Technique plays a very important part in weightlifting performance so it’s important to get your technical practice right. Bad practice can not only make training unproductive but also spoil the enjoyment which can be found when practicing the classical lifts. I’ve seen lots of people doing technical work over the years and think that the […]
Read more →Speed under the bar is an important component in weightlifting performance. Vital to acheiving this is your positioning at the top of the pull. One simple cue I use to ensure that a lifter finishes their pull and starts the descent under the bar correctly is to instruct them to keep their knuckles pointed at […]
Read more →There are lots of books about weightlifting and it’s difficult to know which are good. Reading widely around a subject is usually a good idea but when reading about lifting technique it’s also useful to have some background knowledge to help you separate the wheat from the chaff. Without some basic science knowledge you are […]
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Read more →I’ve been coaching for over ten years now and I like to think I’ve improved a lot in that time. I think about it a fair bit and have some rules/guidelines which help me and are hopefully useful to any new coaches out there: 1. Understand your model of the lift you’re teaching. Think about […]
Read more →We’re always advised to keep a track of the training we’ve done and while I think this is good advice it only makes sense if you use the information you’ve collected. Personally, I kept a training diary for a few years but never looked back at the pages full of hastily scribbled numbers so it […]
Read more →Every other week I help with coaching the lifters at Queen Mary’s University WLC in East London. The last session I went to was ten days before the British Students Championships so the session was a mock competition where each lifter had a run up to heavy but not absolute maximum lifts, decided on their […]
Read more →I’m sure I’m not alone among coaches when I say that one of the most frequent questions I get is “how good do you have to be to compete?” or it’s close relative “I’ll compete when I’m good enough”. People are understandably nervous about taking to the platform and looking silly in the company […]
Read more →One of the problems I encounter frequently while coaching is convincing a beginner to stay on lighter weights which they can do properly. It’s understandable that people who go to a gym want to lift as much as possible and it’s often hard to get them to see that for a beginner, getting the most […]
Read more →I’ve been thinking about the importance of the position of the combined centre of gravity of the lifter and the bar recently and how this is mainly felt in the where the weight is distributed in the lifters feet. In the coaching courses I run one of the key positions in the snatch and clean […]
Read more →We were talking about six pack abs and how shameful they were in the gym today and it reminded me why my sporting hero is Vasily Alexeev. When I first started going to the gym I was 12 and I went because my big brother trained there. He did bodybuilding training and his role model, […]
Read more →A lot of sports people will have been told that a rule is there for a reason while they protest the unfairness of a decision but there are three rules in the sport of weightlifting which competitive weightlifters care most about. There are plenty of others covering kit, lifting area etc but it’s the press […]
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