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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Why the US sucks at Olympic Weightlifting

I recently read an unbelievably long set of posts by Lyle MacDonald about why the US is really terrible at olympic lifting. It's actually quite interesting if you have the time. There's about 30something parts in all, divided into two sections. The first section details the meteoric rise of certain countries' success in a particular sport (Kenyans and long distance running, for example), and tries to investigate the cause.


The second section investigates the US olympic lifting efforts in detail.


The TL;DR of it is that he thinks it's a combination of:
1) lack of fan base which is caused by the lack of hero figures in the sport (no Michael Jordan to emulate), the nuanced judging process (one lift can be red lighted and another can be white lighted with both looking about the same), the fact that the weights are in kilos which makes it seem less impressive to Americans (well I can bench 225lbs, and he can't even snatch 200).

2) Lack of funding. If you're pretty athletic, you'd go into basketball, baseball, football for potentially a metric shitton of money. Why would you OL.

3) The countries who are good (China) train their athletes from like...4 years old. By the time they hit puberty, they've had a decade of experience already. On a related note:


Dude cleans more than me...and he's 9.


...WTF.

What's really interesting is that he thinks crossfit MIGHT be the savior here. Since crossfit got big, the number of registered OL'ers more than doubled. Crossfit seems to be a feeder into more specialized sports (like clean and snatch? go into OL, like handstands and ring work? go into gymnastics).

My recent training:

Saturday:
squat 3x5 330lbs
press 5x5 135lbs
weighted chins 5,5,5,4,3 +30lbs
some ab work.

This morning:
squat 3x5 335lbs
bench 3x3 225lbs

OL class tonight! Last week :(
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6 comments:

  1. MBMarch 20, 2012 at 2:21 PM

    how'd you like the class? how is the coach?

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMarch 20, 2012 at 2:56 PM

    The class is pretty good! My only gripe so far is that we haven't done any full c&j or snatch work. Hopefully that will happen this week.

    The coach is pretty good. He's very careful about getting you to have the right form.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JCMarch 20, 2012 at 4:19 PM

    Sounds like some good stuff, i'll have to take a look at the links later. What have you been doing in the oly class? Like hang cleans/snatches? Front/overhead squats?

    I think ideally before you start moving into heavy weights/full cleans/snatches you'd like to have as close to perfect form as possible. This falls along the lines of the Chinese methodology of doing thousands of reps with just the bar before any lifting with weights is even allowed.

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownMarch 20, 2012 at 7:18 PM

    We're doing lots of hang power cleans and hang power snatches. We're also doing some targeted exercises to help us with certain parts of the movement. For example, one exercise is basically where a partner drops a medicine ball at some arbitrary time, and your goal is to get under it and catch it. This is supposed to help with the racking part of a clean.

    ReplyDelete
  5. JamesNovember 13, 2015 at 11:54 AM

    The first half of a Clean and a Snatch is a variation of the Dead Lift, yet no one at the USOTC Dead Lifts!!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. JamesNovember 13, 2015 at 11:54 AM

    The first half of a Clean and a Snatch is a variation of the Dead Lift, yet no one at the USOTC Dead Lifts!!!

    ReplyDelete