Garage Blog

A lot of weightlifting coaches will get into weightlifting competitions with their athletes and not have any plan. The athletes are coming in b...

Putting weeks upon weeks of training. Months upon months of training. Ready to go out on the stage and snatch a huge PR. But what ends up happe...

Competition prep for a big-time international meet takes work, foresight, and mental focus. Now imagine being at a competition and not having...

Talking about technique for Olympic weightlifting, for anything for that matter, we need to establish a technical model. A technical model prov...

The sport of Olympic weightlifting is notorious for being the sport with athletes with little skinny arms. Arms that look like spaghetti hangi...

The sport of Olympic Weightlifting is extremely demanding. It is demanding on an athlete’s time; it is demanding on the athlete’s body; ...

As we saw with Hayley, nerves and the mental aspect were the weakest point of her competition in Santo Domingo. Even with this weakness, she was still able to post a fourth place finish in clean and jerk and an 8th place finish overall, contributing to the point system system for next year’s Pan Am Games. So...where can we go with her training?

It is very difficult to approach this meet with high expectations and impressive results. Basically, every athlete involved with the competition should not be focused on this meet as their priority for the yearly block of training. Just about everyone should be focused long term preparation for Junior Worlds or Senior Worlds. On top of those factors, it is very well known that Pan Am competitions are poorly managed, hot, not the greatest living conditions, and generally a poorly executed competition which makes it very difficult to set up for a strong peak.

First, I just want to address what some people have probably already decided based on the title: no, I don’t hate deadlifts. Deadlifts can be an extremely effective tool for increasing strength. I really like deadlifts for a sport like wrestling, where more brute strength is required, and the sport itself is more of a grind. But for now, let’s dig deeper into why I don’t have my athletes deadlift in general.

This is a continuation of my article on lifting from the blocks vs. the hang, but this will focus on how I apply these two variations to my throwers. Since I covered the basics of each position in the previous article in this series, I’ll just dive right in.

One very common question I receive about my programming is, “Is it percentage based?”. The answer is no, I primarily use a technique called autoregulation for planning weights in my programs. In this article, I’ll start to dig into autoregulation a bit and how I implement it with my athletes.

One question we get a lot is “what are the differences between lifts from the blocks (or boxes) and from the hang?”. Although they may look similar, there are some key differences when considering which movement to program. Before we get started, I just want to make it clear that this article is specific to weightlifters, performing a variation of either the snatch or clean! I do program partial lifts for my throwers, but the reasons behind those choices are for another article. So, let’s get into the details here.