This is my heavy triple backsquat at the end of a week filled with snatch and clean & jerk maxes.

Congratulations, It’s your max effort day and you just hit a new personal record. You feel pumped up, the weight was easy and you’re ready to do more. Stop and think about your next move. You could try and put even more weight on and hit a larger record but you need to look at a few things before you go to that extra rep. How many reps above 90% have you done? What has your training week been like? How has your recovery been? What are your coach or spotters saying about the rep?

A general recommendation from Prilepin’s chart (for more on that see Elite FTS) is that you should not lift more than 4 times over 90% of your 1RM. This can act as a general guideline for your workout; however they may be times when you want to cut your reps shorter than this. If you just hit a large pr at the end of a long workout and it took you 3 lifts it may be beneficial to end your workout there. You are probably on track to keep getting prs and you need to evaluate the risk of injury, particularly after an intense workout. If your training week has been very heavy the risk of injury to stressed muscles, joints and tendons is higher than during a light training week. Remember that a 10 to 20lb pr might be great, but you’ll lose much more than that if it causes and injury.

Input from spotters can be helpful in determining if you are able to complete another rep. If they tell you that your last rep looked slow and heavy then it may be best to avoid trying even more weight. If they say that you move the weight easy and the technique was perfect then the jump might be more acceptable. There are times when you feel like the weight was easy, particularly after a big pr, where the lift was actually heavy and slow. These are the times that you need outside input. If the rep felt easy to you it may have just been due to the fact that you set a record and felt good about it. The adrenaline released during that rep probably won’t be around for your next. Better to leave the gym with a new record and feeling like you have more, than to leave with and injury.

Seriously. Think about how long you want to be an athlete, think about how long you want to compete and train. The more injuries you have the more problems you have to work with. Inevitably the will happen but don’t get them for silly things. If you get hurt winning a national meet you will be much more satisfied than getting hurt just so you could lift a few extra pounds when you already have a new record. If you train hard the pr will be there on your next max effort day.

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.

In the front squat a strong rack is crucial. There are two things that are important about the rack position. The first is that you need to have the bar balanced on your shoulders, not in your hands. The second is that you need to have a strong upper back to help hold the weight in place.

Keeping an upright posture is the best way to ensure that the bar stays on your shoulders. The best cue for this is to try and lean backwards. Don’t worry you probably won’t fall back (emphasis on the probably, don’t be an idiot and overdo it). With larger weights your center of mass changes, and although you will never truly be leaning back it may feel like a substantial lean is necessary in order to keep the bar lined up over the center of your foot. The tendency that you need to fight with an load on the front of the body (anterior, if you want to use a big fancy word) is a lean forward caused by the bar being positioned in front of your spine. It is obviously impossible to place the bar at shoulder height directly over your spine, at least I would hope this is obvious, but the closer the bar is to being over your spine the easier it will be to keep in place.

Another word of warning, if the bar is racked too deeply on the shoulders you may be at risk of passing out due to the loss of blood flow caused by embedding the barbell in your neck. In the event that you feel feint, bail the bar. Take a minute to recover an try again. There is no need for you to pass out, it does not make you a badass, it just makes you someone who missed a rep and risked injury for nothing.

A second component to the rack position is a strong upper back. This is important in both the front and backsquats, but I’ll address the backsquat in a later article. A strong upper back serves two purposes. The first is to better translate the power from your hips (the real core strength) by turning your torso into a solid block. The second is to act as a buffer to the inefficiency of the front rack position. Due to the position of the barbell there is inherently more strain on the rack position than in the backsquat. Therefore it is crucial to have a strong upper back to hold the bar into the proper position. Arm strength is mildly relevant; however if you are using your arms to hold the bar in position then you are most likely not keeping a high enough elbow position.

So you want to squat like a pro powerlifter, but your last squat 1RM was 315. And now it’s your max effort squat day and you want to blow things up! You are pumped and riding high on adrenaline… wait, take a deep breath. Before you go and put 405 on the bar you should think about your actual ability to lift. Are you stronger than last time? Probably, but it takes a long time to develop strength. Depending on your training level a 5 to 15lb jump may be much more appropriate. You can try and make the big jumps and may you’ll make one every now and then, but most of the time you will miss. Eventually the only thing you will have trained to do is miss lifts. Presumably you are training to be stronger and that takes discipline.

Real in your big dreams and instead move towards the slow and constant progress that will make you strong. Consistently making slightly heavier lifts will be much more productive than making a monstrous jump every other month. In fact if you have been training for more than 6 months you probably will never make a massive jump. A large jump is more likely to cause injury if missed (that will make you weaker) or stall progress if made (which will make you frustrated and then weaker). Be the smarter athlete and move towards consistency in all things you do, the strength will come with persistence and determination.

The 2011 Collegiate Nationals were full of excitement, records, and mishap. The turnout was quite large for year’s meet, including many of America’s top weightlifters. Most notably, Kendrick Farris (85kg) and Jared Fleming (94kg) set collegiate and junior records respectively. Many of the weight classes were highly competitive, with a few of the men’s classes being split into A and B groups to due the high turnout.

The competitive nature of the meet lead to many lifters attempting to use every trick in the book to get ahead. Many lifters were making every possible change to their weights both before they took their openers and during the meet. This lead to confusion among meet administrators, as well as some delays. Often time the bar would remain empty for long periods of time while administrators attempted to sort out who was supposed to be lifting and with what weight. The loaders did a commendable job keeping track of what weight was supposed to be on the bar and executed their job with speed.

The judges were not kind at this meet, enforcing the strictest adherence to the rules possible. The slightest wobble in elbow lockout was red lighted, causing frustration for many lifters. Despite these setbacks the best collegiate athletes were able to participate and demonstrate the best the had to offer. Despite the drama, the meet was a distinct success.