This post is not about the latest fashion in training apparel, it’s about what you should be wearing to train hard. I’m sure you could go out to some boutique store, or even a big name brand, and find some performance apparel line promising to help you train harder and smarter. But what do you really need to wear train at your best?

The best option for a lifting shirt is something that made from thick cotton. The design on the shirt won’t do anything, but stay tuned for Devastation Inc. shirts. The reason a thick cotton shirt is best is that it offers the best warmth while lifting. A thicker shirt will also be less likely to tear when you are cleaning, squating, etc. Synthetic shirts should be avoided if possible. Many of these shirts, particularly the tight fitting compression style shirts will cause the bar to slide, for example when squatting. This can be dangerous if you are attempting heavy weights.

If you need more warmth than a t-shirt can provide, a sweatshirt is your best investment. Once again a thick cotton pullover is your friend. Keeping your body a little warmer than you think you need too will help to make sure that all your joints are at their best. The heat allows joints to be more mobile and therefore decrease your chances of injury.

Stop Crossfitting and start getting under the bar. Seriously. Crossfit is awesome, but one of the things that happens when you do a ton of reps at almost no weight is that your form will degrade rapidly and without punishment. What I mean by this is that when you are doing your cleans at 135, you will almost never miss. Therefore there is no feedback that will motivate you to improve technique. Will better technique increase your speed, probably but that is a long term motivation that does not tend to cause a change.

I’m going to pick on transitioning to move under the bar as today’s problem. What does this mean? Transitioning under the bar is the process of finishing the 2nd pull (upward movement) and transitioning to the 3rd pull (downward movement). Crossfiters often do not display any ability to transition under the bar. Their cleans are pulled almost to standing shoulder height, received, and then followed by a quarter squat so that everybody can see it was a power clean. Yay! You can lift a bar a bunch of times. Unfortunately this means that when you attempt to do a full clean (or snatch) the ability to stop pulling at the right time and start moving under the bar has not been trained. In fact you have trained a movement that is counter to this.

What does this mean? It means that you will often see failures that happen when an athlete attempts to rack the bar at their standing height and then ride it down. Spoiler alert! This can’t happen at a heavy weight. What usually happens is that the second pull turns into an upright row in an attempt to get the bar high enough to rack resulting in a fail. Usually followed by an excuse about how said athlete breathed in gluten/sugar/fast food within the last month. Sorry for the low blow there, but I know you’ve seen it (if you haven’t it was probably you).

How do you fix the problem? Practice. Alright I’ll go into detail. There are alot of ways to fix the problem, many of them correct. I’ll say a few, but this is not intended to be a definitive guide to how to fix transitions. One of the simplest ways is to stop doing the power movements of the Olympic lifts for a few months and only do full versions in all workouts. This may or may not help your transitions depending on how much you focus on technique. A specific drill that may help is a tall clean. For videos and detailed explanations, try Google or better yet find a coach. Basically the tall clean involves standing upright and dropping into the receiving position of a clean. This isolates the transition from the top of the pull (standing) to moving under the bar and ending in the receiving position of the clean.

Would you build a building in a swamp? No. Why not? Becasue it’s squishy… and so are you. Don’t take that as an insult, I mean to say that in comparison to bedrock you are easily compressible. What does this have to do with lifting heavy things? Everything. In this post I’ll focus on how turning yourself into a granite slab will greatly improve your lifting.

When I first started pressing I never took my setup seriously. I would unrack the bar without taking a big breath and flexing my abs and upper back. Then, as I would begin to press, my body would compress lose all the hard work I was putting in to press the weight overhead. Why was I losing all this hard work? Because I did not have a solid surface to press against. As I was pressing the bar up, I was pressing my body down and moving it out of position. Energy was being lost everywhere in the connection between my main muscles and the bar.Because of the inefficiency in the transmission between my muscles and the bar, as well as the inefficiency caused by being in the wrong position to press I had to work extra hard to lift well under my potential.

How did I fix these errors? First off I learned to take a big breath and hold it before I unracked the bar. If I need to I can take another smaller breath before I start to lift. Secondly I learned to get my upper body very tight, again this is before I unrack the bar. The best way to do this is by thinking about pulling your shoulders back, and thinking about pulling your chest up and your ribcage down. The chest/ribcage cue can be hard to learn at first, but combined with the shoulders back it really locks the entire upperbody in place and provides the best platform for pressing.

The next, and possibly most important, technique that I have learned is to flex my legs really hard. Because your do not have to use your legs at all in the press this is the best way to provide your upper body with a solid platform to work on. Combined with the tightening of the upper body, flexing the legs can also help to engage the abs. All of these techniques will put you in the best position to press from and will keep you there throughout the entire movement.

A common squatting fault, both in the front and back squats, is not finding the correct balance and weight distribution on your feet. In order to teach the proper technique, coaches will often use the cue “heels” to remind you that you should distribute your weight evenly across your feet. The ideal balance in a squat is to have the center of mass of you and the barbell over the middle of your foot. Why is the cue not “middle” or “balance”? There are several reasons, the first of which is that both of those are incredibly lame.

They also don’t help to correct the main problem, which is that you are attempting to balance yourself and added weight over the ball of your foot. In order to correct this, the best cue encourages you to over-correct and shift the weight to your heels. Hopefully you will try, and more importantly succeed in making a change that places the weight over the middle of your foot.

It may be hard for beginners to squat to full depth due to flexibility or strength imbalance. If flexibility is an issue, cueing may not improve squat technique. Instead it is more important to get into a good stretching routine that will loosen up hips/quads/hamstrings so that you will be able to reach the bottom of a squat easily.

If strength imbalance is the limiting factor, cueing may be a good way to solve the problem. usually people who squat on their toes are attempting to use their stronger quadriceps (the front part of the leg) to move the weight instead of engaging the hamstrings. Over time, and with constant reminders, cueing to place weight on the heels will strengthen the back of the leg enough so that the balance comes naturally. Other assistance exercises can be used to achieve this balance; however the squat, when properly executed, will usually the be most effective training tool for a begginer.

Can you tell me your squat pr? Of course you can. You could probably tell me your 1RM on
almost any lift you do regularly. But what was it 6 months ago? What weight have you been working during your volume sets? what have you been doing for assistance work? Has it changed? Is your program working?

These are the questions that can be answered if you keep a quality workout log. Records of past work will allow you to assess the impact of whatever you keep note of. Important things to keep track of in addition to lifts are general nutrition notes, weight, extremes of water intake, particularly stressful life events, extremes of sleep, sickness. Noting these factors occasionally in your log will help you to get a picture of how you are recovering.

Let’s say you are a weightlifter and you are thinking of switching to a Bulgarian style program. You can use you logs to look for periods of time when you training was similar. If you notice that your sleep is always worse during these times and that you are always getting minor colds you can use this information to plan out when you will do the intense cycle of training. It is probably best not to pair an intense training cycle with a time of the year where you are likely to be exposed to other sources of stress.

Information about sickness or severe allergies related to a particular season can be used to plan training cycles so that the cumulative stress does not cause over-reaching or over-training. The only way to have a record of these effects is to keep a workout log with information on how you are training and how you are responding to that training.

There are many different way to record your workouts. The most conventional way is a small notebook, just like the ones you had in middle school, or a ledger book. Any collection of lined paper capable of fitting in a workout bag should do the trick. You should be able to buy a suitable log book at any drug/office supply store. $1-$5 is a good price. How can you say no to that?

Recording the actual workout is the most difficult part. Not because of the complexity in writing down simple numbers, but because you need to get into the habit. It’s hard to record workouts if you have not been doing so before. Luckily if you can manage a week or two of solid recording you should have the pattern set with very little effort.

On to recording the workout. Any variation of recording sets/reps should do the trick. Just remember that anything written in a logbook is for the purposes of looking back on training and making decisions about future training (more on this in a later post). Therefore it must be legible and tell you what you have actually done. If you are learning how to warm up then it’s probably important to record this. Otherwise you should just record your working sets. How many sets/reps did you do at a certain weight? and for what exercises? That’s the good stuff.
Other things might include how you are feeling (emotionally and physically), what the technique problems were, anything relevant to performance on that particular workout. These comments should be minimal, that poem you scribbled in the side of your log was no good anyway.

There are many ways to keep a log. Find the one that works for you. Stay tuned for ways to digitize your log and other log related musings.