Olympic Weightlifting

This weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in an Olympic Weightlifting workshop hosted by MBS II CrossFit in Arvada.  There were 15 participants (half guys, half girls) and 1 coach.  Our coach has competed nationally and is passionate about Olympic lifting.  After a 15 minute warm up we started to talk about lifting in general.  Olympic lifting at its core is a jump and a land.  A statistic thrown around was that 90% of missed lifts could be traced to the feet.

We started with the Snatch and foot drills, going from a deadlift position to a squat position.  We did drills moving from hang position to hip drive position.  We did drills going from ground to hang position focusing on pivoting the knees back and out of the way.  Even in the deadlift position vertical shins was the goal.  We eventually got to high elbows and dropping under the bar.  We worked exclusively with PVC and spent about 45 minutes on the snatch.

The next 20-30 minutes we spent on the clean.  A lot of the technique is similar, except for obviously catching the bar in the rack position.  We then spent another 15 minute on the jerk.  I determined that my dominant forward foot is my left foot.  We again spent the majority of time on foot position.

Finally we wrapped up with 20-30 minutes of light barbells.  James and I worked out with 55# which felt good and reinforced all of the technique work we had done to that point.  It was a lot of information to take in, but every pearl of wisdom will pay dividends in my performance and safety.