Beginners Gains

Training
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[quote]alexus wrote:
wouldn’t be totally surprised if weak abs were playing a role in my not standing the weight up. i don’t crumple forwards but my body might be trying to protect crumpling by not letting me use my legs.
[/quote]

I thought of your ab woes when I read this from Donny Shankle’s blog:

“The torso is a pillar of marble, resembling the enduring strength within the pillars of the Parthenon. The back is straight and the elbows are up with the weight aligned over the center of the feet. THERE IS NO GIVE HERE! The slightest relaxation on a maximum attempt during the command â??receiveâ?? will cause the weight to crush you like a bug.”

Uh, yeah, I’d say get to working on those abs so you don’t get crushed like a bug!

debraD, thanks for the link to Donny Shankle’s blog. He provides the best explanation for clean & snatch technique that I’ve ever read. Plus, it’s one of the best blogs in general that I’ve seen. I’m definitely bookmarking his webpage.

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thanks so much for doing that deb. i could be wrong but i think… you now know how i feel when i squat WITH oly shoes of standard height!!!

thank god for my new magic heel raise!

i predict you will be able to do the first exercise once your oly shoes arrive, mwah haha. could be wrong, though. will be interesting to see. sorry they are taking so long. fingers crossed that you are very happy with them indeed once they do. did you get the purdy do-wins? I’m finding that I need to rediscover the positions with my additional heel raise, so maybe you will too, but I’m sure it is for the best in the longer term.

wall squats do seem to be taking over the world…

how much ankle dorsiflexion have you got, nimain? debra has a lot and is perfectly capable of a nice deep squat with good lumbar curve - but the wall variant just feels wrong because her weight is too far back and she can’t maintain lumbar arch (I think because that would require the upper back to go back as well as her butt which would tip her over). maybe this is the case for you. point of that being: if you try and try and try and really can’t do it then maybe you simply aren’t built for that particular exercise. doesn’t mean you can’t do a good squat (debra surely can) - but your knees might need to come forwards and / or your torso might need to lean forwards and / or you might need to adopt a wider stance (so your knees can go out instead of forwards). I bet deb could do it if she went sumo (but might have flexibility issues with a new plane of motion). snapper could only do it sumo - and she has a good squat, too. i bet snapper could do it with heel raise (though she might be asking ‘why would i want to?’)

are you allowed shoes with heel raise for powerlifting squats? i wonder if they would help or hinder…

sounds like i need to check out the blog. haven’t done that so far - but i will. thanks for that. yes, crushed like a bug. i forsee that if i don’t get serious about ab work :frowning: especially because i’m now wondering if i can ditch squatting altogether if i make sure i get under most lifts and get really really really good at catching the bounce…

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Nice vids, Deb. Well, now. I wonder if I could do the wall squat exercise if I rounded my back. But that is just reinforcing really bad form. So why even try? I was trying to do the opposite. Arch, arch so hard. Bottom line is that I can do them wide-stance sumo but don’t have problems with sitting back or knee cave. I can squat narrow stance ATG just fine as well. Let the saga continue. . .

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so i found out that the knees together and ankles together variant isn’t a strength training exercise so much as a mobility, balance, and zen exercise. the whole point is to develop the muscular control to overcome ones center of balance being out of whack and the movement isn’t intended to be weighted.

a trick with them is to push the shoulders forward into the wall - which helps shift the balance forwards. probably works better for guys, heh. would still love to see a woman pull this exercise off. apparently people start out standing their heels on a telephone book and then remove a few pages every day until they are eventually doing it in bare feet without heel raise. if you can be bothered, that is.

i guess i’ve learned that heel raise doesn’t help ones knees go forward so much as reduce the need for them to go forward by having the same effect - shifting the center of gravity forwards.

i find that wall squats are useful for teaching a slow and controlled descent where you really pull yourself down with your hip flexors. it is good for me to do that. i think that that really is a hard thing to get the hang of and it is really important with respect to getting a tight bottom position and for maintaining good lumbar curve. i reckon they are pretty worth it for that. they also keep me honest with respect to how upright my torso is. i do need to work on pushing those knees out hard, too. so i’m very happy indeed to have rediscovered them (thanks nimain!)

TRAINING

mostly consisting in ‘stuffing around’ at the moment, getting used to my shoes and trying to get positions.

WARM UP
Didn’t get through my whole EVA / softball rolling ritual. I think I’m taking too long on this - there has gotta be a more efficient way for me to warm-up!

2x5 wall squats.
bar drills - hang power snatch x3, overhead squat x3, drop snatch x3, hang power snatch x3, hang snatch x3, snatch x3.
positions / speed seemed ‘reasonable’.

SNATCH
worked up to 30kg snatch but muscling it. went back to 25kg trying to get it smooth. blah. not getting good hip drive, basically. not getting a nice tight position in the catch, either.

CLEAN
worked up to 35kg clean. ok. felt too tired to try and stand up anything else.

PUSH PRESS
worked up to 42.5kg

SQUATS
clean to set stance width then x5.
20kg x2, 25kg x2, 27.5kg x2.
experimenting with descending faster and using muscular contraction to bounce out the hole.

ok i guess. i know i said a few days ago it was time for me to take a day off… well, i haven’t done that yet. training has been a bit lackluster, though, and joints still cranky. sunday will be my day off.

comp next saturday.

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good luck on the upcoming comp!

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thanks nimain. it is about 6 months too early for me, but whatever. aim to have some fun and hopefully hit a PB.

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^ Wow that vid is awesome! how juicy are those guys btw?..Anywho…

Deb, you do those wall squats real well! I’m still not even sure how these might help Oly folks, but that’s just me, probably stubbornly refusing to try something new.

Lex, I feel you with the warmups - they do take long! I wish I had an answer for you b/c it does eat away at training time if you think about ALL the things that need to be warmed up. Its so weird tho, my coaches at the O gym take 10 mins to warm up, just doing broomstick stuff and the like. They’re very old school and don’t even know what foam rolling is…so I wonder if all the warming up is totally necessary myself. But then i got this bum shoulder…

Hm. What’s with the lackluster workouts (they look good to me!)? Maybe you do need a rest day - so enjoy it! Anyways, you did a great job despite feeling a bit meh about the training. How did you feel trying to bounce out of the hole? Any tips?

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Awesome training, lackluster will not be my adjective of choice. More like stellar.

Take it easy this week so you can perform at your peak Saturday. Very exciting, I can’t wait to hear how it is.

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Oh ya!!! Good luck at your comp on Saturday!! And Nikki’s right, take it easy for the comp. Smart cookie.

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Good luck at the comp!!

[quote]Mascherano wrote:
Lex, I feel you with the warmups - they do take long! I wish I had an answer for you b/c it does eat away at training time if you think about ALL the things that need to be warmed up. Its so weird tho, my coaches at the O gym take 10 mins to warm up, just doing broomstick stuff and the like. They’re very old school and don’t even know what foam rolling is…so I wonder if all the warming up is totally necessary myself. But then i got this bum shoulder…[/quote]

I don’t know if it’s good or bad or what but I only take 5-10 minutes to warm up usually with some jump rope and some air squats and some broomstick snatches or something. Sometimes I just squat in the morning and it’s real quick so I hardly warm up at all. I’m a little rough to start like that but I only do the morning thing as a time saver.

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Alexus, I can’t remember if you said, do you take anything for your joints? Like fish oil? If not I totally recommend the fish oil. I stopped taking it for a while and found my joints complaining recently with the oly lifting and so I started again and they are happy again.

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Is your competition next weekend already? Oh my. Sending really good vibes your way. Have fun. Take vids.

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masch - i think wall squats are probably useless for the significant majority of Olympic Lifters. They are only useful for me because it is impossible for my knees to travel in front of my toes and because I still stand to profit from unweighted squats.

Perhaps the idea is for me to do EVA / Softball rolling (takes about 40 minutes) at home with my foot rehab rather than doing these as part of a warm up. I’ll try that and see whether it makes the Oly movements harder for me.

The Oly Lifters at my gym seem to warm up with parts of Oly lifts / Oly lifts with the bar then progressively adding weight to get warmed up to the movement and weight for their work sets. I guess I tend to think of this part of their warm-up as shorter than mine - but I need to remember that 70kg on the bar is part of a warm-up for them so I simply will spend more time with unweighted movements / the bar than them given that it is a much higher percentage of my max.

While I am maintaining lumbar curve pushing my knees out and sitting into my hip flexors I’m not doing any of those as tightly as I could so my squats are a bit soft in the hole. The wall is useful because I have a good measure of forward lean (which seems to result from softness particularly in my hip flexors). I need to work on getting a tight bottom position from a controlled descent squat (i.e. the wall) before I’ll make very much progress on doing a relaxed drop into a tight bottom position. Then some more work again making progress on actively pulling myself down under the bar into a tight bottom position. The tightness of the bottom position and the speed of the descent will determine how much bounce you can generate, I think. It is possible that I’m making too much of this, though. I figure it will co-ordinate timing-wise with the weights bouncing on the end of the bendy bar - but I’m not actually sure about this… A lot of Oly lifters do seem to pause in the hole (waiting for the bouncing weights?) I dunno…

The ‘using the bar path in Olympic weightlifting’ vid shows what Carl meant by ‘more back’ - literally moving the bar back into you from the moment it leaves the floor. The hot guys… There are some trajectory’s in there, too. The person who made the vid is offering his analysis of why some of the lifts were missed (e.g., bar path too forwards from the floor, bar path too forwards in the jerk - the result of not stepping forwards enough in the split etc).

deb - thanks. you are much more mobile than me! great idea about the fish oil. i have been slack with taking it, actually. the weather is cooling off here, too (moving into winter) and so now is when i need to be extra careful about remembering to take it. thanks for that!

snap - thanks. not sure about vids… someone said they would take some and give me a CD so hopefully i’ll figure out how to get them to youtube (bet he doesn’t have a mac).

geek alert:

if anybody knows of mac friendly open source or shareware that would allow me to plot bar trajectory (velocity graphs are a bit beyond me, i’m sure) then i’d be grateful to know of them. thanks.

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oh a competition! Good luck. I can’t wait to hear about it.

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snuck to the gym (in the middle of a batch of grading).

2x5 wall squats for warm-up.

bar drills for warm-up (hang powersnatches, drop snatches, hang snatches)

worked 2x1 up to 32.5kg. got it once. fail. fail. chickening out on the 2nd pull again. sigh.
back to 25kg for powerclean x2 then snatch x2. still not getting proper pulling position. hang pulls x5 (more pissed off than accomplishing anything)
worked 2x1 back up to 32.5 but failed it again x2. blah.

cleans worked up to two singles at 40kg. I got 40kg!!! PB!!!

push-press worked up to singles at 40kg. failed 42kg. i can do that dammit. put it on the uprights. not happening today grr.

i got 40kg clean. thats my max squat tee hee. either my form is perfect or i’m pretty bloody weak. i’m going with the latter lol.

2x5 wall squats and a little rolling / stretching the quads / hip flexors.

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always interesting reads in here!!

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[quote]alexus wrote:
snuck to the gym (in the middle of a batch of grading).
[/quote]

You know someone’s a passionate, dedicated badass when their “sneaking around” involves going to the gym to rip some weight off the floor. Good job.

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Ha, I can’t do wall squats unless I put my feet really wide.
Incidentally, your butt and hammies look tasty.

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Wall squats FTW.

Seriously, I think that the consensus about wall squats not being as important/useful for Oly is probably correct. I really do them for warm-up/mobility purposes and they make my hips feel fantastic before I squat. I am a woman of my word and will put up the vid this week come hell or high water.

Nice training and good luck with the comp prep!

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You post the coolest videos Alexus! Congrats on the PB! Woohoo!

I tried the wall squat wide, I think I have video somewhere but it still didn’t feel too good. The wall and me are friendly but not really compatible :smiley: