This weekend, I had the absolutely awesome opportunity to attend an Olympic Lifting Certification in San Antonio with Coach Burgener – What a great learning experience!
I think the thing that I enjoyed the most was learning how to explain and teach the basics of Olympic Lifting to people without a lifting background. This will be extremely helpful as I teach Jamie the lifts over the next few months 🙂
It was also a great opportunity to have my technique analyzed and areas for improvement pointed out. I am by no means a world-class lifter, and there is plenty of room for improvement! It was great to identify a few of those areas and be taught drills that I can do that will help me continue to improve on my weaker areas and the things that I’m not as comfortable with.
I have high hopes that my lifts will be going WAY up over the next several months, as long as I stick with Coach Wilkes programing, and continue to apply the corrections to technique that I learned this weekend 🙂
One of the things that I know that I have had a problem with is bending my arms and trying to “muscle up” the bar when doing a snatch. I know this is one of the reason that my snatch stalled several months ago, and I haven’t been able to increase it since. It is only humanly possible to “muscle up” so much weight! I’ve been told several times to pull myself under the bar, and not to bend my elbows so early, but for some reason I just couldn’t seem to make this knowledge translate to my lifts. . . . This weekend, Coach B and his trainers went into a lot of detail explaining how to pull oneself underneath the bar. They also emphasized over and over again that you do NOT pull the bar overhead – you accellerate it through the middle, and then pull yourself under it as soon as you finish your extension. For some reason, it FINALLY “clicked” for me!!After the Cert, I decided to do a few quick lifts with “real weight” in order to help all of the information that I learned sink in (we used PVC and stripped barbells for most of the drills during the cert).
I started by warming up with the bar, then snatched 65lb, then 85lb like it was NOTHING! My previous PR was 87lb . . . . I took the weight up to 95lb, and nailed it on the third attempt!
Then I dropped it and did the happy dance! lol 🙂 The best part is that Jessica from Atlas CrossFit in Chicago got a picture of me in the bottom of my 95lb snatch! I’ll post it once I get a copy 🙂
I really think I could have gone even heavier, but I didn’t want to wear out my welcome, and it looked like the Alamo crew was packing up and getting ready to call it a day – so I will have to max out again next weekend and see just how heavy I can go 🙂