Jan 27, 2012

Technique, is your style the best? That is the question every athlete asks themselves. Unfortunately the answer to that question ends up being an undoubtable yes. If I just described you, stop and think about your train of thought. Is your technique really the best? Better than all those international athletes that do something different? I bet not. I bet the difference between a top competitor and a merely good athletes is that the top competitor has mastered his/her style. So long as the technique does not introduce massive inefficiency, the best technique is the one most practiced.

Find a technical style, find a coach, and practice as hard as you can until you master that style. The more time you spend talking about how great your style is, the less time you spend training.

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.

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.

Excuse me sir, we don’t allow weights to be dropped in our facility
-Your Friendly Staff Member

In training, particularly weightlifting, weights must be dropped. Bumper plates were invented, bought, used, improved, bought, used…etc. Yet somehow you are still not allowed to drop weights. Generally speaking, patrons of commercial gyms are afraid of loud noises. More importantly, is that lawyers who work for large gyms are afraid of things that move too fast. Things that move fast are liabilities. People who move things fast are also liabilities. Everybody loves money, particularly if it comes from a lawsuit, therefore we will not move things fast to reduce this liability and retain money.

Let us take a moment to acknowledge the benefits of this approach. You probably won’t lose money from a person who drops weight on himself of others. Your patrons will not be scared, therefore they will pay you money. Gaining money and not losing it, that’s pretty sweet.

Are there downsides to this approach? Yes. You do not allow for Olympic Weightlifting training to occur at heavy loads, because all weights must be lowered. You also remove most of the assorted loud noises associated with powerlifting, not to mention bands and chains. If you read this blog, I hope you enjoy moving weights quickly, at heavy loads, while occasionally making noise.

It is not always appropriate to drop weights, move them fast, or make noise in general; however in the course of a worthy training routine it is usually necessary to do one, maybe two, but probably all, of these things. Find a gym that let’s you do this. There will be strong people there.

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.