guests. The Live Webcast Presentations and Chat Room Q&A will give the readers who live out of driving/sailing distance to interact and get some help.
Lastly, I’m going to start doing Form Check Help. No, I can’t coach you without being in person and I may not even be able to make an impact, but I’ve periodically helped people in all of the barbell lifts by giving them a helpful cue online. You’ll send in a video, I’ll analyze it and then we’ll chat on the phone about it for a bit. If your squat is a fucking train wreck, then I’m not going to charge you and will try and find you a Starting Strength coach to help you out. These little form checks will be very cheap ($10 and under depending on how many videos) and hopefully it will help those of you that train on your own.
Note: You can still send in videos to the site or my e-mail, but I won’t give it much attention and will only give you a brief response. You won’t get the whole “phone call” and “descriptive explanation” thing. Unless I like you.
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PR Friday
Go forth and record your Personal Beasts in the comments throughout the weekend. I hope to hear about your gained weight, lifted weight, children tossed, clothing ripped, and cannonballs performed. I also want to congratulate all the people that have written in and told me about their first lifting competition and how much they enjoyed it. I really like hearing about that stuff — it makes me proud of you guys…even if you are a pain in the ass 85% of the time. I’ll be posting about these exploits soon.
Take care and enjoy your weekend.
PR Friday — post all your personal records to the comments.
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USA Weightlifting’s School Age Nationals begins today (at 7:00 AM actually) in the bay area of California. There will be 287 kids from around the country competing on two platforms. I’ve never seen an Olympic weightlifting meet run on two platforms (seen it in powerlifting), so it should be non-stop lifting. The best part is that they are running a live webcast for both platforms. You can watch it here.
Remember when I talked about Paul Doherty and Hassle Free? Well, they have lots of lifters competing as well as other bay area clubs like, FitBBC, TJ’s Gym, Catalyst Athletics, California Strength, The Sports Palace and Myles Ahead — somewhere around 50 lifters from this area alone.
I wish I would have been recruited for weightlifting when I was younger (I was pretty good at power cleaning), but we can watch all of these kids that range from 13 to 17. You can see the schedule and qualifying totals for each weight class starting on page five of this .PDF file. Oh, and here’s a quick shout out to my pal Kyle — he’s 15 years old and qualified for nationals, but won’t be making the trip to compete. Good stuff nonetheless.
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Here’s a pretty cool video of David Rigert, a 90kg lifter, pressing 203kg in a 1971 competition. That’s about 446 lbs. boys and girls. You’ll notice the obvious knee kick, but that’s how guys pressed because the judges allowed it. The press was eliminated from competition one year later. I always wonder how different weightlifting meets would be if we had to do the clean and press first.
I didn’t get a chance to talk about some other things in yesterday’s post — my post was long enough and it was getting late. Here is a little list of stuff I wanted to mention.
Pronouncing My Name
If anybody saw the webcast, they had all 11 lifters walk out and introduced us one by one. The announcer said “Justin Las-check”, and I was right next to the table so I said, “It’s Lah-sick.” He smiled and said they’d get it figured out in a minute. I guess not. But anyway, it’s pronounced “Lah-sick”. I’d rather have it said “Las-check” than “Lay-sick”, though.
First Jerk
Using a lower eye gaze definitely made the bar collide into my jaw/chin. When it happened, it almost made me bite a chunk out of my tongue (the back right portion). My tongue was swollen for the rest of the day. I do not recommend this.
Crass
I met Rachel briefly. She was wandering around looking for something unimportant (I’m kidding, Rachel). I watched her lift, and I hope I can get as solid a rack position in the snatch as she has sometime soon. I think the new rule is that you aren’t allowed to ask eating questions until you’re lifting more than her. Correct me if I’m wrong, Rachel, but you are qualified for the world team with Sunday’s performance, yes?
Problem Areas
My primary problems with the Olympic lifts are technical. I don’t rack heavy snatches solid and my jerk used to be a mess. I think that getting more experience/practice with the lifts will be the first step into solidifying these things, and I think I’m on the right path with the cues I have implemented lately. There may be a couple drills that will help the snatch situation. As for the jerk, I recently changed my grip, my elbow position, and how I dip/drive. The dip/drive has been the hardest to reconfigure, but I think I did pretty well with it at the meet, especially on the third attempt (which was the most important). The bar moving back at the rack of the jerk is a new development, and I haven’t bothered spending time to figure out the mechanics behind it yet.
“The Face” Is Hard To Do
I think I’ll need to have a tutorial on how to make — what I guess is being referred to as — “the 70’s Big face”. I took a picture with Ben, and it looks like he’s doing more of a kissy face. Maybe he was trying to spread love to all of his adoring fans.
I purposely didn’t put a whole lot of hoopla on 70’s Big about the USAW Senior National Championships because I didn’t want any unnecessary attention placed on myself as a lifter. I figured that it was my first national meet, and I didn’t want to have to think about anything other than the lifting. I discreetly linked you guys to the live webcast (I hear it was good), so hopefully you got a chance to see some of our country’s best Olympic weightlifters. Since it was my first appearance at a national meet, I figured I’d briefly share my experience.
(If you want to see how some other lifters did, look at the USAW Website)
The meet was held in the Peoria Civic Center, which was a good looking building in a pleasant city center. I would liken Peoria to Chattanooga, TN – it’s clean, not crowded, and has a lush landscape. The lifting was in a large, cavernous concrete room and a black curtain separated the warm-up area from the competition area. Bleachers were set up in front of the competition platform (if you watch the video below, the warm-up area is to the left), and the whole building was very clean.
The warm-up area was equipped with some good platforms with high grade rubber (not sure of the brand) and Werksan bars and plates. There were probably eight or so platforms, so things weren’t crowded. They also had the attempts projected on screens in the competition and warm-up areas with a TV in the warm-up area of what was happening on the lifting platform.
I was in the B session for the 105kg weight class that started lifting at 11:00 AM. Earlier at the weigh-in I met Ben (who looks exactly like AC) from the Hassle Free Weightifting in Sacramento, California. This is primarily a 20 & Under club, but they have some older lifters as well. Some of you astute readers will recognize the head coach, Paul Doherty, from an article in a 2009 issue of Iron Mind’s Milo. Ben was a cool dude, and he said he liked the website, so we got along pretty well right away.
This was a good thing, because Ben was how I met Paul, and this had a very important impact on my meet.
AC compared with Ben -- the similarity is striking
Other than my girlfriend running the cameras in the stands, I was by myself. I figured I would be opening early since I totaled 287 to qualify (the qualifying total was 285). There were a few guys who totaled an even 285. Lifting was supposed to start at 11:00 AM, so I figured I’d be read to go by then. I started taking warm-ups and felt very good hitting 60kg, 90kg, and 100kg. During this process, Paul asked if anybody was handling me (there wasn’t) and he asked if I wanted some help (I did). That’s when he told me that the bar was opening at 110kg and that there were “like 85 guys opening with 120”, so wouldn’t be lifting for at least fifteen minutes. Well, balls. I guess because of all the hoopa I didn’t even go look at the attempt cards on the table – stupid beginner mistake. I started warming up to early, so then I just sat down and chilled out a bit.
This would end up being slightly detrimental. I was feeling really good warming up the first time, and when I started taking lifts again, things didn’t feel as good. Ben and I lift about the same weight, so we warmed up together and had the luxury of Paul’s lifters, Sae and Keelen (sp?), loading the bar us. I took 70kg, 90kg, 100kg, 110kg, missed 120kg (stupid error), and completed 120kg.
I opened with 127kg. Off the floor and through the middle, everything was fine. Once I racked the bar, I had the slightest bit of bar movement from not catching it tight and solid, but I was able to hold it in place and squat it up. White lights on the lift.
Rob, another coach that helps out with Hassle Free was counting attempts for me as I snatched. Paul came by and asked what I wanted next, and I said, “Well, the plan was to go to 132,” so that’s what he gave me. I wasn’t prepared for the long wait before I went. There were lots of attempts and misses around 130, so this delayed my second attempt. In retrospect, I should have done a power snatch with 100 or so to stay warm (something I would implement later in the clean and jerk on Paul’s advice), but I didn’t. I had never been in that situation before, so I didn’t have a clue.
When I approached the bar for my second attempt at 132kg, my mind wasn’t right. When you’re competing, it’s easy to forget simple things like the cue you are supposed to be thinking about, or maintaining/managing your mindset. I just wasn’t thinking about much at all, and this didn’t give me the “killer instinct” for the lift. I pulled it perfectly overhead, but just didn’t rack the damn thing.
I was kind of pissed off, so I had a short rest and then repeated the lift. This time I racked it, but let the bar drift backwards only to lose it (I’ve only done this a few times ever). My cue I had been using was “stick it back” (I can explain the mechanics behind it another day), which had been working until that lift.
Paul, Me, and Ben afterwards
So, there I was, heading into the clean and jerks with one successful lift. I only let myself stay irritated for a moment or so, and let it go. I am pretty sure Ben only hit one snatch as well, and I said, “Hey, at least we’re on the board.” My girlfriend had gotten me some food to eat during this time, and one of the items was som Muscle Milk. Ben let me have some yogurt before we snatched, so I asked him if he wanted some protein. After catching the Muscle Milk I tossed him, he said, “Ah, this is the ‘Lite’ kind…definitely not 70’s Big.” True. Later the lady friend told me she made it a point not to get the ‘Lite’ kind, but must have gotten it accidentally.
Ben and I pretty much warmed up together since we were both opening with 152 – I had planed on moving this up to 155 or 157, but after the irritation on the snatch I figured I’d get on the board with an easy opener. Ben and I went lift for lift on warming up when Paul told us to take them, and I had a goofy last warm up at 147 (there was only a short rest after doing 140). Eventually 152 was loaded on the competition bar, and I headed out. I made an easy clean and a nice sharp dip/drive on my jerk, but the bar whacked the piss out of my chin on the way up. I dropped the bar and staggered back holding my chin. I didn’t just skin it, I clocked it an inch and a half from the end of my chin (that’s where the bruise is). After reviewing the video, I figured out that my eye gaze was significantly lower than it usually is (I was trying to avoid looking at people since they can move around) which lowered my head and kept my chin down and in the way of my bar path. It sounds like a stupid little detail, but it was definitely the culprit here. I wonder if that had an effect on my second snatch.
I didn’t have to follow myself to repeat 152, but still had a short rest. I was a little pissed off, and went out, made the clean without much trouble, had a decent dip/drive on the jerk (my limiting factor on my jerks), and then racked it over head. However, I did something to move the bar backwards once I racked it, and this made me recover out of the split awkardly, and I had to fight with the bar to get into a solid position to receive the down command. White lights, but damn if it didn’t feel like wrestling a big ol’ snake.
I sat down behind the curtain, and Paul asked me what my PR was (meet PR was 157kg). He said, “Well, you want 158? You didn’t pay all this money for nothin’.”
“Yeah, fuck it, give me 158.”
I really didn’t think it was likely after my crappy jerk lockout from a minute before. Objectively speaking. I had to wait quite a while for 158 since I made a six kilo jump, and we had eleven lifters in the session. During this waiting around, I power cleaned and jerked 110 twice to stay warm. I had never had to do that before, and it really helped a lot. It kept me from getting cold, and I never would have thought to do it on my own if Paul hadn’t recommended it. Paul was very respectful (even though he didn’t need to be) of not trying to step on my toes about how I warmed up or performed my lifts. He was exactly what I needed; guidance and soon to be motivation.
After taking the 110kg in the back, I was waiting with Ben for 158 (he was going for 160 on his third attempt). As the lifter before me was finishing up, Paul smacked me into shape…literally. I had seen lifters get their quads slapped before a lift, and I never really understood why. Paul said something like, “All right Justin, you’re up. Let’s get this.” He double hand smacked the FUCK out of my right thigh – kind of like what The Hulk would do to a bad guy’s head. He walked to my left thigh, and did the same thing as he was talking. He then said Brent Kim’s all-time favorite line, “This is competition, Justin. Go out there and compete.”
He said some other stuff, but I can’t remember what it was. All I know is that Paul was the catalyst for my adrenaline. The smacks on the thigh forced blood to the muscle and my legs felt warm instantly. I stormed the bar with purpose; this would be the lift of the day for me.
The plates broke the floor, and once they passed my knees I exploded upward. I racked the clean routinely as can be, and had to give a pretty decent effort to squat it up. It felt harder than it actually was (see the video), and I settled for the jerk. I had a nice, sharp dip/drive and the bar exploded overhead quickly. Again, the bar traveled back a bit at the rack, but not much, and it wasn’t as much trouble to control to get the down command. I checked the three white lights, and felt one of the coolest feelings you can feel in sport – doing something that you didn’t think was going to be possible earlier. I truthfully don’t think I could have done it without Paul.
A few seconds later, Ben would hit his 160kg clean and jerk to finish with a total of 291kg – good for 6th place. I finished with a 285kg total and 8th place overall (including A session). It wasn’t my best total (I had done 287 to qualify) but all things considered – only 8 months of experience, first national meet, 4th meet overall, first travel-by-plane meet, just recently overhauled my jerk, and warmed up goofy on snatch – I’ll take it.
I talked with Ben and some other lifters (Keith, from Austin, TX, was another guy I met that lifted in the 105s) who were in their first national meet. They might get on and comment what their experience was throughout the meet.
Again, here’s a big thank you to Paul Doherty. He was kind enough to help me out, and I was really impressed with how he handled Ben and I – he’s a good platform coach. Also thank you to my friend (and chiropractor) Dr. Lee Birk who helped crack me back from a February injury. I could barely stand up to coach at one point and didn’t squat for two months before he started treating me, and it wasn’t long before I could do all the strength lifts to get stronger than I ever had been before. This set me up to get a little bit of practice with the Olympic lifts in the last five or six weeks before this meet. Without those two guys helping me out when I was in a bad situation, I probably would have had much different results.
Kendrick Farris is America’s star lifter. He’s won four Senior National Championships, placed 8th in the 2008 Olympic games, placed 12th in the Senior World Championships, and won a gold medal at the Senior Pan American Championships. He holds the American record in the clean and jerk (203kg) and the American record in the total (362kg) — all in the 85kg weight class. But…is that enough to take on the world?
There are two lifters in particular with existing international track records that currently stand in Kendrick’s way; Andrei Rybakou and Lu Yong (surnames come first in most Asian cultures…according to Brent). Rybakou has been called a “specialist” in the snatch as he has snatched an amazing world record 187kg (remember, he is an 85kg lifter). He also is tied in the world record with Lu Yong in the total with 394kg. Rybakou has won the 2006 European Championships, the 2006-07 World Championships, and won a silver medal at both the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. Here is the video of Rybakou breaking his own World Record in the snatch with a 187kg lift (go to 4:10 in the vid):
Lu Yong has a similarly impressive list of accomplishments. He won a silver medal at the Asian Games, a silver medal at the 2005 World Championships, a gold medal at the 2009 World Championships, and most important of all…a gold medal at the 2008 Olympics. He won it in a battle against Rybakou, who was a pubic hair away from winning gold. Lu Yong had to hit a lift to tie his total (he was at a lighter bodyweight and would win the tie), and he did so on his second clean and jerk. However, the jury reversed the decision because of a pressout, and he came back on the third attempt to hit the lift for the gold — quite impressive. Here’s the video — the whole thing is very good, but if you just want to see the final lift, go to 4:10 for Lu Yong’s second attempt, and then 7:50 for the third:
Lu Yong matched Rybakou’s total, but since Rybakou made the total first, he maintains the world record until someone else beats it.
As you see, these 85kg lifters are very good. I don’t know if they have room to improve on their current total — Rybakou needs to improve his jerk to become an Olympic champion, and Lu Yong needs to stay one step ahead. Kendrick Farris has snatched 160kg (at the 2008 Olympics) and clean and jerked 203kg (at this year’s Pan-Ams). Kendrick is a very good with the clean and jerk as he has hit 211 in training, and has cleaned and just misses the jerk forward at 218.
There have been whispers of Kendrick setting a World Record in the clean and jerk (which is 218kg in the 85kg class), but even if he were to do so, he’ll need to improve his snatch significantly before the Olympic games in London. Going 170/220 would still only yield a 390 total. I hope he does, and I’m rooting for him more than ever. He’s got quite the task ahead of him, so let’s stay behind him (well, at least us Americans) as he prepares for 2012.
