Train Hard

When I first started weightlifting towards the end of 2012, I did Bulgarian style training. After some months off, during the Summer of 2013 I continued this, hitting a squat daily maximum twice a day, the main lifts once a day, and doing from 6-12 back off sets. Sessions would take me so long I'd often be pale and shaking slightly by the end from lack of blood sugar. I began taking packs of kit-kats and eating around 1000kcal to just let me survive the training. It worked excellently. My lifts shot up extremely fast.

Notes from China

Over Summer of 2015 I lived in a Chinese sport school for a month, and another week just before I left China.

My Chinese is pretty bad, but I managed to, with lots of repetition, understand what my coach was trying to say to me. I'm going to try and post what stuff I've learnt from my experience there. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Chinese Programs

Summaries of training programs
On left are the summaries of a detailed week plan and a summary week plan of the training program of lifters in a Chinese youth sports school.
On the right are the summaries of the week training plans of some Chinese lifters, credit to @PapaYats on Instagram.

How to Snatch - Updated Version

This is another tutorial for snatching. More specific I feel, as I see a lot of people pulling incorrectly, which leads to an ugly Snatch. My main issue is people that start with their shoulders way over the bar, then after the knees they have to swing their torso upright whilst using the lats to bring it in, this overuse of lats can cause arm bending if the timing of hips and torso verticality are off. This also result in a lot of bar banging, instead of brushing the hips, resulting in an arc motion, meaning the lift is very often lost behind them, as well as a lot of bruising and pain.

Some people have adapted to this, and got strong enough to muscle the bar into place, but I feel if you learn it the way I will describe, you will make more progress consistently.

Now, why should you listen to me? Don't, it's fully your right to ignore, there are hundreds of weightlifter that have much higher lifts and totals than me. But My status has had lots of downs, and the most recent being a Stroke in Vietnam. This reduced me to basically nothing. Now, I can just about Snatch (but it causes pain in my right arm) and my ability to clean is gone. I will work on bringing these things back, but I think it's safe to say my goal of becoming a British Weightlifter is over.

However, throughout my weightlifting career I have done absolutely insane amounts of research and theoretical work. I never had a Coach, because they weren't available, so I had to become my own coach, filming analysing myself, catching fractions of things being off, and forever tweaking and changing small things. So, this should give me a fair bit of Theoretical knowledge, particularly in the Snatch. So now, my goal is to become a Coach, but potentially through Email, as I will live out in Vietnam instead of England.

So, lets get down to snatching 101.

Alex

Takano Weightlifting Programs

Download Spreadsheet here
Spreadsheet is a work in progress; so far I've done Class III to CMS. I am running the CMS macocycle at the moment and enjoying it a lot, and feel that my consistency and strength have gone up.
Strongly recommend purchasing Bob Takano's Weightlifting Programming; excellent book. He has a great blog and website (with more information on) here.

Weightlifting Performance Matrix

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ierj1yo7eto05x2/StandardsMatrix.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vvbben23x9utevg/WLLevelCalc.ods

Mohamed Ehab - Clean and Jerk

185kg Clean and Jerk at -69kg

Fairly standard, but blisteringly fast, impressive because a lot of people chasing speed sacrifice hitting ideal positions.