Tuesday 15 October

How’s your Oly lifting technique?

 If you ask a CrossFitter to take a look at your lifts, they might think you move pretty awesome.

Ask an Olympic Weightlifter, and they may have a different opinion.

In CrossFit, the standards in general are to lift the barbell above your head anyhow you are able.  This tends to bring a variety of techniques into play, not all of which are recommended…..

Competition techniques such as tap N go reps, reactive jerks and pushpresses, and the demand to perform all the variants of the lifts (eg: from the hang) etc also have served to modify the way the Oly lifts look in CrossFit and how they are trained.  You will see the hips in a higher position in order to keep the knees out of the way for multiple reps, and the feet not moving out to a landing stance, to avoid having to move them back to the more efficient jumping stance each time.

This is the balance between work capacity and absolute power output.

Olympic Weightlifting has only 2 events, and fairly complex rules around each of them, some of which include the fact that the bar must arrive overhead without any pressing of the arms, there can be no pausing of the bar at any point at the lift, when you drop the bar, you must hang on to it until it has passed the waist (great rule!!), and in order to finish the lift, the feet must be parallel to each other.

The most common ‘error’ you will see from a CrossFitter is the press out.

But just because it still counts as a rep, doesn’t mean it should.

If you train your Oly lifts like a Weightlifter and always focus on moving well, then when you are deep in to a high rep barbell based metcon, you are less likely to move ‘not so well’…….

Or, even if your technique does degrade a little bit under fatigue, it would be much better to degrade 5% from 100% perfect, than 5% from 75%…….

Train perfect, train perfect consistently; then, and only then can you compete a little less than perfect…

 POWER

Jerks

1 rep EM for 12 mins

Then,

30 Jerks 60kg

25 Pullups

20 Thrusters 60kg

15 Bar Muscle Ups

S+C

Pushpress

3 reps EM for 12 mins

Then,

60s wallball

60s shuttle run

60s wallball situps

60s rest

3 rounds