weightlifting

I love weightlifting. By weightlifting, I mean snatch and clean and jerk, not bodybuilding with 10 versions of curls, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not what I’m interested in. I do have to admit I love squatting, but my body’s always been wired to squat deep. I’m not great at it, but I love the process of weightlifting. I do a lot of recording myself, picking apart my technique, and trying to improve it since we no longer go to a gym and I do not have a coach.

Really, I have wanted to get into it since seeing weightlifting in the Olympics when I was little, but I didn’t have the means to learn it back then. I thought you’d have to be a bodybuilder to do it, which is a shame. I was always strong. When I said I wanted to lift people, that was what I meant. I see nothing wrong with wanting to be or look like a bodybuilder. It’s just not my cup of tea. That takes a hell of a lot of dedication to accomplish.

Fast forward 30 years, and I came across CrossFit, which, as everyone knows, among other things, includes some weightlifting. I was fat, old, and out of shape, so I started that so as not to wind up dying young as my dad did. Actually, I like CrossFit itself a lot for fitness because it’s constantly varying, but that’s another thing.

Being that snatches, cleans, and jerks are used in some CrossFit WODs, and honestly, those are my favorite WODs, they were taught. It took me a long time to “get” it. There was a special coach who came in for an Olympic lifting class, and he was outstanding in that class. Kyle was able to see the whole movement instead of just the parts he was focusing on and was good at making you realize what you were doing wrong. Sadly, for us, he had moved on to other things before we quit going to CrossFit Trinium.

After that and general practice, I feel like my form has gotten consistently good on clean and jerk and power snatches. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the occasional “What the fuck was that?” rep. I need to be more patient with cleans, and I know that, yet at one point, I cleaned 95 percent of my front squat. I’ve added quite a bit to the front squat now, but not too much to the clean because of the early pull and being thrown off by heavier weights.

Snatches with a full squat are a different thing in every way for me. Until a few months ago, whenever I overhead squatted, I had a weird little shift in body weight right around parallel, which also happened in snatches. This really destroyed any stability. If I am unable to do something correctly in a reasonably controlled way, it is better not to do it in a more dynamic setting. I’ve done a couple of full snatches when I was thinking too much, and my body did what it was supposed to do, but not consistently.

A few months ago, after a long hiatus from overhead squats due to an unrelated shoulder tweak, I tried them with just the bar and felt stable. Recorded myself and watched the video, and that little shift is gone. I can do it correctly, not mostly consistently, with overhead squats, but haven’t yet tried snatches. I want to nail the good movement pattern because I know as soon as I try snatches, bad old muscle memory will creep up. I have done a few snatch balances, and they were okay considering where I was coming from. They’re not where I’d like them to be, but it was an improvement. They say it takes thousands of reps to improve.

Once I am happy with my snatches, I will be able to find a weightlifting meet I can get to and push myself. That’s my long-term goal, anyway. I want to do it for fun. I won’t win or anything. I’m too old and cautious for that.

I generally don’t miss lifts unless it is close to my max anymore, or I just have one of those rare what the fuck was lifts, so I guess that’s a good thing.

My current maxes are low power snatch at 140 freedom units. Clean is 210 freedom units, and jerk is 200 freedom units. I really haven’t gone heavy at the jerk in quite a while, since I do it at home, and the ceiling can barely be touched at lockout. No need to have a mishap and drop a heavy bar on myself, being distracted by that. I’ll work on those when I can take my bar outside.