For those of us with a weightlifting program in our gyms, one of the most important goals is keeping the lifters actively engaged over an extended period of time. This means that they will be participating long enough to develop their skills and maintain progress and that will in turn allow you to afford to keep your program running and rewarding you.
The American Open is the second highest national event regularly conducted by USA Weightlifting. Like all national level events in any sport it should provide an opportunity to focus attention on the very best athletes in the sport. For many weightlifters it is a final opportunity to improve year-end national rankings in a drug tested event, and thus put them a step closer to qualifying for future international events, residency opportunities at the Olympic Training Center, record setting opportunities and financial recompense.
There is such a thing as a best bodyweight for weightlifting. It is a fairly specific number that will vary from time to time in a lifter’s history.
At that best bodyweight the lifter will achieve the highest total possible for the athlete’s stage of training. The snatch will be approximately 80% of the clean & jerk.
I am proposing 3 leagues, but that, like everything else in this proposal, is open to modification. There should be a commissioner for each league and if possible a record keeper as there will be a lot of documentation that must take place.
Each commissioner is responsible for selling the concept to the clubs and securing an agreement to participate. Each must set up a schedule and determine who the host clubs will be.
The three commissioners and the LWC governing board should establish the ceiling totals for the two lowest leagues.
The Advanced league calendar should be set up first based on the national calendar. The LWC championships date should be established in relationship to the Regionals, American Open and Nationals, depending on the quality of lifters in the Advanced League. A high powered elite program might be most concerned with the Nationals.
By the way the LWC championships can be set up in any format that works best for the LWC. Many LWC’s set up their championships to determine the best open, youth, junior and master lifters in each bodyweight class. This is not the only way, however. Keep that in mind.
There should be a meeting between the three commissioners and the constituent clubs to determine the meet schedules, the host clubs and the ceiling totals for each league. In some cases the league meets can be combined or mixed in with other events. For example a beginner league competition could be combined with an open or a legacy event. Creative solutions are certainly welcome.
The important thing is to develop interest in the league competition so that at the culmination of the league championship, team standings can be determined, league champions can be crowned and other awards such as outstanding lifter or most improved lifter or top coach can be presented. This type of program will keep athletes training, and will develop friendly rivalries between teams. The management of the program and the cultural leadership of the commissioners will be keys to the success.
I feel that the basic plan allows for a great deal of individual adjustment, but it will serve the important purpose of maintaining long term interest in the sport. We are now in a situation where the sport can move forward but it will depend on whether weightlifting clubs can survive as businesses. A scheme that encourages long term participation will go a long ways toward this goal.
As a 7 year old child I used to love books about animals. One of my favorites was the San Diego Zoo guidebook. Each animal’s common name was presented in boldface and immediately following it was another name in italics. I had no idea what that italicized name was and my parents couldn’t explain it to me either. Fortunately for me, my aunt and uncle lived in a duplex that they shared with a retired, widowed school teacher, Mrs. Gough. She too, loved animals and was a member of the Audobon society. Figuring that she might know what the italicized name might mean, I asked her one day.
Rene Gough explained to me that the italicized name was the scientific name, the name by which the animal was known to scientists all over the world. She further explained that the languages used for scientific names were ancient Latin and Greek which no one spoke anymore. This led me to do even more research such that my 8th grade science project became constructing phylogenetic trees of over 4,000 mammalian species. It even led me to taking 2 years of Latin in high school.
Now I understood that because some people called a cougar a cougar, others were calling it a painter, or a panther, or a mountain lion, or a pantera which could eventually lead to confusion. Scientists around the world, however, all knew the animal as Felis concolor.
For this standardization we have to thank a 17th century Swedish biologist named Karl von Linne. Von Linne realized that with science fast becoming an international enterprise, the names of species would vary from one country to another due to language differences. To solve the problem he chose to use ancient languages, Greek and Latin, that since they were no longer spoken were highly less likely to change in meaning. He was so enamored of Latin that he changed his professional name to Carolus Linnaeus. We can thank Linnaeus for his development of the Binomial System of Nomenclature that remains the international standard for the naming of species.
Non-standardized nomenclature
We are currently at a point in the history of weightlifting where it would serve us well to take a page from Mr. Linnaeus work. We are participants in a sport with nearly 190 member nations. The official languages are English and French with working languages being I believe Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The number of exercises available for the training of weightlifters is considerable and as such any discussion of training is subject to confusion if there is no standardization, and if the naming of exercise variations is not tied to the function or biomechanics of the movement.
Furthermore we are now in a period where relative newcomers with no sense of history and who live in a bubble are rediscovering exercises and re-naming them for what seem to be narcissistic or marketing flavored motivations.
As an example the Chinese have been observed doing pulls in which they bend their knees and drop the torso downwards at the conclusion of the movement. Because the folks in the bubble had never seen this variation (which had been a part of weightlifting training for decades), they decided to re-name it Panda Pulls because their thought processes have been commandeered
by the marketing industry. The problem is that that the new name is not descriptive in any way of the actual movement, nor how it might vary from the more common variation.
I’ve also seen instances where an old exercise is rediscovered by some bubble denizen and then renamed after himself! This is also not very descriptive of the dynamics of the movement.
Unfortunately due to social media, this naming process can spread misinformation rather rapidly.
A Revelation From the Past
Back in the 1980’s when the women’s portion of lifting was just gaining steam, there was a National +82.5 kg champion named Stephanie Armitage who was so enthusiastic about the sport that she actually spent a few months in Hungary training so that she could improve her lifting and learn as much about it as possible. I spoke with Steph upon her return and she showed me how the Hungarian coaches had lists of exercises numbered in a systematic fashion so as to avoid confusion. All snatches and snatch variations were in the 100’s. Cleans and clean variations were in the 200’s, etc. In this way there was no question about which exercise was being implemented.
It was apparent that the Hungarians (and perhaps the neighboring Romanians as well) had encountered some exercise confusion within their circle of coaches and found that numbering was the best way to avoid such misconceptions. For those of you fortunate enough to have a copy of Weightlifting For All Sports, an IWF publication by Tamas Ajan (Hungary) and Lazar Baroga (Romania), you might have seen those numbers next to the exercises in the sample training programs. Well those are the code numbers that Steph brought back to the U.S. (For the rest of you, that book is out of print and you will have to wait for some elderly lifting enthusiast to die and hope that the spouse puts it up for sale on e-Bay).
So…………….
What is sorely needed right now is an exercise glossary assembled by a panel of experts (No bubble guys, please!) with codes, exercise descriptions and videos. This will go a long way toward providing some standard practices for the sport and hopefully putting the bubble guys out of their self-indulgence.
I’m sure that some readers are probably wondering what went on with my athletes at the 2015 USA National Weightlifting Championships. Consequently I’m doing this self-evaluation as the process is valuable to me.
I coached two athletes at the Nationals. Christine Na lifted in the 58A session and Dan Scanlan who lifted in the 94B session.
Christine’s training went well up until about 3 weeks before the meet. She had a wrist injury that prevented her from jerking and so when she lifted in our local meet on July 19th, she only cleaned and did 98 kg relatively easily. At that point her back was bothering her and she could only get relief by having an epidural injection about 3 weeks before Nationals. We both felt that this would not have a lingering effect on her performance. Unfortunately our calculations were off.
The injection affected her leg strength dramatically.
Subsequently her performance at Nationals was not the best She could only make her openers at 74 and 93. Her cleans were especially affected by the lack of leg strength and she could not rise with 97, although racking it twice.
I will reassess her training for the next competition and make sure that we do not make the same mistake again. Opportunities to compete at Nationals are to be valued.
Christina Na
My second lifter was Dan Scanlan. I had only met Dan at a seminar I presented at his gym, Crossfit Highbar, the year before. He had purchased my book and was following the training. A few months ago he asked me if I would be willing to platform coach him at the Nationals. I don’t normally do this, but agreed as Dan seemed to be a very sincere individual with talent.
We communicated a little about his training and I reviewed some video about his jerking.
When I got to Nationals and started working with Dan in the warm-ups I was amazed at how quickly he was moving and how strong he was. Dan was a little excited at his first Nationals and although his first snatch went up very easily, the second and thirds with 140 were really out of control and he couldn’t secure them. His clean & jerks, however, were superb and he lifted 3 successful attempts to finish with 165, a PR that also gave him a PR total.
I was very pleased with Dan’s lifting.
This little review allows me the opportunity to look back on this event and to help with planning for coaching in the future. I encourage all coaches to review their efforts periodically, as it provides the opportunity for reflection and reorganization.
