Beginners Gains

Training
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[quote]alexus wrote:

3rd figure, you can see the bump and extension. This is why I don’t like calling it a second pull, you are not pulling the weight up, rather “falling” under the bar into your catch position. Keep playing with it. Another good tip I got is not to keep all the weight on your heels, rather use mid-foot.

There is a discussion on page 11 of the Pendlay forum (the long thread) of the catapult technique. I need to read it more carefully and have a think… But I think (as part of that?) shrugging was frowned upon. There is this tricky thing of needing to get the bar high - and needing to get yourself low. I read something somewhere about there being two kinds of lifters - those that err on spending too long getting the bar up high (so don’t get under quick enough) and those that dive under the bar too soon (and don’t get the bar high enough first). All my powercleaning… Focusing on getting the bar up high… I’m probably not developing the ideal technique for being able to get myself under it quickly. I have been experimenting with my weight more in the mid-foot and I think that is really helping :slight_smile:

[/quote]

I’ve read that discussion too. Its the first discussion I’ve seen on the catapult technique that made any sense to me. What is seems to all come down to is a difference in emphasis.

The old school triple extension method treats the pull like a jump, with emphasis on knee extension, a shrug at the top, and raising up on toes, pulling the bar as high as possible before pulling under. The catapult school says this leads to pulling under the bar late, after it has reached its maximum velocity, giving less time to get under the bar before it starts descending. Some also erroneously claim that it increases the distance required to pull under the bar.

The catapult method emphasises hip extension. Full knee extension and any ankle plantarflexion, if they happen, are coincidental. The best I can tell, the triple extension school says this is a waste of resources. I don’t know how many times in the past I was told to “Finish the pull!”

Despite an initial objection to the term “catapult”, I tend to side with the catapult school. When the bar reaches its maximum velocity is the time to quit pushing on the platform and start pulling yourself under the bar. The problem is knowing when that maximum velocity occurs. My main problem with the catapult method has to do with some people’s description of the technique that claimed it was the actual bar-hip interaction that accelerated the bar upwards. Being to the side of the bar, your hips can only impart horizontal velocity to the bar, usually not a good thing.

As for the shrug, I don’t think it really matters. It’s darn near impossible to catch a snatch or clean without shrugging at some point, and whenever you do it, it has the effect of increasing (or lessening the decrease of) the bar’s velocity, and decreasing the lifter’s body’s velocity (or increasing the downwards velocity) , i.e. assisting in pulling the lifter under the bar.

It all boils down to: Bar height is not the critical factor, bar velocity is.

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[quote]Carl Darby wrote:

The old school triple extension method treats the pull like a jump, with emphasis on knee extension, a shrug at the top, and raising up on toes, pulling the bar as high as possible before pulling under. [/quote]
This is how I learned it.

Alexus: You mention building up your back. Do you mean your traps and such where you rest the bar for a back squat? And, yes, you’ll get used to holding the bar on your back to squat. But I find if bar placement is off by just a teeny bit it doesn’t feel right.

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That’s the way I learned it too. I’m not so sure any more that its the best way to do it.

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I made alot of progress with pullups (and kept my elbows and shoulders healthy) just training them once a week and doing a second day of horizontal rowing. I know most pullup programs advocate more frequent training, but in case your interested–the program I followed began with a slow, but steady increase in volume. For example, work up to 10 sets of 1, then add a couple of sets of 2. Work up to 10 sets of 2 and then add sets of 3, ect.

And a 2 minute plank is stout. I hate those too.

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Nice work, especially since you’re just deloading, and I’m glad you enjoyed the BodyBalance class.

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Front Squat:

Form isn’t as strict as I thought it was (I think I’d lose the bar if it was heavier)
Powerclean:

Think I need to set up lower to start?
Powersnatch:

Wobbly. Weight was forwards on my feet
Back Squat:

Do need to watch my lumbar curve

Is it me or do I just look wrong when I’m squatting?

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Thanks for the summary Carl. It does make a lot of sense to me. I did have some confusion about what shrugging was supposed to do. Was it supposed to help the bar go up or was it supposed to help me get under? Maybe it is helpful to emphasize one way or the other depending on whether the lifter is a puller or a diver (or whatever the terms were). Does sound to me that it is as you say with respect to the objective being maximal bar velocity.

Right now I’m feeling like I just need to be putting in the time and drilling the movements to get them smooth and reliable. Stronger, too. I think I did well not to have a couple weeks off from lifting when my gym was shut… But I did focus on strength rather than technique. My squat has gotten stronger, so that is good. I think my technique has gotten pretty sloppy, though. Need to be stricter about my training, I think. Up the volume and focus on getting every rep as perfect as possible.

Yeah kpsnapp - I think I don’t have the traps for comfortable bar placement. Or maybe it will just take some getting used to. Trying to get my traps pumped up lol. You will have to be good with your shoulder rehab so you can kick my ass on the Oly stuff!!!

That sounds interesting Nadia. I was thinking I might do chin-ups 2x a week and see how that goes. Not sure how much it is about my not packing my shoulder properly or my having overdone it a little. Do need to be careful with my shoulders, though, because I’m very sad when they feel too dodgey for overhead work.

Thanks Nikki. I’m glad I enjoyed it, too. It really is my ‘fun’ exercise time on a Saturday morning. I would have been really sad to not have had that anymore.

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Awesome vids alexus, post more in the O-lifting log!! We need more people, hehe. Great effort on the lifts.

Your squat is fine, very good form. You just need to work on hip mobility, you seem to have to ease into the hole in the bottom of the back squat. Your legs/femur length also seem long relative to your torso, so keep in mind that this may be a factor in how your back squats feel and look. Again, ankle and hip mobility, hammer it! Stuff by Bill Hartman, Eric Cressey, and Mike Robertson is golden. I highly recommend the product ‘Assess and Correct’.

Also - if you could get some side-views of the clean and snatch, and maybe zoomed out a bit more, that’d be great for technique-purposes.

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Lifts look pretty good. Its hard to tell from the angle if you need to set up lower on the cleans and snatches, but you are probably right. On a different topic, have you tried a wider grip on the snatches? The bar hits pretty far down your thighs with your current grip.

On the squats, it looks like your upper legs are about 20 or 30 times longer than your lower legs. This makes your butt come very far back and so your torso leans over quite a bit to keep your center of mass over your support, so yes they do look a little wrong. Raising heels more? Different stance–wider, narrower, feet angled out more? When your squats move up your lifts are going to follow close behind.

Completely off topic, but do you know anything about a Ramseyfication of a language? I heard it mentioned at a party with a bunch of philosophy students once and was amazed Ramsey Theory had any applications outside of mathematics.

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Just poppin’ in to say great work on the chins! That is awesome. Also videos are looking good too :smiley:

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Thanks Andy. I will be sure to post some stuff to the Oly forum, too. I’ll try and get some footage of different stance widths / heel raises for upright torso and feedback on that will be really helpful. I really have been hammering ankle / hip mobility. I definitely do need to keep working on that.

The limiting factor on my ankle mobility at the moment is my foot immobility. Toes become very clawed when I dorsiflex. Trying to intentionally stretch out my toes feels like trying to intentionally wiggle my ears (hard to know how to begin to intend or will that). A couple of docs have said that the hardware fusions shouldn’t affect dorsiflexion (only side to side movement) so that gives me hope that I can recover it with soft tissue work. I suspect that prior to injury I would have had ankle hyper-dorsiflexion to cope with my shitty levers (so knees would have been able to come well forwards to keep my torso upright).

The butt wink is mostly about poor motor control of my hip. If I try really hard to will my non-existent scorpian tail to reach out back and try to will my hip flexors to pull me down then I don’t get the butt wink. I do need to drill this so it becomes automatic, though. So I can solidly get from standing to the bottom position and back again. The butt wink becomes much worse at a certain time of the month (my deload time) because my flexors / lumbar spine feel achy then and I’m a bit scared of willing myself an injury. But I should only go as low as I can go without losing lumbar curve. I was happy to see my form didn’t deteriorate with increased load (so stop being a pussy!!!) but a bit sad to see my form wasn’t as good as I thought it was :frowning: I will get some vids when I think I’ve got a solid bottom position so I can see if once again my form isn’t as good as I think it is…

I purposely avoided side-views because I know I’m not pulling my hips through properly - but am trying to focus on the getting under and standing it up aspect for the moment. I think I do pull my hips through a bit more with heavier weights (got to or I’ll fail). When I can stand up more than I can get into position I’ll worry about my pulls again.

I tried a slightly wider grip on powersnatches / snatches today Carl. Slightly wider grip → Better hip extension → Straighter bar path → Increased confidence getting under! Cheers for that :slight_smile: Must remember that forwards bar path (for me anyway) seems to be the result of subpar hip extension. Guess I do need to worry about proper hip extension. Bah. Guess it is about practice getting the extension with less than maximal force.

Ramsey Sentances… A logic tool for showing (unobservable, inner) mental state terms (‘belief’, ‘desire’ etc) to be inter-definable without circularly (take that behaviorism!!). Not sure if that makes sense… Um… One can describe a machine (coke machine) that has a bunch of inner states that are abstractly and functionally defined without circularity ( e.g., ‘50c’ ahead def: State B: gotto by input A, when in state B goto state C). Not sure if that makes sense, either.

That is all I know of it in philosophy, anyway. Amazed it has application in math. Though I could see some application with respect to legitimating ontologically dubious variables or something like that… Not sure if any of this bears a relation to what you are talking about…

thanks n8tive! hope to have some vids with better weights soon! i’m really happy about my chin :slight_smile:

I’ll try and get better with the vids, too. First time I’ve done that. Need to set the computer up a bit further away lol. Still. I’ve done it now. My camera shy self made it to youtube lol.

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Alexus, sorry I’m late. Fantastic congrats on the chinup! That is a very big deal. And from a dead-hang? Yay!!!

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TUESDAY:

OVERHEAD SQUAT: 20kg 5x5. Took all 5 sets for me to feel I had a smooth ROM and good bottom position. Slightly wider than usual stance

POWERSNATCH: 25kg 2x3. Slightly wider than usual stance, slightly wider than usual grip. Pulling nice and straight :slight_smile:

SNATCH: 25kg 6x1. Very nice :slight_smile: Slowly regaining confidence.

PUSH UPS: slow and controlled: 1x10, 1x6 - fail. bit more ballistic: 2x5.

BACK EXTENSIONS: (not sure what these are called. Like a GHR but stop when hips are pulled through and back is horizontal). 3x10. Haven’t done these in ages.

ABS: Elbow plank 1:00. Bailed. My planks have all been straight-arm but read that these are harder on core and less hard on shoulders so worth a go. Will aim for 3x2:00 elbow planks.

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Ahh, thanks for the vids. Very interesting to watch.

I’m not sure what to say about your squats. You do GM them a bit, and your cadence strikes me as odd. Not sure what’s going on.

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[quote]alexus wrote:

I tried a slightly wider grip on powersnatches / snatches today Carl. Slightly wider grip → Better hip extension → Straighter bar path → Increased confidence getting under! Cheers for that :slight_smile: Must remember that forwards bar path (for me anyway) seems to be the result of subpar hip extension. Guess I do need to worry about proper hip extension. Bah. Guess it is about practice getting the extension with less than maximal force.

[/quote]

Glad it seems to work for you. Try working on an ever wider grip until the bar hits your hip crease on the way up.

Yeah, that would be it. We (mathematicians) grabbed a combinatorial result from the same paper that you get your Ramsey sentences from (“On a Problem of Formal Logic”) and started applying the idea to everything we could imagine. Now there are entire books on Ramsey Theory.

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Thanks Aracne (just missed your post). The odd one from a dead hang, yes :slight_smile: - but mostly from standing on my tippy toes.

Yeah, I do seem to GM them a bit kpsnap. I thought I had learned to use my legs properly, but think I get sloppy with that when there is insufficient yelling. I do the same with deadlifts - set up high and use hip extension rather than setting up lower and using my legs / extending my knees to start. Need to keep on at myself about that.

I’m so glad you guys post vids which motivated me to do so. They really are a very helpful tool, indeed. My squats are a lot worse than I had supposed, but now I can work on fixing them up rather than thinking my only problem was my being so weak. I’m aiming for something like Carl’s cadence (so oly rather than powerlifting style). Not quite pulling it off, though. Dive bombing a bit, I think, and smoko’s between reps… I’ll take some side views of cleans next time to see if my body solved the upright torso problem with that, or whether I GM them as well.

Widening my grip (quite a lot actually) seems to have fixed the forwards bar path situation. Yay!!! Need more time to get my confidence back, but at least I’m getting there now. I’m not a logician (or philosopher of math) - but maybe you like this: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:IFAvwMys5qIJ:consc.net/papers/ramsey.pdf+ramsey+%2B+moore+%3D+god&hl=en&gl=au&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESixlqAKapq4frHtAb-AwwYF3tHhDw1pKjWkm3ok5Rg09hpWgCXAyW4Lwm5Y2n9pBrFVowtlFAV0HrLQst0h0gWG9_-DaHpG9dEAnTkp6BPIK1XFsISrtxifiSgS6lsgZEaITuxE&sig=AHIEtbTM3daY_lB_ln34Io2ZQaFbcJEIKg

Been having problems with my internet where pages from this site were taking 5min to load… Seems to be fixed now though :slight_smile:

WEDNESDAY:

FRONT SQUAT: 20kg 1x5, 25kg 1x5, 30kg 1x3, 40kg single, 42.5kg single. Played with stance width / heel raise and felt like crying a bit that I didn’t seem to be able to get my torso more upright. Will keep working on it.

CLEAN: 35kg 35kg 5x1, 37.5kg 3x1, 30kg 2x1. Feeling like my torso wasn’t very upright - but catching solidly and getting it up (though hard work).

OVERHEAD SQUAT: 20kg 1x5, 22.5kg 2x5, 25kg 1x5. Couple of solid snatches to get bar into position. Wider grip. Felt good.

CHIN UPS: 2x (5x1)

ELBOW PLANKS: 2:00, 1:00, 1:00

THURSDAY:

FRONT SQUAT: 20kg 1x5, 25kg 1x5, 30kg 5x5. 35kg single. Feeling lazy. Not using legs properly (GM I think). Need to drill lower weights (up to 30kg) and make myself use my legs properly.

CLEAN: 30kg 3x1, 35kg 2x1, 37.5kg 2x1, 40kg 3 fails - not strong enough to stand up lol, 35kg 2x1, 37.5kg single.

SNATCH: 20kg double, 25kg double, 27.5kg 8x1. Straight pulling. Lost one forwards (balance on my toes in the catch) but better than they have felt in ages. More reps for confidence then will be ready to start the battle with 30kg again.

AMT: 15 minutes varied intensity cardio (my non impact sprint substitutes).

Still working on my program… Realized that I need to have some ‘play’ times as well as scheduled hard work. Keep the joy.

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I don’t know anything about o-lifts, but I thought all your vids looked great!
very deliberate and smooooth. :slight_smile:

Not much room for error, huh?

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Amusing link. I guess the logical conclusion is that we are all irrational.

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[quote]alexus wrote:
I’m so glad you guys post vids which motivated me to do so. They really are a very helpful tool, indeed. My squats are a lot worse than I had supposed, but now I can work on fixing them up rather than thinking my only problem was my being so weak. [/quote]

This is my general operating principle–most form problems are just a manifestation of weakness–best corrected by doing what needs to be done to get stronger. This is probably less true with Oly lifts, but… hmm, let’s face it, a back squat, (I should shut up now) isn’t really that complicated a movement, and if you can do it correctly unweighted than it’s safe to assume when your form breaks down with the heavier weight, the problem is the weight. Not the form.

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thanks mom :slight_smile: its only taken me… 9 months of learning Oly Lifting to get them that good :-/ i freak out a lot about crashing and burning on snatches when it comes to pulling myself under.

i think i understand what you are saying Nadia. I’ve realized that my front squat form is pretty consistent until i’m not strong enough to stand the weight up, but my front squat form (unweighted) isn’t optimal… and my back squat form isn’t optimal either…

today i held the power rack for balance, held my lumbar curve hard (side-on mirror kept me honest) and made my way down to the bottom of a squat via a succession of bounces. needed the bounces to get there. massive stretch in my hip flexors. needed to stop and reset my lumbar curve sometimes because it went away. i am impatient to be working on my front squat 1RM (so i can clean more!) but i (also? instead of?) need grease the groove on the correct motor pattern without weight, i think.

i don’t know what to conclude from the link, Carl. Stuff like that that makes me wonder how the hell we got ourselves into this mess, makes my head start to hurt, and makes me pretty darned happy to go do some heavy squats or deadlifts just to quieten down that part of my brain for a bit. Hopefully I’ll find the joy once my thesis is done.

FRIDAY:

Overhead Squat: 20kg 3x5, 22.5kg 2x5. Tried not to worry about my form on this one too much (yet!) and just do the darned reps.

Snatch: 22.5kg 2x1, 25kg 2x1, 27.5kg miss (came up on toes and lost balance forwards in catch) single, 25kg single, 27.5kg 2x1, 30kg single YAY!!! 27.5kg miss (same as last time), single.

Clean: 35kg 2x1, 37.5kg 3x1, miss (crumpled), 35kg 2x1, 37.5kg single, miss (weight forwards on toes in the catch), miss x2 (too lazy to stand up), 35kg single.

Jerk: Heel plates so I can dip-drive (can’t without). Just the bar (learning) and can’t stand feet together properly to finish since the plates are in the way. 20kg 5x5. Wrists hurt from holding the bar in the rack for so long.

Squats: Rehab gestures.

Deadlift: 50kg 1x5, 60kg 1x5, 70kg 5x1. Really trying to get under with my legs and use them until the bar is past my knees. Felt heavy today. Tired I guess (above took a while).