Answer: As always, the short answer is that it depends.  Mainly on how they are done and the person doing them.  Frankly, this is truly the only way to analyze if a given exercise is ‘safe’ or not, any exercise can be relatively more safe or unsafe for a given individual for a given set of circumstances.  That said, the upright row does tend to be surrounded by it’s share of ‘unsafe exercise’ beliefs so let’s look at why.

I think the first place I saw it asserted that upright rows were categorically unsafe was in the old 7-Minute Rotator Cuff Solution from Health for Life (a now defunct company that put out a variety of different manuals).  And this was based on the mechanics of the movement.  Specifically, upright rows put the shoulder in an internally rotated and horizontally abducted position.  And this is a potential problem because it puts the shoulder/rotator cuff at risk for impingement.  Hence, to avoid shoulder problems, upright rows became one of the big no-no exercises.

But is this strictly true?  In my opinion, no and much of it has to do with how the exercise is performed.  Certainly, the traditional bodybuilder method of performing the exercise is pretty high risk.  I’ve shown the typical form below.

High Ouchie Potential

As you can see, the elbows are being brought very high (often the goal is to get them to the ears) and certainly that tends to put the rotator cuff in a high risk position even with excellent shoulder control.  As well, you don’t really get a whole lot more involvement of the deltoids in the first place by pulling the bar this high.  So you increase the risk without really impacting on the movement’s benefit as a shoulder movement.

So for those reasons, I certainly wouldn’t recommend folks do upright rows using that technique.  The risk is high and the benefit relatively low.  This is especially true given that it’s easy to modify the movement into one that is not only safer for the shoulder but targets the deltoids just as effectively.  And that is to do the movement where you stop with the elbows only going as high as the shoulders themselves (this typically put the weight/bar/dumbbell about sternum level) as shown below.

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Less Ouchie Potential

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The above has far less potential for impingement issues, simply by limiting the range of motion.  Yet it still provides full stimulation for the medial deltoid. I’d mention that it does still require some ability to control the scapula (in terms of setting the shoulder down and not letting it elevate) so someone with a previous rotator cuff injury might still have problems with it.  But for someone with good scapular control and no other shoulder issues, I see no problem with doing upright rows in this fashion.

As a final note, I would suggest doing the movement either with a rope handle (off a cable stack) or with dumbbells.  The wrists tend to get a bit cocked using a barbell so even if the movement doesn’t bug your shoulder, it can jack up your wrists.  And, of course, if doing upright rows even in the above fashion still bugs your shoulders, drop the movement.  As I said up above, movements can only generally be rated as safe or unsafe for a given individual under a given set of circumstances.  If a movement causes pain, it’s not a good one for you.

Hope that clears things up.

Answer: It depends.  Simply there is no single proper way to squat despite what many will have you believe or vigorously contend.  At the very least most will define three primary ‘types’ of squats which are:

1. High-bar/Olympic squat
2. Generic Power Squat
3. Geared powerlifting squat

And I’d note that that only begins to scratch the surface of the different types of squats which have been done over the years.  But those general categories tend to encapsulate the three ‘primary’ types of back squats that are done by trainees.  I’ll describe each generally and try to look at some of their various pros and cons below.

The high-bar/Olympic squat is done with the bar held high on the traps and the goal is generally to keep the torso as vertical as possible; this is usually facilitated by wearing shoes with a slight ‘heel’ on them as this lets the lifter get the knees further forward.    The focus is generally more on squatting ‘down’ than ‘back’ in this style of squat and it’s critical to push the knees way out and squat ‘between the knees’ (as Dan John puts it so simply).   A slightly narrower stance is also usually used (as this tends to have more carryover to pulling and the jerk in Olympic lifting). 

Olympic lifters use this as a general leg strengthener as well as to strengthen the muscles used in the Olympic lifts.  Generally, lifters using this type of squat aim for maximum depth (often called ass to grass or ATG) although bodybuilders often use a high-bar style but stay above parallel.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The second type of squat is what I call the generic power squat.   In this style of squat, the bar is held a bit lower on the back (but typically not as low as some powerlifters would do it) and the lifter sits more back although there is also a down component.  Generally, there will be more even involvement of the lower body and the low back tends to work harder since the torso will tend to be tipped further forward.  Depth is typically just below parallel and a wider stance is often used; this can be perfectly appropriate for raw powerlifting competition and the following video shows a fairly generic ‘power’ squat.

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Finally is the geared powerlifting squat.  Frankly, technique here can vary massively depending on the type of gear allowed, whether or not a monolift is being used and how strict the federation is about depth.  You will see anything from a squat that looks almost like a high-bar squat (in IPF competition) to insanely wide stance squats.  The focus is generally more on squatting back than down but, again, there is huge variance here. Unless you’re planning on competing in a geared powerlifting federation, this probably isn’t relevant to you.  You can go Youtube videos and you’ll see all kinds of different techniques, again depending on the gear and federation and what’s being passed as a ‘squat.

And of course, there are endless other details to squatting which is what I suspect you are actually asking.  Debates over head position, how much torso lean, whether you break at the knees or hips first have been going on for years and aren’t going to end soon.  All techniques have their pros and cons and there are always trade-offs in techniques and you will see top competitors doing all kinds of different stuff along with differences in ‘style’ between two people doing the same ‘type’ of squat.  I doubt this really answers your question but short of writing a lot more, that’s the best answer I can give you.

So which is the ‘right’ way to squat?  That’s a question with no answer.  For most, either the high-bar style of squatting or generic power squat is going to be the better choice than the geared power squat (unless they are planning to compete in a geared federation).   

To really do a high-bar squat right usually requires Olympic shoes (especially if the goal is to hit depth without getting up on the toes); if a lifter doesn’t have those I’d tend to teach the generic power squat with the lifter sitting both back and down and aiming to hit parallel if they can do it without tucking their butt.

Which brings me to your second question, about the ‘butt-wink’. This is a term invented by, I believe, Mark Rippetoe, to describe the phenomenon whereby the butt tucks under (and the low back rounds) during a squat.  This video shows a pretty exaggerated version of tucking the butt under.

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Frankly, this can be related to a lot of different things often various aspects of flexibility or mobility in the lower body.  Tight hamstrings are often a culprit, tight glutes can be a problem too.  Often a lack of ankle mobility sort of ‘moves’ up the chain and causes problems higher up.  Sometimes it’s just an issue of the lifter not consciously trying to keep the back arched. 

I will note that with ATG squats, some amount of butt tucking is almost invariable. What I personally look for is what’s going on at the low back.  If the butt only tucks to the point that the back is flat, it doesn’t concern me; if the back actually rounds (as it does in the above video) then that has the potential to put a lot of stress on the spine due the combination of flexion and compression.

How you go about fixing it depends on the problem and I usually use a combination of static stretching, what’s usually called the squat stretch and focusing on keeping a hard arch.  The squat stretch probably has the most potential to do benefit here, since it’s about as specific as it gets. 

To do it, load up a bar with maybe 50% of your best squat.  Now holding a hard arch in the low back lower yourself to the point in the squat just above where your back would normally start to round.  Now trying to hold that arch (you may need a helper to let you know), let the weight push you down a little bit deeper; this is stretching all of the tissues that might be limiting in as specific a way as possible and over time you should be able to lower your depth without tucking.

If you want to get more information about squatting than you ever hoped for, I’d refer you to Boris Bachmann’s Squat RX blog and video series.  Excellent stuff and he’s got an entire video on correcting low back tuck somewhere on the blog.

Answer: There are actually two different issues that you’re bringing up here which are the general fatigue and the soreness and I want to address them separately.

First, the easier of the two which is soreness.  Simply, this doesn’t matter.  Soreness appears to mainly be an issue of connective tissue damage more than anything muscularly (despite still being called Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS) and there is no problem training through it.  Most find that by the time they finish their warm-ups (see Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room Part 2 for detailed information on this), the majority of the soreness is gone and even more find that as they get used to a higher training frequency soreness becomes much less anyhow.  They also usually start growing better.

The general fatigue issue is something else.  Mind you, without knowing more about your weekly setup, it’s a little hard to address this totally.   Because while it could be related to the previous workout it could also be related to lifestyle factors like sleep (or a lack thereof), nutrition, overall life stress, etc.  Making sure that those are in order often fixes any problems. 

As well, realize that many people find that they have some of their best workouts when they walk into the gym feeling a bit under.   They’ll be yawning and a bit apathetic and then just proceed to blow it out or have banner and PR days.  I suspect this is just an issue of not wasting a lot of mental energy ahead of time and relaxing during the workout and letting it happen instead of trying to force it.

But that’s far from universal.  My usual recommendation for folks when they get to the gym or training not feeling really up for it is to at least go through their warm-ups.  Often by the end of it they feel great and have a good workout.  If it’s still not happening, I’d either recommend calling it a day and going home or just going through a short active recovery workout (read Active Versus Passive Recovery for more), keeping volume and intensity dialed way back.  Ideally you should leave the gym feeling better than you walked in.  If not, you went too hard.

I’d mention that often the problem is related to the previous workout simply being overwhelmingly intense.  Many people who start to increase their training frequency don’t dial it back in their workouts and get themselves into trouble.  You may find that reducing the workload even slightly (not taking any sets to failure, reducing  volume a bit) at the previous workout (i.e. the Monday workout before a Friday workout) prevents the soreness and fatigue issues.

Finally, I’d mention that people who are using considerable poundages (i.e. who are very strong) often can’t pull off the higher training frequencies without adjusting their total work load majorly.  A heavy/light system (where only one workout is truly heavy and the second workout for that exercise or muscle group is much lighter) often allows the same higher training frequency while improving recovery.  Again, that’s usually for more advanced trainees who are handling very heavy weights and for whom two truly heavy workouts per week are simply too much.

Answer: With early morning training (and here I’m talking here about resistance training specifically) there are a few issues that need to be taken into account.  One of them is food intake and here there is a lot of variance.  Blood glucose is usually on the lower side in the morning and not everyone performs at their best under these conditions. 

In this situation, getting something (ideally with some carbohydrate and protein) before lifting is a good idea (I’d mention here that the studies which found that pre-workout carbs/protein were more anabolic were looking at morning fasted training so this is one place where getting something into the system is probably ideal from a training adaptation standpoint).  This isn’t universal and some people do just fine without eating.

But let’s say you’re one of those people who needs to have something in them to lift at their best.  Now we have another issue, some people don’t do well with food in their stomach during high-intensity activities.  At the same time, others can eat a big meal and go train and have no issues.  Some of this depends on the type of training as well: folks doing low repetition work with longer rest intervals don’t tend to have the same issues as those doing more ‘metabolic’ type work (with higher repetitions and shorter rest intervals).

Mind you, you don’t need a lot of food to get blood sugar into the normal range and I wouldn’t recommend a huge meal prior to training regardless.  A small amount of protein with some carbs is all that’s needed.  But what if you can’t handle any solid foods prior to a workout?  Then what.  In this case, liquids can be invaluable.  A simple glass of low- or non-fat milk or even a premade carb/protein drink will get carbs and amino acids into the system without sitting in your stomach during an intense workout.

So that’s issue one.  Another has to do with the training itself.  Research back in the day suggested that most people show optimal performance about 3 hours after they wake-up, it simply takes some time for the body to warm-up after you’ve been asleep.  And for folks who train first thing in the morning, this can be a real issue because odds are you’re not getting up at 4am for a 7am lifting session.  How to get the body warm?

A hot shower is one approach although it’s more of a passive warm-up.  Mainly realize that you may need to do a bit more extensive warm-up for early morning training than you did while training in the afternoon/evening (when you’d been up all day).  That may mean a bit more cardio to get the body fully warmed and you may need more warm-up sets prior to heavy lifting (read Warming Up for the Weight Room: Part 1 and Warming Up for the Weight Room: Part 2 for more details on optimizing your warm-up).  Of course, stimulants are usually part and parcel of early morning training as well.

Finally realize that there is likely to be an adaptation phase as your body gets used to training first thing in the morning.  You may have 2-3 weeks where your workouts just aren’t that great until you adjust.  But the body does eventually adjust (and there are plenty of folks who have gotten to their goals despite very early morning training).  The body’s circadian rhythms to adjust to training (and there is evidence that you perform best when you habitually train) but it can take a little while.  You may have to reduce your volume or intensity a bit initially but within a few weeks you should be back to your normal workouts without any issues.

Hope that helps and good luck.

The Season Overview

First and foremost, comparing to 2011 to 2010, if nothing else good happened the fact that I didn’t find myself cratered into a near life ending depresssion can only be seen as a good thing,  Frankly, compared to last year, anything would have been an improvement. 

Beyond that, I came into this season with the plan to move up both in distance (from the half to the full marathon) along with level (from the open to the elite).  My preparation was a bit truncated, by maybe a month coming out of the mess that was 2010 but I can’t honestly say that was the big issue.

Somehow the season managed to start disastrously with the Ronde Von Manda (where I got dropped right away and spent 2 hours riding through the cold, gray countryside) and end almost identically in Duluth (where I got dropped right away and spent 90 minutes skating through the cold, gray countryside).   I am obsessed with cycles but this is why: my life seems to run on them.

In between those two things, it was a little more variable.  I was happy with my performance at the Texas Road Rash although it identified some differences in the racing I had moved to; even though I didn’t do the final race, breaking a decade+ old issue of mine (cracking 20 minutes) against the 10k in Chicago was a high point.

I even got involved in bike racing, something I had managed to avoid for the near decade I had ridden and that not only provided another outlet for my mediocre ability and competition drive but I got some good experience, got some good training, avoided the crashes and started to get more comfortable in the pack.

So let’s get more specific

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Overall Training Response

Mind you, I did have one close call with the spectre of overtraining and depression during this overall season.  It came in something like week 13 of my first block of training and pointed out something important for me: I’m good for about 12 weeks of continuous (and progressive) training before I need to take some recovery.  This simply points to my needing to structure my training exactly along those lines, 3 months of training followed by at least 1 week (and possibly 2) of easy recovery.

I also realized that training a maximum of 5 days/week but with most of them double sessions works for me in a way that trying to train 6 days/week (even if some of them aren’t doubled) does not.  Cutting out that one extra day (and making at least one day per week piss easy, talking 125 HR on the rollers or whatever) made a huge difference in terms of staying mentally and physically fresh.

But that’s basic training, what did my racing tell me?

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Bike Racing Analysis

I don’t have a ton to say about this at this point.  Getting into bike racing this year was sort of a reflection of the lack of inline races.  There are a total of about 10 in the country and all but one require travelling which is hard to justify on a lot of levels, not the least of which given my dog anxiety and not liking to be away from home for extended periods. 

The existence of a big local cycling community (and weekly racing at the Driveway series) is a big help.  Not only does it let me get competition experience but there is no better training stimulus than competition, it forces you to a level that you just can’t reach on your own.  That cycling dynamics are fairly similar to skating dynamics (big pack of guys, drafting, tactics) helps as well, it gives me a way to cover a bunch of needed factors (physiological and psychological) conveniently.  I can literally race weekly from about early April to Mid-October if I want.

Certainly the Ronde Von Manda was a big shock to my system, I wasn’t prepared for the distance or the dynamics of the race, especially when everyone went off like a bat out of hell off the start (I’m told this is common to shake off stragglers; it sure threw me off) and I even ran into that issue during the Driveway series and I will be far more prepared next year.

The shortness of the Driveway, 25 minutes means pretty high speeds and not a lot of pacing although there are quite a few speed changes going on.  Even moving up to the 3/4 next year (said race being 50 minutes) will mean similar dynamics.  But that’s not a bad thing since the duration is closer to my skate races and the dynamics will be the same as well.  But even there a lot of speed changes, surges and slowdowns, etc.  And while finishing the race was never an issue it was clear that my overall approach to preparation did leave me unprepared for some of it.

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Skating Overall Analysis

In hindsight, moving up both in distance and category in the inline races was probably a mistake.  But given my performance in 2010 I had no real indication that it would be.  The first observation I’d make is that the marathon is longer than the half marathon.  Someone should check my math but I think it’s about twice as long.

Of less idiotic relevance is that the duration of the races (jumping from 40 minutes or so for the half) to an hour twenty completely changes the nature of the races as I learned.  A 40 minute event can be done all out because you’re done before you’re cooked. The race dynamics changed significantly moving up the full marathon as there is more pacing, speed changes (especially surges) going on.  And that was something that my mostly steady state training just hadn’t prepared me for, just as on the bike.  I went into the marathon expecting it to be just a longer version of the half-marathon but it was not.

Add to that a big jump in speeds from the half marathon (which is not really raced by the top guys) to the full marathon.  Even in the slower divisions, the speeds are faster and everybody’s game is raised (average speeds jumped from about 20mph to 21-22mph or higher).  Not to mention that the true elites are in the marathon division and some of those guys are just blazingly fast. 

This isn’t helped by the smallness of the sport; in something like cycling, folks tend to move up by Categories (there are 5 categories before you even get to National level) so the speeds tend to increase more gradually.  In skating, it’s pretty much either age group or the open (though Northshore did have the wave thing going on).  So the speeds just take a big jump and I found myself without a pack to skate with.

That was on top of having a general lack of pack skills since I appear to be about the only outdoor inline skater in the city and I do all of my training alone.  And while indoor is always a possibility, that raised other issues that I didn’t want to deal with. 

Recognizing this early on, that prompted me (along with other factors) to go ahead and get into the local cycling scene.   Skating and cycling have always had a lot of crossover, the mechanics and physiology are the same and I’ve used cycling as a form of conditioning for years now.   Give the large Austin cycling community, it just made sense to get into bike racing.

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So What Does This All Tell Me?

Along with other indications (such as my overall power profile on the bike during indoor training), it was clear that this year was marked by good overall endurance and a lack of a top end.   I even did some OCD level race analysis after Chicago, I’ll spare you the numbers but basically, as the race distances went UP (as did speeds) so did my performance and placing went down.  And vice versa: as the distance goes up so does my performance.

Given my inherent physiology, the type of training I tend to be drawn towards, the type of training I tend to default to (and have done for the majority of the two years coming out of the SLC ice experience), this all makes sense.  If I’m built to be anything, it’s to be an aerobic animal and anaerobic type stuff has never been my strong point.  Mind you, not working on it for so long didn’t help.

But that was all part of the learning that came out of this year.  So how do I fix it.

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Looking to 2012 and Beyond

Going forwards, my overall plan, which I have only generally mapped out is to:

1. Continue working on building the aerobic engine.  This is always a priority for this type of racing and will always make up a majority of my training no matter what I’m doing.  Since I’m still targeting races towards the shorter end of things, having the sheer endurance to go hours is less relevant than raising my functional threshold power.

2. Put a lot more concentrated effort into building my top end.  This includes short neuromuscular efforts, longer anaerobic stuff and VO2 max efforts.  It’s all relevant for the type of racing that I’m doing and can only help to pull up my aerobic capacities as well.

3. Move to a more mult-tiered approach to training.  That is, rather than long blocks of pure aerobic work followed by the anaerobic stuff, I’m going to keep a small amount of top end work in pretty much throughout the general prep period.  This is simply a reflection of the years of aerobic work I’ve put in (meaning less ability to improve it by much) on top of the greater general difficulty in improving anaerobic capacities.

Mind you the above has two factors: general physiological development along with specific improvements on skates (where the technical aspects of going fast are just as important as the purely physiological).  The combination of starts and varying distance sprint work on my skates coupled with high intensity conditioning on the bike seemed to be a winning combination this past season once I implemented it.  I’m basing that on the increasing top speeds I was seeing on my skates.

Honestly the only thing I haven’t really resolved is how to optimally balance both skating and cycling.  Certainly there is overalap between the two.  Skaters have always used cycling to build physiological capacities and ice speedskaters often switched to cycling after their ice career ended and did quite well (Eric Heiden was part of the 7-11 Team I mentioned briefly towards the end of the Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting series).

But most don’t try to race both at the same time and figuring out how to prepare for both types of racing along with develop anything (without trying to do everything at once) still hasn’t made itself clear to me.  I may end up doing something akin to what I did this past year, alternating blocks of focus.  That seems the best approach.  Time will tell.

And that brings the 2011 skating season to an end. I’ve spent the entire week following the Northshore disaster not training and eating too much, already I’m getting that inactivity soreness setting in and I may spin on the rollers today.  I’ll have an easy break-in week next week (and hope to ride the Velo in houston) before moving back into normal training and aiming towards the 2012 Road Rash in April.  I’m sure I’ll be prattling about this stuff soon enough.

Following Chicago

Even without having raced the marathon on day 2 of the Tour of Chicago, I was still pretty wrecked.  The 10k and time trial along with the travel had taken it out of me and I took a solid 3 days of doing nothing to recover before sort of jacking around for the rest of the week, just getting back on the bike and on my skates.  I did do the Driveway that Thursday expecting to be fresh for a change but I was just flat and stiff.

At the time I had been focused on entering at least part (if not all) of the 4 day Tour of Austin bicycle race.  It was local, it looked like fun (at least two of the days were at the Driveway where I had been racing) although the two actual crits did scare me since I haven’t done one of those (with true 90 degree crit corners).  With that on the schedule, I had 4 weeks to prepare and I was sort of thinking about how best to do it (especially to handle the multiple days of racing).

 There was still a potential inline race on the schedule, the Northshore Inline Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.  As it turned out my friend Eva Rodansky from SLC was going to be skating it and that gave me some impetus to do it.  But frankly, I didn’t want to travel again and really had the bike race in the back of my mind. However, as my mentor, who I sometimes wish I didn’t keep around (because he keeps me honest) pointed out if my goal is skating then it makes little sense to put my focus on cycling (even if it’s local and hence ‘more convenient’) pointing out that I had only done one full distance race this season and that it would be better to do the inline marathon. 

I wasn’t happy with it but ultimately he was right.  It also gave me 6 weeks to prepare although it would mean not doing any of the Tour of Austin .  I’d simply do the Driveway series a few more times to finish up my introduction to bike race and then skate and then take my transition period.

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Setting Up the Program

Given my experience in Chicago, it was still clear that while my endurance was good my top speed and acceleration and pack skills were lacking.  And while 6 weeks wasn’t a tremendous amount of time, I saw no reason to at least keep working on my weak points, really looking at 2012.  Effectively I just set up a truncated version of my previous 12 week cycle (split into 6 weeks sprint focus and 6 weeks endurance focus) and did it in 6 weeks split into two three week blocks.

 The first block was just a repeat of my previous sprint block with two sprints days (with starts and acceleration/top speed work) and a couple of slideboard days along with the bike.  I was also doing the Driveway series on Thursday, trying to get more experience and get out of the Cat 5′s.   Originally I planned to go to indoor inline as well to get some pack experience; I went exactly once, caught shit for leaving after warm-ups and just didn’t need the hassle.   I did feel a lot better in the pack that day though and that was enough.  In my skating workouts, I would note that I hit a new top speed PR, 26.8 mph on my 100mm wheels, beating my previous 26.6 PR on my 110′s.  That was promising and told me that at least something about my training was working.

And that was translating to the bike racing anyhow, I kept forcing myself to move up, get into the mix, etc. every time at the Driveway.  And I was starting to get more comfortable in the pack.  I still wasn’t trying to achieve more than just finishing (and not getting tied up in crashes), it didn’t help that the bike race came on my last of a three day block; it was my 5th workout in a row.  So I didn’t have much to give by that night. 

After that block ended, I switched to a 3 week endurance block though I did some different things.  If I’m honest, the Northshore race was sort of an afterthought race as it was; I figured I’d try something different and assumed that the worst I’d do was the same as the previous races.  This was facilitated by my involvement in a cycling study at UT Austin that I got recruited for.

It didn’t really fit my training but I got a free VO2 max test and was getting paid to do essentially the same training I’d have been doing anyway.  But it meant that I could only fit in one long inline skate per week, for a total of three (I was doing all of 20 minutes warm-up before sprints) before the race. The rest of my work was on the slideboard, two sessions of 12X5′/20″ rest or an hour of down time.

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Tapering for the Northshore

I started my taper 10 days out for the Northshore as always, skipping the Driveway that week (there had been a huge crash the week before and I’d already gotten my 10 Cat 5 races so I dodn’t care) and reducing volume.  My last long skate was Saturday, I had the UT bike ride (a hour all-out time trial) on Monday and then cut volume as I went. 

I managed to get an ankle blister the Saturday before the race which was annoying and then I ran into other problems.  I had ruined my good bearings on wet pavement and simply could NOT get a set to spin right.  I serviced three sets of bearings and whereas I could generally get 45 seconds of spin time previously I was getting 10-20 seconds now if I was lucky.  And I couldn’t figure out the problem.

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The Disaster in Duluth

I had one of my typical blitzkreig trips planned, I flew out of Austin Friday morning to Minneapolis, drove up to Duluth to get my hotel with the goal of racing first thing in the morning before driving straight back to the airport for my flight back Saturday afternoon.  I had no intention of staying a second night in Duluth and, even though I have friends to do dog duty, I don’t like to be gone too long.

Shockingly, my travel went perfectly, both flights were on time and outside of some headache with road construction and traffic on a Friday, I got to Duluth fairly early.  I got my race packet, hung out a bit with Eva and that was pretty much the last thing that went right.   I got lost looking for a grocery store, I still couldn’t figure out my bearing issue and I just gave up and went to sleep.

For a 4:30am wake-up call. The race course was point to point, down beside the lake and that meant that we had to go to the finish line and get bussed up to the start line.  I do thank god that I thought to check the weather, because it was COLD up there, 40 degrees or lower and I did pack sweats.  But it wasn’t nearly enough.

We’d sit at the start line picking our butts for about 1.5 hours with everybody freezing their asses off.  I waited a bit too late to get into my skates (because I didn’t want to get cold) and out of my sweats and that truncated my warm-up.  And it hadn’t even occurred to me to pack the tights I have that I can wear under my skinsuit.  I don’t currently own armwarmers; it’s been 90+ every day in Austin, why would this occur to me?

And I never really warmed up during the race.  But that was the least of my worries.  Assuming that the race would go off like my previous races, I had signed up for the elite open, there were also A and B waves (and then masters) starting behind us.  This was a different structure from other races but the only cutoff for elite was finishing a marathon in 1:30 or less. 

I’d done the 28 mile Road Rash in 1:24 and I figured for 1:20 at the marathon distance (i.e. 3 minutes/mile, subtract two miles means a 1:18 marathon).  I also figured that the pro pack would splinter into faster and slower packs like previous races.  And boy was I wrong because at this race the slower packs were in the A and B waves.

Off the start the entire pack went off like a bat out of hell, dropping about 4 of us literally within the first mile which was also uphill.  This was not good.  I worked with one small group for a while, one guy lost his front wheel at mile 3 (he’d skate without it for the rest of the race) and from mile 3 to about, oh, mile 14 I was doing an individual time trial.

And it was going badly.  My bearings were completely wrecking me, I had also thought that the course would be smoother than it was and the wheels I had chosen to run were too hard for the majority of the pavement.   One consequence of this was that I just got my teeth rattled out for most of the race, causing my low back to lock up early (I rarely have problems even with hour-long skates on smooth pavement).

But the combination of the two was completely screwing my technique.  Skating is one of those sports (like swimming and Olympic lifting) where one problem causes a host of others.  But whereas a swimmer can change his technique on the fly and an Ol’er can try to fix the deviation on the next set, my issue was equipment and course based.  And I was screwed. 

I was thrown up on my toes (I could feel the pressure and both of my big toes were bruised after the race) which meant I couldn’t push off my heel and carve properly which meant that my toe was turned out at the end of my push which meant that I couldn’t get an outside edge which meant that I lost a lot of my hip drop.  I also had to sit up and higher to try to get my weight back which meant more aerodynamic resistance.  It was one big disaster and I wasn’t even hitting speeds I’d hit in training easily even putting everything I could into my skates.

At one point I had to pull over as the road conditions were rattling my wheel bolts out, thankfully I had packed an allen wrench.  My hands were so cold I could barely work the wrench, my hands just wouldn’t work. I hit the halfway mark in a time and at average speeds slower than I cruise in training and never have I been so close to just abandoning a race as I was just then.  But I didn’t even see sag or support to get me back to the finish.  So I just kept skating.

The only thing that kept me going was knowing that somewhere behind me were the later packs who were going to catch me that I’d be able to get into to get some rest and draft.  At about mile 14 or 15, the first pack came past me and I couldn’t begin to stay with them.  The second pack blew past me too.  The third pack finally caught me and they were dicking around enough that I was able to finally sit in.  I had given up on racing by this time, I just wanted to finish at this point.

So I sat in for the next 9 miles, finally we got to some smooth pavement where my skates ran at least a little bit better.  Then it would rough up again and I’d run into problems.  I’d just sit in for the next 11 miles or so, at mile 25 we got into this weird grooved pavement and my skates became a problem again.  The pack took off for the finish and I couldn’t be bothered.  I just skated it out.  It wasn’t as if it mattered.

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Post-Race

At the finish line I was still cold, I had never really warmed up and even after 90 minutes of hell my heart rate monitor wasn’t even wet with sweat.  I was shaking from fatigue, had a headache, I was already getting sore muscles (the change in technique had thrown stress to all kinds of new places) and my low back was just destroyed.   My hands were still numb.

I wanted to just collapse out of exhaustion but now I had to go back to the hotel, clean up and drive back to Minneapolis for my flight back.   Thankfully, again, the flights were on time and I got back home at 10:30.  I badly needed dog lovin’ after that and I slept the sleep of a dead man.    As I type this on a Sunday, my low back is still nuked and I can only hope I’m semi-recovered in time to give something approximating my best in the lab tomorrow.

But the race was simply a disaster from start to finish.  If I’m honest, I went into it with a bit of the wrong mentality, I was underprepared physically and mentally but even there I didn’t expect it to go that badly.  On my worst day I should be able to skate a 1:20 marathon and clearly the course was plenty fast as evidence by the speeds of the pro pack.  

Mind you, even with gear that was working, I wouldn’t have stayed with the main pack on my best day (they’d finish in a blazing 1:12 with a European pro apparently taking a flyer at mile 8 to finish by himself in 1:07).   I haven’t looked up finish times for the A or B wave but with gear that worked and starting with them, that’s the group I should have been in (again, I didn’t realize that the split packs I had experience at other races were dealt with here by the waves).

But I am not one to sit around and mope and make no mistake, I’m not trying to blame anybody but myself for the race.  I went in unprepared in a lot of ways and I paid a hard price.  And rather than sit around and complain about my results, I’d rather learn from the experience and fix the problems going forwards; that way I can just make new mistakes next year.  And that’s what I’ll talk about on Friday when I do an overall 2011 season wrap-up to look at what this year taught me about love, life and racing and what I’m going to do going forwards.

But in that way, OL’ing is not terribly different than a lot of marginalized sports in this country that exist under literally identical conditions of few athletes, no access, etc.  And yet in some we succeed brilliantly; in others we medal sporadically (even one of our rowers won in Beijing and that sport is as niche as it gets).  Clearly if all the problems with OL’ing were related to the issues of the last two days it would cut universally across all niche sports and it does not.  There must be other factors at play and that’s the topic of today.

Because irrespective of all of the factors that exist to keep OL’ing no more than a niche sport in this country, there has always been a small group of elite lifters in this country, who despite the title of this series, have performed to varying degrees at the highest level, placing Top 10 (with a couple of guys coming close to cracking the medal stand, Barnett’s 4th in 1996 being the closest but I’ll come back to that below). 

These are the folks already in the sport so the discussion of the past 2 days doesn’t apply to them; they are the ones who have devoted their lives to the sport and reached at least a high enough level to make the big show to see what, if anything might be holding them back.

Is It Simply a Lack of Talent?

Perhaps the simplest answer to the problem with the elites that America has is that they simply may not have the talent to reach the highest level.  This is actually the place I am really in no place to comment.  Certainly, other big sports in this country do tend to draw top strength/power athletes for reasons I discussed at length and this is certainly part of it.

Even the niche sports that we have succeeded in such as cycling, swimming and speed skating aren’t sports where the folks going into those sports would have chosen much else.  It’s at least worth noting that all three have more of an endurance bent (where to a degree you can overcome genetics with sheer grinding volumes of work) and this does separate them from OL’ing with it’s specific set of physiological and technical requirements.  But, overall, the presence of the big three and track and field doesn’t seem to have explicitly kept other sports from at least occasionally reaching the medal stand and it’s a bit hard to see where US OL’ing would be held back specifically by this.

The same non-team sport middle-class types who seem to get involved in things like cycling, swimming and speed skating seem to have been the major players in OL’ing in this country and, again, it’s hard to see that they would explicitly lack the potential talent to succeed.  Though this may simply be an issue of numbers; as I’ve mentioned at the highest levels of sport you need a lot of factors, physiological, etc. to come together and the handful of folks entering the sport may simply be insufficient.

This is specially true given the amazing numbers that are being produced by other countries; it’s not even an issue of a single country producing all the top lifters; there are a solid half-dozen or more countries producing top lifters.  Just as it was in European cycling, the few Americans are competing with a depth that is hard to overcome no matter what. America has never done the testing, selection, etc. that other countries did, nor did we have the sheer number of people to throw at the sport.  So this is possible but hard to prove either way and, once again, I’m in no real position to comment here.

Let’s assume for the time being that this isn’t the issue and see what else might be going on with America’s elite lifters, mainly here I’ll focus on factors that others have commented on or suggested ‘fixes’ to to solve the problem.

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Out Lifters Simply Don’t Work Hard Enough

This was the first suggestion made by Hoffman when the US started slipping  in the 60′s, that the Europeans simply worked harder than American lifters.  At least similar ideas have been trotted out more recently but I’m not sure I buy it.  Certainly in the 60′s it’s arguable that American lifters might have been coasting a bit because they were so dominant; I think it’s more likely that they were just putting their effort into the wrong things.  They were focusing on maximum strength and such when the Europeans were staring to focus on constant technique practice and speed strength.   But I doubt they were doing anything but working their brains out.

And I’d make the same argument now for this simple reason: no athlete who reaches the International level, even if they never reach the truly highest level and medal, gets there by being lazy.  I discussed this in detail in the Talent vs. Work Series and I’d refer readers there.  But all athletes at that level are intensely driven to succeed and will pour blood, sweat and tears into their sport.  I just don’t buy that American lifters are inherently less driven to succeed anymore than I buy that white sprinters in high school aren’t driven; they work just as hard, they simply can’t compete with the West African blacks.

Our Lifters Have Lost Belief in Their Ability to Win

Another argument is one of motivation, this is something that Tommy Kono has gone on about for years and discusses in detail in both of his books.  His argument is that as Americans started to slip in the standings that their belief in their ability to succeed started to slip. 

Along with this appears to have come somewhat of a ‘culture of mediocrity’ in the sport where Americans simply settled for what they were capable of producing without hoping or aiming for more.  Certainly belief is huge in sport (as I discussed when I talked about Kenyan distance runners) and this could be contributing.   Because while believing you win won’t guarantee it, believing you’re going to lose pretty much does.

When being American National Champion puts you at the bottom of the leader board internationally, it’s hard to get past that.  And there does appear to have been some toing and froing with qualification standards in National Championships that may be related to this. 

But OL’ing is a sport that is pretty damn objective, you can lift what you can lift which is what you can lift.   It’s not a sport where you can suddenly make some monstrous improvement on the platform when you haven’t been doing it in the gym (nor is it a sport like running or cycling where tactics and other random factors can take someone to the front where you might not have expected it).  OL’ing is a pretty pure sport in this regard.

And simply, if you’re only capable of 180kg and the top 3 in your class open with 190kg, it’s not as if belief comes into it. Life still isn’t a Rocky movie and the objective nature of the sport makes reality reality.  And given the driven nature of athletes in all sports, I still have trouble accepting that Ol’er would just be giving up because of a lack of previous results.  That’s not consistent with the psychological profile of athletes, certainly not those who pursue something like OL’ing in the first place.

Our lifters are capable of what they are capable of and that’s what they are capable of.  Most athletes believe that they can succeed if they work hard enough and while it certainly can’t help confidence to know that your best day still puts you behind everybody else, I’m not convinced this is as big a deal as some make it.  I could be wrong.  Of course, all of that is predicated on being allowed or willing to push the limits and here there may be a real problem with the culture of weightlifting in this country.

They Don’t Push the Envelope

I do think it’s worth mentioning that there does seem to be a long-standing, how do I put this, hesitancy to really push the envelope in Olympic lifting among Americans although it’s hard to tell if this is a coaching issue or an athlete issue.  Charniga discusses this in Part 6 of his farticle series how lifters even during our heydey wouldn’t take their final attempt and go for a world record, presumably ‘saving’ it for another day.  Why is less clear, whether it was out of fear of injury or simply not seeing the need when they were so far ahead, I just don’t know. 

Charniga contrasts this to athletes from other countries routinely starting with weights far in excess of what they need to win.  And who routinely take all of their attempts to just set record after record (note that not everyone did this, Alexeev was famous for only beating his own world record by small amounts; but realize that he got paid every time he set a new world record.  He was just being crafty by allowing himself to break it over and over again).

It’s worth mentioning that in some training systems, notably the Bulgarian based ones, lifters are routinely training with or above their world records on a daily basis.  I’ll come back to training in a second but there is no doubt that many countries just push and push and push even in training and it’s possible that this is pushing them to higher levels (along with regular competition because NOTHING brings an athlete to a higher level than competition; you just can’t generate the same intensity under any other conditions).  Of course, injuries and destroyed lifters also come out of that system but that’s the price some are willing to pay to win.

Perhaps that’s a problem, America, for whatever reason isn’t willing to push it’s lifters to the point of near destruction with the kind of training needed to succeed at the highest levels; although what we do to other athletes (think football) would argue against that on a cultural level. 

I think it’s more likely that we just don’t have the numbers to take that kind of approach in the sport and have anybody left when the smoke clears.  It’s ok to destroy people when you have thousands to throw away; not so much when you have a couple of hundred and can’t lose any.  If there is any conservatism in how Americans approach the sport, it may simply come out of not having the lifters to sacrifice to the beast that is elite level OL training.

And certainly there does still seem to be an element of this hesitancy in  OL’ing.  I recall during Beijing, this may have been on a blog of one of the female lifters how she was basically forbidden by her coach to take anything but fairly conservative attempts that he knew she could make.  And on every level this makes no sense whatsoever.  

Now, I’m all for being somewhat conservative in training, hurting yourself doing something heroic there is kind of stupid.  But at the highest level of the sport, in a situation where a lifter is going to come in 15th place anyhow, what logic is there in not allowing them to go for it all on the Olympic stage with nothing to lose?  That I don’t get and simply can’t understand. 

I think I heard that the coach felt it was important for Americans to demonstrate our consistency by having the lifters make all their attempts.  Maybe when you’re in a situation with no chance of winning, consistency is the best you can shoot for.  Again, I don’t know although I wish I could know what the coach was thinking when he handed down such a stupid ass decree.

But this all sort of leads me to the next topic because while the above is certainly possibly part of the case, I still don’t think it’s all of it (and mind you, fixing it would still require getting the US to where it could perform so it’s a huge catch-22 situation.  If US lifters are being held back by their belief that they can’t do well, then they won’t ever do well enough to break that belief). But the final paragraph does point to a potential issue having to to do with coaching and training of our top lifters.

Because if the talent is presumably there, and there’s not some weird psychological block holding our lifters back, that doesn’t leave much as the target of the problems with our top lifters or why they aren’t getting where they need to be.  The first thing I want to talk about is the training/coaching issue although this gets embroiled with another important issue which I’ll talk about first.

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Support

Support for athletes encompasses a lot of different factors ranging from financial, housing, coaching, therapy, etc. And while it’s true that the majority of Olympic lifters train without much in the way of support, the fact is also that not all of them do. Because once athletes reach the top level of the smallest niche sports, they are often given the opportunity to go to the Olympic Training Center and enter the resident athlete program.

Said program provides support, housing, food (amusing story: the last time I visited the OTC there was a video asking resident athletes what the best part was and they all said “Having food cooked for me.”), training and coaching, sports science, etc. 

Mind you, athletes have to reach a certain level (usually unsupported during the entire time) to get into the resident program but it does exist. Certainly it’s nothing like the ‘professional athlete’ status that most Eastern Europeans train under but it’s better than nothing.  Once athletes have proven themselves as being worthy, they can get support to hopefully reach the next level.

And over the history of its existence, it’s basically failed to produce much, certainly we’ve had some decent finishes at the Olympic level (I haven’t really taken the time to delve into World Championship results) but no medals as I described.  For an affluent country with some of the best supposed ‘sports science’ and resources, it sure doesn’t seem to stack up against what small, broke-ass countries are doing with some basic equipment and well trained coaches.   This is a place where we’ve got all the tech, but everyone else has the results.

Now, there is no doubt that the OTC program has changed significantly over the years.  New coaches are brought in to try and generate results and much of what I’m going to write probably reflects more of the early goings on (much of what I’m going to write comes from Dreschler’s book published in 1998 and doesn’t reflect what is currently going on).   I’ve also heard stories coming out of the OTC from various sources, little of which has been positive and much of which gives me some pause.

Because at least for most of it’s history,  what happens at the OTC seems to cause more problems for its lifters than it solves (and the overall lack of results points to this) and this probably stems from a few different issues.  One of them is the decentralized nature of this country and the fact that every coach has his own way of doing things (in countries with more centralized coaching systems, everyone is coming from the same philosophical and/or coaching background). 

The nature of the OTC is that an athlete who may have been developed by a singular person (their personal coach) for the 5-10 years it took them to reach that level is now handed off to the National coach, a guy who has never worked with the athlete, who doesn’t know who they are, how they respond to training or anything about them. 

And, sadly, a lot of coaches have a fairly cookie cutter approach to training, giving it to all the athletes and then assuming that the athlete is the weak link if they don’t respond (this happened ALL the time in speed skating).  So the athlete may be thrown into a style or type of training that they have never been exposed to by a coach who doesn’t have the time nor interest to individaulize it and they get injured or what have you.  It’s not universal but it certainly happens.

This is compounded with a general fascination of Americans (including athletes and the federations) in certain sports with foreign coaches.  US Speedskating was notorious for hiring Dutch coaches for the National team (because the Dutch clearly have skating ‘secrets’) over Americans and USA WL’ing seems to have fallen prey to this to at least some degree.  So coaches such as Dragomir Ciroslan (the Ex-Romanian National Coach) are brought in and put in charge of the OTC athletes. 

And often don’t realize that our elites lack the years of systematic build-up or the background to handle what their elites did. Stories of athletes at the OTC having their training volumes and frequencied doubled or tripled almost overnight are common and you hear of athletes who developed training 4-5 times/week with their personal coach being destroyed by an Eastern Bloc coach (or ex-athletes) who simply has no concept of training without ‘support’ (many of the coaches from those countries are aghast to hear that they are expected to prepare top athletes without ‘support’; and yes, Virginia, support here means drugs).

I saw this happen in short-track speed skating when USS hired a Korean coach to take over the national team.  Now the Koreans are hardcore in short-track, they start as kids and subject their kids to the kind of child abuse that only a Communist country can generate.  By the time they are elites, the survivors are handling 6-8 hours of training per day but it took them a decade of selection (leaving destroyed athletes in the wake) to get there.  And the hired coach came in and put the American athletes on the exact same program, without recognizing that they hadn’t gone through the buildup.  It worked in his country, why shouldn’t it work here?   And the athletes were just blown up.

Even when that isn’t the case, American coaches, convinced that there are Eastern European sports secrets latch onto isolated concepts (such as depth jumps which ruined many a career in the 80′s) or training models without understanding them or the context in which they developed (i.e. thousands of athletes put through systematic multi-year training as professional athletes with constant therapy, regeneration and anabolics).  They apply the models uncritically to American athletes without that background and just destroy them.

And failing that, you still find coaches, from the old school who are married to what can only be called ‘outdated’ methods of training; older coaches who haven’t kept up with recent developments who are training folks lke they have been for 10-20 years. 

Because at least one place where a huge focus has been on the lack of success in American OL’ing is on the training and many have lamented the lack of a true American ‘system’ of training in the sense that other countries had one.   Which leads me into a tangent that I wish I could spend more time on but won’t; I’ve provided plenty of resources and this isn’t the place.

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On the Training of Elite Olympic Lifters

In one sense, training for the OL’s is simple, there are two competition movements and the goal is to lift the most one time. Like powerlifting, there are a minimal number of biomotor capacities that need to be developed maximally (I’d refer readers to The Sports, Training and Adaptation Continuums) and, in contrast to many other pure strength/power sports, OL’ing is one of the handful of sports where the weight training is the sport.

Historically, Ol’ing training has divided itself into two major camps, simply reflecting the two countries that were producing for the longest and represent the different ‘general’ philosophies of training.  Certainly every group has developed it’s own ‘flavor’ of training but there really is only so much you can do differently in the sport given the specialized nature of the activity.  And the two main ‘schools’ of training as they are typically delineated and described are the Soviet and Bulgarian methods which I will briefly describe.

Russia vs. Bulgaria: The Brawl to Settle it All
As noted above, these are sort of the two major schools of thought in the sport of OL’ing and I’m only going to look at them in precis to save space.  Note that body have generated champions so drawing conclusions about exclusive ‘bestedness’ is misguided.  Simply they each have their pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks.

The Soviet system coming out of it’s relatively less centralized system and multi-faceted training approached Ol’ing with a great variety of movements including variations on the Olympic lifts themselves (with much of the competition work being saved for later).  The system was based around percentages of maximum and periodization and tended to move from higher volume/lower intensity (which might have meant 6 sets of 3 at 75% not the silly bullshit American interpretation of this with 4 sets of 15 at 75% of max) to lower volume and higher intensity (singles at 90%+) as competition drew nearer. Lots of assistance movements were used to fix weak points and many feel that the Soviet system is applicable to a greater number of lifters because it allows more flexibility in the training.

In contrast Bulgaria under Abadjaev was all specificity all the time. He threw out 99% of the movements Ol’ers had used, using only 6 by the end of his heyday. Periodization was scrapped, he didn’t use percentages (weight adjustments were just flat reductions or increases of 5-20kg below or above maximum) and had his lifters train to a daily maximum (which is NOT the same as attempting your personal maximum daily, a nuance lost on most and which I should write a full article on) and mostly singles (with the occasional double were done).

He pioneered short intense workouts, working on a given lift for 30 minutes before taking a break, the competition lifts (or power versions) were trained in their full version multiple times daily. It’s often felt that this was mainly a way to control his athletes, that the system breaks people down, bores them to tears, injuries are not unheard of when you’re working at max all the time.  Mind you, Abadjaev didn’t care, he was going to win at all costs.

For those more familiar with powerlifting training than OL’ing training, the above basically comes down to Westside (tons of variety, don’t practice the full lifts much, fix weak points with special exercises) versus Metal Militia (specific, heavy work all the time and little else).

Which Is Best?
Which system is better? That debate has been raging for 30 years and both have produced champions. Certainly I think that most top teams have moved closer to a Bulgarian system than not.  Sports have changed since the Soviet heyday and most have moved to more specificity at competition intensity (and for all I know the Soviet system has changed in recent times, most of what’s available in the literature is older stuff from what they were doing in the 80′s).

It’s safer to say that each system has it’s pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks.   I’ll quote Glenn Pendlay from an article he wrote on the topic titled A Russian Perspective on the Bulgarian System, interviewing a former top Soviet lifter:

Do what works. The Russians believe their “system” works for a wider variety of people, and doesn’t produce as many injuries. But they, or at least Ruslev, agrees that the Bulgarian system is the “ideal” for a person with no weak points.

I’d only add that the Soviet system doesn’t seem to work so well if a lifter doesn’t have years under the bar; many find that doing nothing but broken or segmented lifts most of the time doesn’t prepare them for heavier loading in the full movement (many have found the same with Westside even in the relatively less technical powerlifts, the lack of heavy competition work doesn’t prepare them adequately for a heavy competition lift).  And the simple fact is that most are training the full competition lifts more and more frequently; for all I know modern Soviet training does too.

The Bulgarian system, at least at it’s full level, requires years of build-up to be survivable in the first place.  My friend who trains with Abadjaev notes that his program is far less voluminous than the ‘professional’ program (i.e. what Abadjaev feels is required to succeed at the highest level).  My friend is also not using ‘support’ (yes, I am coming back to this).

It’s interesting to note the big swing towards more specificity in training, even in powerlifting with systms like Sheiko, Korte 3X3, Smolov and others which are based around near daily practice of the powerlifts. Mind you, most of the above is somewhat historical even if many modern teams use some variant of the Bulgarian system in today’s era (where all sports have moved to much more specificity of training and away from the variety of the 80′s). 

Chinese Sports Secrets

I think it’s worth pointing out that, while very little information is available, the Chinese may have developed an ideal ‘hybrid’ system, eliminating the potential negatives of both the Russian and Bulgarian system while combining their strengths.  Not that there is much to be found about their system but they seem to combine daily near maximum lifting in the competition lifts with specific assistance work to focus on weak points (based on the coach’s eye) then supplemented with general bodybuilding work on the premise that a ‘bigger muscle is a potentially stronger muscle’.   This type of mixed approach may provide the best of all worlds.

Success Leaves Clues

But the above really only touches the surface, clearly there are a lot of countries doing at least somewhat different things even if most are derived from the above systems of training (simply, there isn’t that much variety to be had) in one fashion or another.  But it’s instructive to see if there are any commonalities in the training of elite Olympics lifters; I wasn’t joking at the start of this series with the trite ‘Success Leaves Clues’ phrase. 

Because while Americans (athletes and coaches alike) are often obsessed with finding Training Secrets, the secret is often that there is no secret (other than all the factors I’ve been discussing the past 7 weeks); looking at what all elite athletes are doing is often instructive.  Here again I’ll let Glenn Pendlay sum it up again quoting from his article.

…[H]ere is how the best are currently training. The minimum training sessions per week that I encountered was 5, maximum 12. Minimum hours spent training per week was about 8, maximum about 18. I did not talk to the Chinese, who I dont doubt top this number. Everyone snatches. Everyone clean and jerks. Everyone squats and front squats. Everyone does power snatches and power cleans. Most do pulls. Many do some sort of pressing or push pressing. This group of exercises makes up most of the work done. Many have some sort of exercise which they do which isnt as widespread, some do jumping exercises, some bench press. A few do some sort of good morning exercise or stiff legged deadlift variation. Some do some variation of back raise, back extension, or Glute Ham raise. In no instance which I encountered did these “extra” exercises make up any sigificant part of the training load. No one does only singles. No one does sets of 10. Most use a variety of reps between 1 and 5. Most do snatches and/or clean and jerks, or some close variation, every workout or almost every workout with significant weights.

And that really does sum it up and the key sentence is really that last one so far as I’m concerned. Because the technical nature of the lifts requires near daily practice in the lifts themselves, with the word ‘significant’ there being an older school term that you can translate as ‘heavy’. The OL’s change significantly when the weights approach max and training with 75-80% really doesn’t prepare lifters to handle max weights.  Everything else just supports that goal of endless practice and attempts to improve performance in those lifts.  So with that background, is there something wrong with how American lifters are training?

On the Training of Elite American Lifters
Here the completely decentralized nature of our country makes much in the way of discussion problematic.  Because outside of the USA Weightlifting coaching certification (which few seem to care about) there is no centralized approach to training. The handful of gyms that do exist all have their own way of going about things.  And it’s hard to say how much any of them, mostly run by guys who have been in the iron game for years and years have really kept up with the cutting edge of the sport. 

Here I truly am talking out of my own ignorance, I simply don’t know what’s going on outside of what little has been written, articles I’ve seen or what have you.  I would say that it’s clear that there are still some very silly and outdated ideas floating around.  Here are a few.

Quality Training
One of these actually comes from one of our greatest lifters, Tommy Kono to whom I mean no disrespect.  Critical of the European approach (based around the athletes training as professionals) he has long called for a return to what he calls Quality Training.  During his personal heyday, he trained like the lifters of the day with at most a moderate amount of training on the Olympic lifts themselves (perhaps three times per week) while pushing up strength in basic strength lifts. 

And certainly it worked for him during the time he was lifting.  And that style of training rapidly disappeared as being productive at the highest levels.  Note above that the minimum number of sessions per week is 5 (and you can be assured that the competition lifts are practiced at every one) and most do far more than that. The OL’s are too technical, too groovetastic at the highest levels to get by with that little practice on them.   Simply, nobody trains like that anymore.

Many guys lose their snatch groove with more than a day or two away from the lift (many elite Ol’ers will not only lift the day before competition but do a light workout the morning of to get their groove going).  While it’s debatable that American lifters should try to copy what the elite European block atletes are doing, returning to a system of training that worked 50 years ago is even more misguided.

Do It Conjugate Style/NEED MORE STRENGTH!!!
In what is now a rather famous series of articles (Milo Issues Vol 2/#3, Vol 3/#1 and Vol 4/#1), there is the suggestion by Louie Simmons to train effectively in the way he has instituted at Westside, arguing that American lifters are so far behind that they need to return to how the Russians were training in the 70′s and using what he interpreted the conjugate method as. 

To whit he suggested training the competition lifts between 65-85% of max and building up maximum strength through special exercises, building work capacity and ‘not training the competition movements too often’.  Effectively the exact opposite of how all successful teams of the day were training even in 1993.   And effectively moving training backwards to a style that didn’t work for the Americans in the 50′s and 60′s and that only roughly represented what the Soviets were actually doing (they certainly weren’t only training the competition lifts a couple times per week).

He holds up several flawed examples of why this should work (such as that America rules powerlifting, a sport that the rest of the world didn’t give a shit about at the time, and hence Westside is the best. It’s the World Series thing again.) that I won’t go into but he’s basically falling into the same trap that our lifters in the 60′s and 70′s (and coaches today such as Mark Rippetoe who’s comments are what started this stupid series) are still falling into: thinking that our lifters need MORE STRENGTH and that that’s what is holding them back.

Certainly, some of our lifters may be weak (or weak in certain areas) but as I detailed elsewhere (and Charniga goes into extensive detail on), maximum and limit strength are at most minimally related to performance in the lifts.  Strength needs to be kept at a certain level above competition performance to be sure but beyond that point, more strength not only doesn’t help but often hurts.  

That idea was out of date in the 60′s when the Eastern Europeans started handing us our asses and it’s no less out of date now.  Certainly the Chinese may be going heavier in assistance work than most have traditionally but how much of their training this comprises is hard to say (even the Soviets felt that up to 10% isometric and 10% eccentric work was useful back in the day).   But that’s only in conjunction with constant work on the competition lifts.

Now, admittedly these articles were written in the 90′s and I have no idea if Simmons would make the same arguments.  But it’s clear that style of training is even less relevant now with all elite competitors training in a fairly similar fashion which is constant work on the competition movements with everything else assisted that.  So what are Americans actually doing today?

The Current State of American Olympic Lifting
Here again I’m in no real position to comment except generally.  I asked Glenn about the current OTC program and was informed that it is certainly more like the current training of other country’s elite lifters than it may have been in the past.  He states:

As far as how this compares to the rest of the world, it’s in the ballpark of what everyone else is doing.  Obviously there are different “styles” of training and not everyone does exactly the same thing, but Zygmunt has worked with high level European athletes for 20-30 years and was an Olympian (for Poland) himself, and has imported the training system he used as the Polish national team coach, so the guys at the OTC are training at least similarly to the rest of the world.

Will this be sufficient to put one of our lifters in the medals before 2012 (Glenn joked that he hoped I finished this article series by 2012 so I wouldn’t have to rewrite it if we medalled)?  Time will tell and hope springs eternally at the very last it appears that the training of American lifters, at least at the OTC is at least in the ballpark of the rest of the world.   That’s at least progress from where it has been.

Beyond that I imagine that the long-standing gyms such as Calpains, Coffee’s and the rest are doing what they’ve been doing for quite some time. Which, at the risk of being blunt, hasn’t produced except perhaps to put athletes onto the Olympic team at the OTC.  Which hasn’t produced to date.  Whatever they have been doing hasn’t been working in terms of getting our lifters on the podium.

But that brings me to three more fairly recent developments in the climate of elite Ol training with the last one leading me into my final topic.   In order of what I know about them.

Jon Broz and Average Broz Gymnasium
Jon Broz has a training facility in the Vegas area called Average Broz Gymnasium.  I don’t know how much is really known about what he’s doing (he has at least one article on T-nation) but he does have at least one monster talent in Pat Mendes (you can see him on the BrozKnows Youtube channel).  Broz seems to be using the Bulgarian style system and Mendes has certainly put up some big numbers (though in recent competition he’s apparently far off his best lifts).  Time will tell and I don’t have much more to say about this.

Glenn Pendlay and California Strength
Coming out of Wichita Falls originally, Glenn (who I’d thank again for his invaluable feedback on this series) has set up an excellent situation for Ol’ers training with him at California strength.  By that I mean that he’s set it up so that lifters training there also ‘work’ at the facility, allowing them to be able to make a living while being able to train full time (and presumably without some of the politics, etc. that goes on at the OTC).   He seems to be using more of a Soviet style program with his lifters but you can check out his website for both regular blogs about their training along with video.

The facility also works with athletes from many other sports such as football, it’s not just pure OL’ing.  This not only allows it to keep it’s doors open but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of those athletes at least consider OL’ing as a fallback or alternate sport.  Glenn has been producing many of the US’s top lifters at the World level for now and this is certainly progress.

Ivan Abadjaev
I mentioned in an earlier part of this series that Abadjaev currently resides in California and has started training people again, presumably with the idea that he can recreate the magic of his heyday with American lifters.  There are a number of reasons that I doubt this can or will occur (primarily that he doesn’t have the numbers he needs to throw into the grinder and the lifters he will get will either be starting too old or not have the multi-year buildup to handle the full program) but he is in the country and the potential is there, I suppose.  Mainly my mention of him acts as a bridge to my final (at last) topic.

Because among other topics that Abadjaev is exceedingly open about is this: to prepare an elite Olympic lifter, to be able to handle the training required to reach the highest levels or become a champion requires the use of drugs (I’ve mentioned repeatedly how foreign coaches are stunned that they are expected to prepare American lifters clean; the entire idea is just insane to them).  And now it’s time to talk about the white elephant in the room.

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Drugs and Olympic Lifting

The topic of drugs in elite sport is always contentious for reasons I discussed in a previous section of this series.  Because while many sports fans take the idea that drugs are only used by guys who can’t succeed other ways, Americans take this to the mental level that we take anything, simply refusing to accept the reality of the situation.  We believe that only the weak use drugs and that hard work should be able to overcome anything.

And the reality is that Olympic lifting has had a perennial drug problem.  I already mentioned that I have it on good authority that American lifters were using the earliest anabolics and there’s simply no doubt at this point that the Soviet sports machine, GDR, Bulgaria and others systematically used drugs to support the training that was being done.  And while I don’t know what sport has generated the most positive drug results in the Olympics, I’m guessing weightlifting is up there.

And before you argue that this is a leftover of the olden days consider that for Beijing both the Greek and Bulgarian teams got popped for drug use going into the games.   Greece was able to pay the $500,000 fine and send it’s B-team but Bulgaria neither had the money nor the B-team and wasn’t able to compete (there have been other recent drug busts as well).   Drug use has been part of the sport for most it’s existence and nothing has changed.

In fact, the whole drug issue led to a few interesting occurrences in the sport. Because in the early 90′s, due to pressure from the IOC to clean up it’s act, Ol’ing did crack down on drug use.  And it appears to have gone down as evidenced by the fact that suddenly the top lifters or countries were about 5% off of the previous world records.  They just couldn’t hit the numbers clean.

In fact, in a roundtable on the topic of Olympic lifting in the pages of Milo (Volume 2/#1), it was estimated that anabolics gave roughly a 5-10% benefit with at least half or more of that being retained even if the drugs were dropped.  Which coincided exactly with what lifters were doing relative to the previous world records: they were all about 5% off their previous best.   And it’s hard to see how guys had gotten worse as lifters from their previous performance.

If there was any clearer indication of the impact of the drugs on performance (if for no other reason than allowing lifters to recover from the training loads being used), that was it.  It’s similar to the slower speeds and changed dynamics of the Tour De France this year; the top guys are all going slower and unless you want to believe that they backslid in terms of talent or training, the only logical conclusion is that they are using less drugs.

And this led to a problem because people watch the Olympics to see records being set and the fact was that lifters simply couldn’t reach the previous levels without drugs.  And the solution that International Weightlifting came up with was to simply throw out the old weight classes and effectively ‘reset’ the world records to zero so that new records could be set again. And the situation rapidly returned to where it was before.

There are two other interesting facts that came out of this.  The first is that arguably the US’s best recent finish in men’s weightlifting, Wes Barnett’s 4th in 1996, came during this period when, at least to a first approximation the competition was a lot cleaner than they had been.   Because this is a place where US lifters do seem to be a massive disadvantage compared to the rest of the world and this can be traced directly to the US Weightlifting federation. 

Because as one of it’s explicit goals for USA WL’ing is to make sure we don’t get dragged into the morass of drug use.  And accordingly US lifters are some of the most tested of any athlete in the world, subject to constant random testing.  And, simply, in the climate of international Ol’ing, given what we know other countries have been and are doing, how the records have been set and what the sport requires at the utmost levels, this is a huge roadblock.  Simply, other countries have state sponsored drug programs to support professional athletes; our enthusiastic amateurs are expected to reach the top level clean.

And this has led to another simple suggestion, just give our lifters more drugs.  But there is even indication that this wouldn’t be sufficient.  For in the same issue of Milo further analysis of American results even in the ‘cleaner’ days of the early 1990′s showed that we were so far behind (roughly 10-20% behind the leaders depending on the weight class) that even adding the supposed 5% gain from drugs would have only moved us from bottom of the heap to middle of the heap.   I don’t know where we stand now in terms of actual poundages relative to the top guys but I would be surprised if it’s changed much.  We may have a drug gap in the sport but clearly it’s not all that’s holding us back.

Because at the end of the day, there is no singular factor that can be identified in all of this.  Which brings me to endgame.

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Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting

And believe it or not, that’s the end.  I’ve covered too much information, this got stupid early on and I just rolled with it because I was having fun rambling about irrelevant shit and making jokes about the French and soccer.  I’m not even sure I really answered the original question, at this point I’m not sure what the question was.  Something about Olympic lifting.  And clearly the sport of Olympic lifting in this country has problems. 

But I don’t think that they are simple problems or that there is a simple solution.  Frankly, the idea that there could be a simple solution to something this complicated sort of points to part of the problem: Americans are simple people, we want complicated problems to have simple, solitary fixes.  It’s just this fundamental part of our nature.  We want the problem to be simple so that we can fix it overnight.  Just add _____ and suddenly the problem is solved.  If only.

That’s fundamentally the reason I spent so much time trying to show how there is this vast interconnected web of events that both produces and destroys sports performance.  All of the sociological, economical, ideological, genetic, physiological, etc, etc, etc, stuff that I covered when I looked at the countries and systems producing consistent results.  Even the exceptions seeing how sports seemed to survive and thrive despite not having everything in place at first glance.   What is needed to generate sports success isn’t simple, nor is what prevents it.

And what is wrong with the sport of Olympic lifting in the US isn’t simple.  Certainly getting more athletes is a huge part of it, you need that to find the talent.  And it has to be found young.  That requires facilities, coaching, incentives, money, support, a federation that does more than nothing. 

More than anything it requires interest.  But that ties in with our country as a whole, the way America developed, the way our people think, the way our culture developed.  It ties in with the sports that we watch and don’t watch, like and don’t like, get and don’t get, the sports we will and won’t invest money in.

And at a first glance, Olympic lifting has literally everything against it from both a competitor and athlete point of view.  The nature of the sport, the nature of the lifts, the nature of the lifters, the existence of not only the big three and track and field but simpler, easier sports like powerlifting and bodybuilding which fulfill American’s weightlifting mentality to a far greater degree.    They are hard to learn, few can teach them in the first place, they require specialized equipment, they don’t get you jacked or lean or strong.  In a quick fix capitalist society they have little appeal to either the athlete pursuing sport for a better life or the gym rat looking to get more chicks or impress his buddies. 

We have no heroes, our brief dominance of the sport is forgotten by all but the few who already pursue the sport and they aren’t the ones that need to be convinced.  But getting America to care would require so many things to happen all at once. Winning for one.  But even that might not be enough if the hero wasn’t the right kind of hero.  Even with that, the nature of the sport just makes it intractable for most people.  Olympic lifting literally addresses none of these issues and that’s not even considering the competition, countries who exist to throw people at the sport in immense numbers with immense support. 

Our small group of elites have struggled against all of this and more, toiling with no support, no money, training at the handful of facilities run by coaches who truly do what they do for the love of the sport.  Once these athletes, effectively enthusiastic amateurs, get far enough they can go to the OTC and get some support in a program that, historically not only hasn’t produced but may have done as much harm as good.  Still they soldier on, truly for the love of the sport. 

There are also the realities of the sport in terms of drug use, a place where the federation seems to be actively holding the lifters back with constant drug testing, preferring to stick their head in the sand regarding the realities of high level sport and Olympic lifting at the international level.

To ‘fix’ Olympic lifting you’d have to change all of this and more to make a dent in the problem which means solving the problems more or less all at once.  Just throwing money at it won’t solve the problem.  Just throwing drugs at it won’t solve the problem.  Just building gyms won’t solve the problem.  Just getting a bigger deadlift WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.  Because the problem runs so much deeper than any of those simple things even if simple (and simplistic) minds can’t see that.

At the same time, there is some indication of change in the winds. Crossfit has done more in the last two years for the sport than lifters or the federation did in 40 years, the momentum is gaining and both the sport and interest in it is growing.  Down the road this might increase the numbers sufficient to find the talent needed to change things.  New coaches dedicated to the cutting edge of training such as John Broz and Glenn Pendlay may be the ones to find the talent, the hero that we need.  Even the OTC seems to be working at a better level than it once did even if the rest of the sport is still a total mess.

So maybe things can change, at least they are moving forwards rather than standing still or moving backwards as they have been.  I doubt it will happen soon but as other examples have shown, sometimes it only takes that single strike of lightening.  The right athlete with the right story at the right time and maybe it turns itself around.  Maybe.

Do I really think it will happen?  If I’m honest, I’m not optimistic which is why the one thing I didn’t do was offer my own simple ‘fix’ to the problem.  I simply don’t think one exists.  And that’s not just a copout, that’s my honest opinion.  There’s too much wrong with the sport in this country to fix it simply.

I also don’t buy the ‘anything is possible’ argument because it sounds like naive optimism to me, just fantasy level hopes and dreams by people with their heads in the clouds (it’s like that flying unicorn that shits gold I’ve been hoping to find).  But this isn’t just me being a killjoy, this is what I hope was an objective look at the realities of the sport in this country lead me to conclude.  I’m not writing it just to shit on people’s parades, it’s just the situation as I see it. 

I’d love to be proven wrong. 

Because I like the lifts, I know the lifts, I missed doing them in SLC, I miss doing them now.  Having been involved in my share of niche sports over the years and knowing people who pursue Ol’ing with great zeal at varying levels, I’d love to see things change even if my inherent pessimism (I prefer to call it realism) tells me that it won’t any time soon.  There’s just too much wrong with the sport on every level and it would all have to change at once for the sport to return to anything close to what it was.

And that, at long last, is Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting.

Sources
For an early roundtable (circa 1993) on many of the issues surrounding OL’ing (that still exist today), I’d point readers to Milo Issues Volume 2, Issue 1 through Volume 2, Issue 3 or so.  The roundtable on the drug issue is in Volume 2/Issue 3.
The Effect of Testing for Performance Enhancing Drugs on the Progress of World Records in Weightlifting by Andrew Charniga, Jr. Another perspective on the drug issue in the sport of Olympic weightlifting.
Weightlifting Olympic Style and Championship Weightlifting by Tommy Kono.  Both books talk about Quality Training as well as Kono’s belief about US Lifters Mentality of Failure in terms of their competition results.
Again, I’d thank Glenn Pendlay for answering my constant stupid questions throughout this.

And at the risk of crashing my server, comments will be opened on this piece.  I’ve turned off moderation because I won’t have the time, energy nor interest to attend to them.  Nor will I join in any debates on what I’ve written.  I’ve said what I have to say and I’m as exhausted from writing this as you are reading it.   End of line.

A Lack Of Incentives

It’s hard to say what problem to Ol’ing is THE biggest problem but certainly this is one of the biggies, especially given the nature of sport in America, the nature of who enters our sports and the nature of their drives to do so.  Simply, the total lack of incentives to pursue OL’ing is almost all that it takes to kill the sport completely. Because without incentives on some level, it’s rare (but not unheard of) to see success in sport.

Even with all of the other factors that may have contributed to our success in the 50′s, at least when Hoffman was running things, there were some incentives; athletes were being supported and there were at least some incentives (like magazine coverage or what have you). Athletes weren’t making scads of money but there was some benefit to being involved in the sport (if nothing else they got to travel).

Now there is nothing. No money to be had, no scholarships to be earned and only the top lifters travel (usually on their own dime) overseas to get destroyed by guys with unpronounceable names who warm-up with weights heavier than our guys lift (in an old Ironmind training tape, Strossen points out that Dimas is power snatching a weight heavier than the best US lifter in his class does in competition). And they only get to do that after the pursue the sport on their own for years to reach that level. There is simply no reason to pursue the sport outside of a deeply seated internal drive to do it.

Mind you, other sports have gotten past this, I mentioned three in swimming, cycling and speed skating, all sports pursued almost exclusively out of some psychotic individual drive (swimming had the collegiate benefits but most didn’t pursue it for that since they could go to college already).

But those sports all had some idiosyncrasies that I mentioned yesterday in terms of the age thing that allowed those self-motivated athletes to succeed in a way that Ol’ers have not.  Probably just the age thing (for skating and swimming) and the low-technical/high-physiological demands of cycling where a guy starting at 18 can sometimes get there.

In OL’ing, certainly masters lifters have the internal drive but it doesn’t matter when you’re years past your peak of strength and power. And the kids entering the weight room may have just as much focus and drive but it’s not going into Ol’ing. For a lack of exposure, for a lack of interest, for a lack of incentives.

Simply, what’s the incentive for a young potential to pursue OL’ing in this country? In Communist countries it’s getting to eat and travel as per the story I related oh so long ago, or to be completely supported, to be a national hero, to get seriously paid for medalling. This is motivation on an epic scale and I’d mention again the statistic that it’s exclusively non-affluent countries winning medals in the sport. In this country there is no money, no scholarship nothing except, well….nothing.

What are you going to tell a promising athlete: “Hey, guy, you can spend the next 15 years of your life living in poverty to pursue a sport nobody cares about or has even heard of and if we do everything right you might come in 14th to a bunch of guys whose names you can’t pronounce from a country you couldn’t find on a map. Or you can be a 4th string football player and still make a ton of money and get chicks. Or just bodybuild and get buffed without the hassle of this insane sport.” For 99% of kids, it’s not even a choice.

Proposed Solution: Offer Incentives
Again, a big duh solution. But while this is obvious in premise, it’s a bit harder to put into practice. That is, what would you offer? Outside of the big three (money, fame) and track and field (college) what do the other niche sports I talked about potentially offer?

For speedskaters, the only incentive is the potential of a gold medal since it’s not a professional sport; a handful of athletes have gotten sponsorships and made some money but they are the exception to the rule. And it was only after they won gold in the Olympics. And even that sport is dying due to the loss of the midwest enclave; now the incentives in the sport are for top rollerskaters to switch to ice to get to the Olympics (an option not available in their sport) and time will tell if it’s enough to keep the sport alive.

The same is basically in place for swimming (again, college is one outcome but most come from a socioeconomic background that this is secondary), the only real incentive is the Olympics. For cyclists, there’s now money and collegiate scholarships to be had but the athletes pursued it long before that; it also had that big European professional draw where you might go overseas and turn pro.

One suggestion made to me (by a friend, a coach and lifter) was to establish a high-school and/or collegiate branch of the sport. Kids love competing (amusingly, powerlifting is massive at the high school level in some states, Texas is one of them) and some kids don’t like team sports.  Setting up a high-school Olympic lifting program might be one way to do it.  Most schools already have a weight room and if the football, etc. teams are already doing the OL’,s bumpers and stuff are there.  You’d have to get some decent coaching and generate interest but the potential might be there.

And that might lead logically into a collegiate division. If there were at least some carrot on the end of the stick for wannabe Olympic lifters, a reason for kids with the talent or potential to pursue it (i.e. if they aren’t drawn to one of the big three or track for some reason), that might be enough to draw folks into the sport.

Especially that same specific underclass that has already shown quite the propensity for speed, power and explosion and who one might expect to do extremely well at the sport if they only had a reason (and resources) to pursue it in the first place (and education is clearly enough of a draw for some sports). But this would also entail a huge number of factors to change including facilities (like high schools, most colleges have equipment for the OL’s as part of the sports program), providing coaching, creating a competition circuit that folks cared about, etc.

Of course, you’d have to make it worthwhile for the colleges to give a damn and that ties in with the next factor. In a capitalist country, people do not do things out of the good of their own hearts. They do it because they are going to get something in return. And that something is usually exactly one thing: money.

Which brings me to the next factor, one which has often been thrown out as another ‘simple’ solution to the woes of OL’ing.

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A Lack of Money

Like most amateur sports there is no money in Olympic lifting. None.  That means no resources to get new equipment, not to build new facilities, not to train coaches, or put in grassroots development, not to do much of anything. Generally speaking, the athletes are broke, the coaches are certainly broke (you don’t become an OL coach to become rich, that’s for damn sure; figure skating on the other hand), and if other niche sports federations are any indication, I imagine the federation is broke.

Because the federations of small non-producing sports are being funded through the USOC which has to decide what moneys it has go where and in what amounts.  And that generally means funding sports that are producing.  And yes I realizes that chicken and egg/cyclical nature of this; underfunded sports don’t generally produce and their lack of production means less money which means.

Though mind you sports such as cycling did produce, as did speedskating despite being perpetually underfunded and incompetently run. Clearly the lack of money in OL’ing is part of the problem but it can’t be all of it or it would impact on every sport equally.  Speedskaters and cyclists certainly often come from at least a middle class white background but there’s still no real money in the sport and they still produce.

Mind you, in most ways this is no different than most amateur sports in this country where it’s broke-ass athletes pursuing their sport out of pure dedication in hopes that they can get to where they want to go (generally the Olympics). I don’t honestly see OL’ing as being too different from a lot of marginalized sports but again this is somewhat of a change from our heyday.

Because for at least a short period of time, Hoffman was supporting athletes and putting money into the sport during that brief period; of course he had his own financial gains to be realized from it (through the sales of his magazines, products). We might compare this to bodybuilding of today, it’s a sport where only a select few make money.

But magazines are happy to sponsor athletes who can pimp their product or equipment which is then sold to the thousands of wannabes who think that the pill or the gloves or the Otomix ™ shoes are what made their heroes jacked. That’s the basic model of a lot of sports: give the pros money to endorse product to sell to the masses of wannabes.

It’s capitalism pure and simple and it was effective when OL’ing was popular enough to have at least some ‘masses’ to sell too. And even then it was tied in strongly with the strength training and bodybuilding of the day as much as it was pure OL’ing; again there simply wasn’t quite the clear distinction then that exists today in the weight room.

But in the current climate of this country, that’s no longer the case.  Olympic lifting, bodybuilding and powerlifting are all separate distinct sports (though bodybuilding and powerlifting have some crossover) and OL’ing is the odd man out. First and foremost we don’t have champions to endorse; more importantly there are no masses of up and coming Olympic lifters to buy products if there were. What are you going to sell? Shoes? Singlets? Knee wraps?  Right.

Which isn’t to say that a lack of money is the problem, but I don’t see that it’s all of the problem.

Proposed Solution: Throw Money at the Sport
This is probably one of the most often/simple suggested solutions to the sport. Certainly, some degree of financial support would allow the athletes that we do have to not have to scrape and scrounge to make a living while they attempt to train (I would note the existence of the OTC program which I’ll talk about later).

Would that be enough to let them reach the topmost levels of the sport? I’m really in no position to really comment here.  My gut says no, it hasn’t held back other sports or athletes and I suspect that other issues are still at work here.  But let’s assume it would solve the problem, or at least help, just for a second. But here’s the important question: assuming it would fix things, where’s the money going to come from?

I don’t know much about the USA Weightlifting federation (though what little I’ve heard is not positive), I imagine that like the federation of many US sports, it’s fairly broke and doens’t have cash to put into anything (not that it would matter).  Again, not something I know about. I can comment here on speedskating again, who’s federation was perpetually broke as hell.  I could tell tons of stories but won’t to save space.  Bottom line: the federation is out.

What about government money, or maybe lottery money like in the UK? Good luck with that given the financial situation in this country along with what folks would see as far more worthy endeavors (assuming you could get it to use in the first place). Cycling is huge in the UK, the interest in the sport was there (and the talent in a relatively non-technical sport was also there, in an event that they thought they could win without dealing with the drug issue, and I’ll come back to that tomorrow) and it made sense to apply the Lottery money to track cycling (other big sports in the country were already well funded). That doesn’t apply to US Ol’ing, not with just as many other sports begging for the same cash. Assuming it was available, OL’ing would have to prove that it was more worthy than a dozen other underfunded amateur sports. Next.

What about finding private sponsors? They do exist, for example, in something I left out of the cycling articles (because I hadn’t read Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Cyclists Took on the World – and Won by Geoff Young and Jim Ochowicz yet), one of the earliest US Pro Teams got a huge financial windfall from 7-11 prior to the 1984 games.  7-11 was expanding and wanted to support the US Olympic effort, pouring money into the track velodrome and sponsoring a team to help not only advertise their business but try to change folk’s attitudes about the crap they sold. But that was a situation of a huge company looking to expand with the Olympic on the roster as a springboard. And the economy was way different in the 80′s and everybody was making bad choices fueled by cocaine and hookers.

It’s not unheard of for rich altruists to throw money at a pet sport, it certainly happens overseas with cycling crazy businessmen from time to time. Maybe USA WL’ing needs to find themselves an OL’ing obsessed sugardaddy. Let Donald Trump train with the team, something like that.  I’d suggest a wealthy Arab oil magnate but they will be supporting the Iranian and other teams (or in the US mind, Al Queda).

Of course, it’s optimistic as hell to think that what happened in US cycling recently could happen in OL’ing, didn’t money come into that sport?   Well, yeah but folks seem to have cause and effect confused. Certainly Lance through his force of will (and having shown he could produce) got money to sponsor US Postal but he also produced almost immediately (and there was the history of the 7-11 team).  But it was his victory that brought money into the sport, not the money that let him win.

And that brings me to what I personally think may be the biggest thing holding OL’ing back. 

The Lack of Interest

At the end of the day, everything I’ve discussed is part of what’s going on.  Because just as success in sport is predicated on a vast interconnected web of things to go right, there’s a lot going wrong in the sport of Ol’ing.  No facilities, no competent coaching, lifters getting pulled into other sports, no kids getting into the sport, it’s all relevant (and I’ll talk about our current lifters tomorrow when I wrap up). But I see that all as a symptom of the bigger, more deeply seated issue. which is this: nobody but the people involved in the activity already give the first flying fuck about Olympic lifting.

And that is a function of a lot of things, not the least of which is America as a whole which is why I spent so long on the sociological and economic and other aspects of this country.  And the following is not meant to be sarcastic, humorous or derogatory. I’m just stating facts (as I see them) in a factual way.

We are a form over function society, things have to look a certain way to engage us and we are all about appearance over anything else. We are a convenience culture. If something can’t be done or accomplished easily and quickly, we’re not interested.  We are a quick fix society, if something isn’t taken care of immediately (or faster) we are not interested. You see this in sports all the time, a failing team brings in a new coach or strength and conditioning guy and gives them one year to turn it around. If he doesn’t, he’s fired.  We are a capitalist society, if something doesn’t produce (and that means earning money), we don’t give a damn about it. What earns money is good, what does not earn money is not. QED.

Basically, the entire structure of our country, the sports we will and won’t watch, the athletes we will and won’t get behind, the sport we do and do not get, all comes out of our brief history, our overarching ‘culture’ (inasmuch as there is one) and all of that sociological bullshit I spent so many days on contribute to the overarching problem with the sport of Olympic lifting.

All of that adds up to a niche sport populated primarily with lifters too old to accomplish anything, a handful of junior lifters and even smaller group of elites who are struggling to survive against a world throwing absurd resources and people at this sport.   And while other sports have seemed to deal with the numbers issue somehow (due to the oddities of those sports), I think that’s a big part of what’s holding OL’ing back. 

We have too many other sports pulling the truly potential greats into the sport (a problem that cycling, swimming and speed skating didn’t have; those guys didn’t want to pursue anything else), the guys pursuing lifting for the sake of lifting pick easier stuff.  That leaves the ‘leftovers’ to pursue OL’ing.

And solving that problem means changing the overall climate of OL’ing in this country.  Basically, you have to make people care about the sport again.  Because there’s no point in even trying to solve the other problems, building facilities, training coaches, any of it until you have bodies to throw at the sport and have someone to coach.

You have to either get the American sport fan to care about the sport or, more usefully, get the average gym rat to care about these odd looking lifts. Because until you convince the average gym lifter that the OL’s will get him big guns, get him lean, get him the ladies or something else that targets the male insecurities he’s trying to compensate for, it’s not going to take. Remember, most people who lift don’t give a shit about athleticism.

To get any sort of money or incentives in the sport means getting the general American public to care. Otherwise you can’t get endorsements, TV coverage, collegiate coverage (the big sports in colleges are the ones that earn revenue for the university through merchandise and ticket sales).

Fundamentally, to solve the global problem in OL’ing you have to make people care. And therein lies the problem for reasons I will now explicate.

Proposed Solution: Make People Care About the Sport
Again, a big duhh solution but the issue here is not in the premise of the solution but how one might go about it in practice. Because of who I am I’m mainly going to look at what I see as the hurdles that the sport would have to overcome to make people care (and I’ll wrap up to day by talking about one of the recent developments in the sport that may have the potential to change things).

Because clearly up until this point nobody has been able to make the US lifters or sporting public aware of the sport.  I don’t know what the federation is doing but whatever it is, it isn’t working.  Because while other sports like swimming and speed skating live in obscurity most of the time, Americans do watch them when the Olympics are on.  And cycling is now televised because people care about the sport.

I would point out that, even during the heydey of American OL’ing, the majority didn’t care about it.  It was just that niche group of folks in certain areas that were interested, the general public would not have been aware of it nor cared.  TV coverage wasn’t what it was today and nobody would have given a damn anyhow.  And nothing has really changed since then.  Even during the Olympics, about the only way to get coverage of the Ol’s is through specialty websites.

Because one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen regarding OL’ing and how to get both lifters and sportsfans interested in the sport is to put it on TV, said argument I will come back to at the end of the day.   But this assumes that people would watch if it were on.  Because while Americans will watch a lot of stupid stuff on sports (see: The ESPN Crossfit games which were shown yesterday on ESPN2), there is stuff that we just won’t watch in large numbers.  So let’s look at how the average American is going to perceive OL’ing.

The Sport: Part 1
First let me be a bit silly but the names of the lifts are not helping.  When a newscaster says “Oh, will you look at that beautiful snatch” Americans giggle (or get offended due to our Puritanical attitudes towards sex).  Hell, I giggle and you’re giggling too.  The clean and jerk sounds like something you do in the privacy of your own shower, not something you do for competition (outside of some weird German or Japanese porn).  But this isn’t changing and I only bring it up for completeness.

If you’re not an afficionado, the sport is intractably boring to watch for more than about 5 minutes.  Because after you’ve seen one snatch, you’ve seen them all (see, you’re giggling).  Nothing changes, it’s the same thing with guys lifting progressively heavier weights over and over again, sometimes they make the lift, sometimes they don’t.  Next.   Powerlifting is the same, mind you and Americans don’t watch that either unless they are involved in the sport.  I always tell people to take a book with them because after you’ve seen the first three squats, it’s the same boring shit for the next 4 hours.  Contrast that to something like strongman (which we will watch) with 5-10 different events that are all different.

The Metric Issue
Coupled with this is the metric issue  and here I’m half joking and half not joking. Not only does the US have an issue with metric in general, there is the simple fact that we don’t get it and the numbers don’t seem that impressive (I’ve joked that lifting is easier in metric because it’s easier to add 10 of something than 22 of something, that is 10kg vs. 22lbs). 

Watching dudes jump weight by 2.5 kg is also problem for us because a) what’s a kilogram b) 2.5 isn’t very much is it?  Most gym rats slap on 25′s or 45′s.  2.5′s are for pussies as any powerlifter will tell you.  Even knowing it’s 5.5 lbs doesn’t help, it’s still a pitiful weight to add to the bar.

And the numbers just don’t sound impressive to us.  Not only do we not know what 180kg is but 180 isn’t a big number, my sister weighs more than that.  Hell, even 220kg isn’t a big number.  Sure, it’s 480 pounds but it will still always sound lighter than a 400 pound bench press, even if it’s not.  Because 400 is bigger than 220 and Americans are not a nuanced people. 

By the time lifters start hearing about 800-1000 pound squats and deadlifts (hell, there is a 1000 lb bench press), the weights used in OL’ing sound like warm-up weights.  Yes, I know it’s ignorant as hell.   It’s also true.  Putting the weights in pounds might help but that’s never going to happen outside of high school weight rooms.

Hell, look at strongman again, the weights make sense and sound amazing.  Watch them describe the stone weights.  150 lbs, 200 lbs, 300 lbs, this rock has never been lifted by a human being EVER but this big dude is going to try.  The weights make big jumps and the numbers sound amazing. OLin’g can’t compete with that in a conceptual sense because the numbers sound too small and the jumps between weights are too small (He just set a new world record by 0.5 kg.  0.5?  Are you kidding me?)

The Competitions
The sport is intractably confusing, the rules don’t make sense to anybody but afficionados and even folks who know what’s going on can’t tell why one lift is passed and another isn’t.  Like many sports (including PL’ing) OL’ing is contested one at a time with this weird structure of lifting where lifters sometimes follow themselves, you can’t tell who’s ahead and you don’t find out who wins until the end (even PL’ing with it’s flights has a slight advantage here since the guy lifting at the end of the flight is clearly lifting more).  Again, contrast that to strongman where at least some of the events are head to head and you know who’s winning and who’s losing.

It doesn’t help that nobody ever gets ruined in OL’ing, injuries in competition are fairly rare and minor.   A pulled hamstring, the occasional dislocation, sometimes someone drops a bar on themselves or passes out.  But it’s pretty rare.  Guys tear biceps in strongman, get the hell torn out of their arms with the stones.  Americans do love destruction.

By the criteria I laid out earlier, Ol’ing is not a sport that we ‘get’ in this country. As I noted above, I would note that powerlifting is also in this category and nobody in this country except lifters gives a damn about it. And it’s not shown on TV either (because nobody would watch). In contrast, strongman is shown on TV because the competitions make sense to us.  Most events are head to head, the guys are big manly man doing big manly things with rocks and trucks and shit. And they look like they are working their balls off the whole time. C’mon, look at this nonsense, this is an American sport.

The Lifts
While the names of the lifts don’t help in getting us to appreciate the sport beyond infantile giggling, there is another issue that I think contributes to this which is the go/no go nature of the lifts.  Because it makes the effort just not look that difficult to the average viewer.    Look, before the OL’ers freak out, you and I both know that they are impossibly hard. But they don’t look it.

There’s no struggle, no suffering, even in the Dimas snatch video from last week, he’s just shaking a bit to hold the bar overhead but other than a brief shout the lift didn’t look that hard to the causal viewer. I mean, hell, here’s superheavyweight Hossein Rezazadeh setting a world record.

He doesn’t make an ounce of noise, he takes a few breaths and no aspect of that lift looks even remotely difficult to the average viewer.   Again, folks who know the lifts know the difference; the average person does not understand what went into that. Contrast that to guys falling down in exhaustion after a track running event, marathoners crawling across the line, even cyclists with signs of pain on their face as they crest the hill, even shotputtters grunt like hell.  Ol’ing has none of that.

Americans come from psycho Puritan stock, remember; if you’re not working hard, you’re immoral. And the OL’s lack this for the most part since most of the real work happens in training.  The competitions look too easy because the lifts either go (and don’t look that hard) or don’t.  You don’t even get to see a lifter trying to save a lift most of the time; if it’s gone it’s gone. And Americans lose their erection because sports is supposed to be about pain and suffering and working hard.  And the OL’s don’t look that way to us.

The Lifters
This is not facilitated by the look of the lifters.  Remember, this was the issue in the 60′s and it’s just as much of an issue now when Americans couldn’t understand why a bunch of unmuscled guys were beating them.  OL’ers often move amazing weights without looking particularly muscular (only the recent Chinese have changed this).  Or at the very least they don’t have muscles in the places we care about (delts and arms).  Or they look downright chubby like Rezazadeh up there.  If Americans want to see fat people huffing and puffing and lifting stuff, we can just go to Walmart the day after Thanksgiving.

Ol’ers get perpetually frustrated by the idea that “Olympic lifters are all fat”.  But since we only like to see the biggest weights lifted (remember, bigger is better than smaller), we tend to only see the big fat boys in the super heavy weight class (and at the risk of being really shitty, Cheryl Hayworth did NOTHING to help the women’s end of the sport; this just a statement of fact). 

As well, Americans have some really strong beliefs about what someone who ‘lifts weights’ should look like and Ol’ers have not fit the bill since the sport changed.  Compare and contrast Arnold, Matt Croc, Mariusz Pudzianowski and Pyrros Dimas (who was relatively jacked for his day).

One of these things is not like the other

I think the average viewer finds it hard to take Ol’ers seriously when that dude down at the gym is way more jacked or at least has bigger guns. And he just does curls 5 days per week and takes creatine. Remember why American lifters were drawn to the sport in the heyday of the press: pressers had jacked delts and arms.  It’s only recently that the Chinese OL’er have made getting jacked a national pasttime but even they achieve that through general bodybuilding work because the Ol’s are not the best way to achieve this goal.  It might have an impact down the road.  Well, if anybody saw it.

Summary
So the entire sport is simply screwed from an American standpoint.  It’s too nuanced, a bunch of unmuscled guys doing ballet with a barbell (and the weights are too small to take seriously) in this oddly structured competition where nothing interesting happens, nobody can get the rules and you don’t find out who wins until the end. 

The sport doesn’t even lend itself to highlight reels like cycling (where you can show the climbs, the finishes and the crashes) because all the lifts look the same, and they don’t even look that hard and nobody is suffering.  The guy who won doesn’t seem to have done anything that the other guys didn’t do, he just did it with 1kg more on the bar.

Which is why the argument that putting it on TV is flawed completely.  You could put it on and folks might watch out of interest for a few minutes before changing the channel.  The sport is simply all wrong for the non-nuanced American mind (and all of the above means that lifters will never care about the sport either) and they wouldn’t watch it anymore than they would watch French art films or eat gourmet food if it were made available.      Which is why it’s not shown in a capitalist country, if nobody watches (because they don’t care), TV stations wont show it because they aren’t in the business to lose money by showing stuff nobody will watch.

The Prefontaine Counterargument
Now, my friend, bless his naive optimism, counterargues all of the above with the argument that “Americans didn’t care about running until they put Prefontaine on”.    But his argument still misses a lot of points, again why I spent so much time on seemingly irrelevant crap.  Because he is working from the operating assumption that Americans became fascinated in running simply because it was put on TV and I think that’s incorrect because the situations aren’t comparable.

First off, running is a sport Americans get.  It’s a bunch of guys racing head to head, everybody knows what running is, it’s an activity everyone has done at some point; hell, it’s part of our evolutionary past.  The guys suffer, the structure of the racing makes sense.  It’s a sport that we get conceptually and will watch at least for limited periods of time.

When Pre started to come to dominance, the running boom/fad in this country was just starting as folks were starting to become aware of and be concerned with things like cardiovascular and heart health and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and running fed into their desire for a quick fix.  Here I have trouble separating chicken and egg. Did Pre help kick off the running boom or did the running boom help people care about Pre?  I don’t know and I’m not researching it.  I’ll just say they complimented one another and move on.

But far more important than that was Pre himself.  Like Arnold and bodybuilding and Lance in the future, Pre was another guy who was the right kind of hero for American to get behind.  A kid from a broken home, ran on sheer guts, called the Europeans chickenshits for not front running.  As well, his fame first developed in Oregon under Bowerman and by the time he was making national news, the groundswell had already taken hold. 

And America loves fads and following what everyone else tells them is good; it’s how our best sellers work and it’s called social proof (the masses want to like what everyone else likes).  When folks started showing up with Pre t-shirts at races, that helped feed the interest.  

Pre just happened to be a runner, happened to be in a sport we got and happened to have the right backstory at the right time to grab America by the balls and make it care about running (we also had Shorter winning Olympic gold in 1972 which didn’t hurt).  If he’d done some sport we didn’t get, I bet he wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference.

That is, it wasn’t just because running was put on TV.  That wouldn’t have accomplished anything without it being the right kind of sport and having the right kind of hero to make people care.   But there is another issue, one that will sound like me being shitty but again this is just me making a statement of fact.

We Still Need a Hero
Pre won.   Actually, he more than won, in the US he was absolutely dominant even if he didn’t have quite the success overseas (but he gave it his all even to come 4th and was happy to slag his competitors as chickenshits).  He was the right guy in the right sport at the right time and that was  big part of it.

But most importantly he was destroying his opponents (like Arnold, like Lance).  Because Americans don’t give a shit about second place.  Or fourth place.  Or 10th place.  Which is where US lifters have been for decades.  The US hasn’t had heroes in OL’ing for 4 decades and that alone is a problem because it gives nobody for up and coming lifters to look up to.  They existed during our short heyday, now we have nobody.  Case in point: Americans went batshit when Phil Fister won World’s Strongest Man because finally an American was at the top of the sport.  We don’t have that in Ol’ing and if history is any indication, aren’t going to any time soon.

Which is why just ‘Putting Olympic lifting on TV’ wouldn’t do much.  Not only is the sport all wrong for the American mind, there are two other intractable issues for Ol’ing to overcome.  First is that it has to produce a winner (and that leads into my final discussion of our current lifters tomorrow).  And even if someone won, I’d argue that the lifter would have to have the right personality and backstory to get America to notice.  And I’m not sure Ol’ing lends itself to that.  I’m still not sure it would matter because even with the right guy, the right champion the sport is still just all wrong for our viewership.

But to have any chance of getting numbers into the sport would require making this country, both lifters and sportspeople alike care about the sport.  I see that as the fundamental problem with OL’ing, the reason that we ‘suck’.  Everything else contributes but they are more symptoms than causes.  We simply don’t care about the sport and that leads to all of the other problems, the numbers and everything associated with a sport nobody cares about.  And had I been writing this two years ago, I would have said that we’re never going to.

But something has changed, this is the first topic I’ve been explicitly avoiding for the last two days, it’s one that almost hurts me to write about but I will try to retain objectivity and keep my opinions to myself.  Because in the last couple of years, much of what I wrote above has started to change.  People have started to care about Olympic lifting, or at least some people, a groundswell has been building with vastly increased (at least relatively) numbers of facilities and equipment and coaching and interest.  That brings me to the final topic for today.

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Will Crossfit Save Olympic Lifting?

Yes, I did just write those words.  Because while USA Weightlifting has traditionally had about 2000 total lifters for most of it’s history, that number has apparently swelled to about 7000 in the last couple of years.  Suddenly there are all these new registered lifters and, factually, they are coming from the cult of Crossfit.

Because through their ‘programming’, Crossfit has managed to convince a bunch of upper middle class white 20 somethings that the Ol’s can help them reach their goals of ‘increasing work capacity across broad and modal time domains’ or whatever silly shit is on the website.  Facilities are springing up all over the place and they are getting bars and bumpers and squat stands.   I routinely tell people to find their local Crossfit compound if they want to find a place to Ol.

And suddenly the OL’s are the in thing to do even if folks are doing them for sets of 20 before sprinting and shotputting their child or whatever Rhonda is.  The coaching is even improving to some degree as Crossfit has had the sense to bring in people who know what they are doing like Greg Everett, Mike Burgener, even a local Austin ex-world class female lifter (Ursula who’s last name I do not know) to teach the certifications.

Certainly more is wrong with the Crossfit approach to the Ol’s than is right.  Their programming sucks, the lifts shouldn’t be done to the point of failure or rahbdoymolysis, a lot of what they do is flatly wrong from the standpoint of the lifts.  But that’s kind of secondary and can be fixed. 

Because in the same way that Hoffman brought basic barbell training to the masses, Crossfit has managed to do something that USA Weightlifting failed to do for 40 years: bring Olympic lifting to the masses.  Or at least more masses than it had before.  Love Crossfit or hate it, it has accomplished something the federation and lifters never could.

Already, there has been some impact, as I mentioned the number of registered lifters has gone up and I imagine there are more folks showing up at competitions because of this.  The interest is increasing and I know several OL’ing coaches who have picked up new athletes out of Crossfit.   It’s usually guys who realize that they are doing something wrong or want proper coaching or to compete in a real sport (NOT the Crossfit games) and know that they need an actual coach.  Of course, given the age issue, you’re not finding the next US OL’ing champion from a bunch of bored 20 and 30 somethings who get drawn into Crossfit.   They are too old for this crap.

But what may happen is that the adults now doing Crossfit will get their kids involved.  There is a Crossfit kids movement and the reality is that this might be sufficient to get more folks coming into the sport and starting young enough to maybe have a chance of producing down the road.  Adults who are interested in the OL’s may get their kids interested.  That’s how you grow a sport.

But that is a solid decade in the future as the folks doing Crossfit now indoctrinate their kids and we see if it has an impact when they get older.  It’s progress, it’s something, it’ll be interesting to see what develops.  But currently all we have is our resident elites.  Which is what I’ll look at tomorrow in the FINAL part of this stupidity.

 Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 10.

The sport had changed due to a rules change along with the dropping of the press (in 1974) and Americans, still fascinated with maximum strength and muscle size hadn’t changed.  Other changes in the gym culture of the day, the rise of bodybuilding, machine training and other strength sports (powerlifting, strongman) along with the big three starting to throw stupid money at its athletes just further diluted any talent that might have pursued OL’ing.

The sport, never more than a niche to begin with had begun it’s downward spiral.  What facilities existed started to disappear as the sport declined, incoming lifters went into other activities, the teachings (such as they were) of coaching and technique were lost, results declined, further decreasing interest.  The magazines didn’t cover the sport, nobody cared.  

And that’s led us to where we are today and, in essence, this part of the series is sort of the ‘punchline’ to all of this (the part that everybody wish I’d started with) although I won’t stop here because I want to address not only some recent developments but other things that might change the situation (if it’s changeable at all).  And while some of what I’m going to write will probably have been ‘obvious’ to everyone from the start, hopefully you’ll see that not all of it.  And why I spent 5 weeks getting to this point.

And as I continue today, this is where the simpletons who stopped after Part 1 of this series will say “See, this is all Lyle had to say.”  But they’ll be wrong.  These are the simple answers to the problem of Ol’ing, the ones everybody focuses on while ignoring what I think are bigger issues.  Even the mere existence of people that thing that there is a single, simple problem or fix makes part of my point.

For structural reasons, I’m going to actually address some of the problems along with some of the potential ‘fixes’ that have been suggested as I go.  It’s a bit more broken up but saves me a lot of tedious repetition by first defining the problems and then redefining them to address the solutions.  Hopefully it will all make sense.

And as you continue, some well-informed readers may note that I’m explicitly leaving out about three important things, very recent changes in the landscape of OL’ing that may or may not end up having a rather large impact.  I’ll get to those when the time is right but please be patient (if you’ve read this far, you’re patient by definition).

Much of what I’m going to say initially isn’t even news.  Quite in fact, as you’ll see in my sources, about 18 years ago in the early issues of Milo, a discussion of the state of US Ol’ing brought up pretty much exactly the same points.  And nothing has really changed in that time until very very recently (and I’ll talk about that change tomorrow or Friday). 

Deciding where to start in describing the current state of Olympic lifting isn’t easy since I see the problem as one vast interconnected web; there is no singular problem that can be readily identified in my mind.  So with no real reason other than it jumped to mind, I’ll start with the easy one and then just run in circles for a bit. 

If you get nothing else out of what follows, it should be this: there is no SINGLE SIMPLE problem with Ol’ing in this country (a mistaken inference that people continue to make with this series).  Because, fundamentally, everything is wrong with it.  I’d note that, as appropriate I’ll tie the issues here in with other parts of this series, mainly to justify having dragged everybody through them to get here.  

And mainly I’m going to focus on how the sport has existed historically in this country; I’ll address a few new developments towards the end of the final wrap-up.  So don’t freak if two specific names and one specific group go unmentioned for a bit.  What’s happened in the last couple of years is too new to have had an impact…yet.

In any case, let’s start with an easy one.

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A Lack of Facilities

Frankly, finding an OL’ing facility in the US, or even one where you can do the OL’s is like finding a virgin at a Catholic girl’s school; they exist but you gotta dig to find ‘em.  There have always been a handful of long-standing gyms with coaches who have consistently developed US lifters.  Places like Coffee’s Gym (he consistently produced top women lifters), Calpains, The Sports Palace and others, you can find a list at OWOW.   If you’re in the Austin area, get in touch with Grassiron to get hands-on coaching.

But in most cities, finding a place to do the OL’s has been traditionally impossible.  Commercial gyms have bent bars that don’t spin, bumpers are impossible to find and you get looked at funny or kicked out for dropping the bar from overhead.  Most followers of the sport either luck into finding a gym with OL’ing facilities (such as Grassiron Gym here in Austin) or get their own equipment and lift in their garage. 

Mind you, that didn’t really stop folks in other sports such as speedskating, where the insanely limited facilities didn’t hold us back.  Then again, all of the skaters came from that singular Midwestern area so they were already local to places to skate.  It was only people not from Minnesota/Wisconsin that were out of luck.  But that’s the situation in OL’ing, if you’re not lucky enough to live in a handful of places where OL’ing facilities exist (or can relocate to chase the dream), you’re not getting into the sport unless you break down and buy your own equipment.

Proposed Solution: Build More Facilities
A simple problem with a seemingly simple answer: don’t have facilities, just build ‘em and watch the sport grow, right?  While this seems logical on the surface it is based on a faulty assumption which is that people care.  And the reality is that the majority don’t know what Olympic lifting is, aren’t interested in Olympic lifting, and aren’t going to be interested in Olympic lifting any time soon (a topic I’ll come back to throughout the rest of this).

Spending a ton of money to build specialty facilities for a niche sport with few participants is just a losing proposition on all levels.  First, who is going to pay for it?  Second, who is going to use it?   You see this occurrence in spades at the Olympics, folks spend millions building these amazing facilities for the niche sports that require them which, after the games, go completely unused.  Because once the games are over, nobody cares any more. 

Sydney has plenty of unused stuff from their games and SLC is only lucky enough to have become the OTC for many winter sports to put the Oval and bobsled/luge track to use. Otherwise it would go unused, just an expensive leftover from a games steeped in controversy, corruption and graft.

Which isn’t to say that an OL’ing facility need be particularly expensive.  Platforms, bumpers, plates, squat stands.  It’s pretty simple stuff.  But from a commercial standpoint, the whole idea is completely flawed.  Because basing a business model around a sport that nobody does is not the way one succeeds in a capitalist society especially in a sport like OL’ing where the athletes are all broke (see below). 

Targeting niches only works if the niche has cash (and yes I will come back to specific group that I’m explicitly avoiding for the time being) which is why golf succeeds.  But OL’ing is not golf.   Poor athletes are poor and the guys who get into the activity who have money can just as easily outfit their garage as join a gym.

Make no mistake, it’s been tried; hardheads love to prattle on about the hardcore gyms they belong to that is nothing but old school dungeon equipment.  And you get to also hear about the roughly 22 members who use the place (while the typical commercial gym has 10,000 paying members of whom 300 use the place regularly). 

Small hardcore gyms are awesome, make no mistake, I love ‘em and would prefer not to train (or train anybody) anywhere else.  But they are always more expensive, usually falling apart (because the membership is lower and they can’t afford to fix stuff) and never attract more than the small niche who can’t stand Planet Fitness (I’d point you to the documentary Dodgeball for a look at Globogym vs. Average Joe’s Gym). 

And given the choice, the majority of folks will join the commercial gym for $20 per month so they can train for 3 days on the shiny equipment before never showing up again rather than pay $45 per month to train on equipment that’s falling apart for 3 days and never showing up again.  And keep in mind that it’s the majority who defines who wins the capitalism game under most circumstances. And the majority has spoken: big commercial gyms win, small hardcore gyms do not.

About the only way to make a hardcore oriented gym (or training studio) work is to cover more than that one niche base.  You can give the OL’ers a place to train but you have to recognize that your money comes from the general training client, or other sports training, or the general public (again, still avoiding a specific group for the time being).

And unless you have a shitload of money, you can’t compete with the big commercial gyms anyhow on space, equipment or price.  If you try to focus on just the niche, you fail economically and nothing is changing that.  The awesome hardcore gym I trained at in SLC was owned by a guy who ran another business that was lucrative.  The 30 members at the gym couldn’t even cover the electric bill.  But it was sure awesome to train there.

Because this isn’t like track cycling in the UK, where there was interest in the sport already and they were willing to put money into building a velodrome (that could also host World Cup events and make money).  OL’ing is too small a sport in the US to support more than a handful of dedicated facilities and there aren’t enough lifters to make putting on competitions financially feasible or beneficial.  This isn’t like running where 10,000 show up to run a 10k; it’s more like you get 50 lifters and maybe take the judges out to lunch if you’re generous.

And overseas Olympic lifters have plenty of places to train and compete; they don’t need the US.  Building an  OL-centric facility in this country is a losing proposition all around unless you accept a lot of non-OL specific trainees (general public, whatever) to keep the doors open.

And with this comes with a very related problem.

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A Lack of Qualified Coaches

Just as facilities for Ol’ing are nearly impossible to find in this country, so is competent coaching.  Usually you find the two going hand in hand, the handful of coaches with any understanding of the lifts or how to teach them are found in the handful of gyms. 

Jim Schmitz, Arthur Dreschler, Gayle Hatch, John Coffee and others are the handful of coaches in this sport, usually doing it for the love of the sport itself at the facilities that they are involved with.   Glenn Pendlay told me in email that we currently have two paid coaches in the US, China has 3000.  That’s coaches.  Paid coaches who do nothing but try to develop OL’ing talent.

And this is a problem given the insane technical demands of the sport.  They are grossly misconceptualized by most people who see them (Commonly heard question “Don’t their arms get tired?”) or simply taught incorrectly under most circumstances.  And in a sport where technique is just a monstrous part of overall success, having good coaching (and not picking up awful habits which take forever to correct) from the start is paramount.   And we just don’t have the people teaching things properly.

Again, here OL’ing is like speedskating where there were never more than a handful of coaches, with varying competency (even Dianne Holum, Eric Heiden’s coach, never really produced anybody but Eric, and he was just a freak).  Somehow what didn’t hold speedskating back is part of what’s hold Ol’ing back: there is simply a lack of good coaching.  Swimming had tons of coaches and coaching cycling is pretty much telling guys to “Ride lots.”

And I have no idea if most current coaches, (and again don’t freak out that I haven’t mentioned two specific people here yet) are up to date on Ol’ing technique or training on any level.  I imagine it’s no different than in every other aspect of American sport, there are some top notch folks, some mediocre guys and a ton of folks that are just making shit up as they go along (like arguing for a straight line pull in the OL’s).

Proposed Solution: Train More Coaches
Again another duhh solution and certainly USA Weightlifting offers it’s coaching certifications.  Which has had about as much impact on the level of coaching as most certification in this country.  It exists and it lets you put some nifty letters after your name but I’m not sure it accomplishes much more than that. Mind you, I took the club coach course years ago, I’m told it’s been revamped in recent years, I don’t really know enough about it to comment to any significant degree on it’s current iteration.

But this is a place where the US’s decentralized ‘system’ and lack of overarching organization is biting us in the ass: anybody who wants to call themselves an OL’ing coach and start coaching can do it, even if he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to the lifts or how to teach them.  In the Eastern European countries, coaches were highly trained on both general training theory and specific sports training theory and technique.  They pour energy into Olympic lifting coaching and training the way Americans pour gas into SUV’s.  And we do not.

But even there, the above assumes that coaches would have someone to coach.  Because, for the same reason that building facilities would be pointless, having lots of trained coaches available wouldn’t make an iota of difference because they’d be coaching thin air.  Because, among other things missing in the sport of OL’ing in this country is athletes.  And while some other sports have gotten away with relatively small athlete populations (for reasons I’ll address below), it hasn’t cut the mustard in Ol’ing.

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A Lack of Lifters: Introduction

For the past 30-40 years, USA Weightlifting has had something like 2000 total registered lifters or so including juniors and masters.  Compare that to the 450,000 that the Soviet Union had at it’s peak.  Contrast that to the 3,000 paid COACHES that Glenn Pendlay informs me exist in China.  They have more OL’ing coaches than the US has lifters.  Mull on that for a few seconds.

And most of the lifters we have, again, are juniors or masters.  And that latter group aren’t making the medal stand.  Something that the sport massively needs is an infusion of bodies to get into the sport.  You need enough people going into the sport to find a world beater.   Although, mind you, there are exceptions, I’ve talked about two (cycling and speed skating) for the most part generating top athletes requires numbers.

And those numbers don’t exist in Olympic weightlifting for a variety of reasons.  Some of it is that potentially great power athletes are drawn into the big three and track and field.  But that’s not true of everyone, just as it has been throughout the history of the iron game, there have always been folks taking up weight training purely for it’s own sake (or perhaps got into it secondarily through sports and then decided to skip the sports bit).  And those groups have traditionally been teenaged males and somewhat older adults.

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Teens or Adults: The Goal is Always the Same
Honestly, both groups, teenagers or adult 20-30 somethings (and again here I’m focusing exclusively on males) tend to get into weight lifting for the same basic reasons: to get jacked, buff, look better naked or hopefully attract the opposite sex.  Usually all of those.  It’s not until folks hit middle age that exercise for ‘health’ becomes a relevant goal to most people.  It’s all about appearance for the grand majority who join a gym.

It’s not even as if most are pursuing the iron game from a competitive standpoint.  And even if they did want to compete, powerlifting and bodybuilding are much easier to pursue, get into, and get reinforcement from than Ol’ing ever will be.  Why spend a year training the OL’s so that you can go lose to a 15 year old when you can just buy a bench shirt and add 100 lbs to your max?

But that’s still ignoring the fact that most don’t go into the weight room with any goal of competing.  Here’s some trivia for the day: most steroid use among weight trainers is by folks who never intend to compete.  They take drugs simply to get stronger and/or more jacked.  It’s purely for appearance and is the same reason that plastic surgery among males is on the rise (see: pec implants, ab contouring, calf implants and butt implants). 

And in the post-rise of bodybuilding, rise of the machines, rise of the commercial gym culture, the Ol’s simply don’t fit in with those goals (ok, fine, complexes got popular for fat loss for a while).   The Ol’s don’t really accomplish those goals well anyway.   Until you’re good at them, the Ol’s aren’t good for building strength, any muscle they build tends to be in pretty specific (and uninteresting to American lifters) muscle groups and, simply, there are faster and easier ways to accomplish either goal.  The Ol’s are too hard to learn and too hard to do compared to exercises that give more immediate results.

This certainly isn’t eased by the lack of facilities or coaching but, even if they existed, most wouldn’t care.    Hell, most aren’t even aware of the sport unless it happens to be an Olympic year and they accidentally turn on coverage during the 37 seconds that Ol’ing is being featured.  

The only magazines that talk about OL’ing are niche publications read only by the lifters themselves.  Even PLUSA can be found on the newsstands sometimes (though Greg Everson briefly published his Strength and Power magazine which covered them but it died quickly for a lack of interest and titties).  Mention Ol’ing as a sport to most people and all you get is a blank stare most of the time (before they ask you how much you bench).

Because about the only time the average gym trainee will even be remotely exposed to anything related to the Olympic lifts is when it’s time (about one or twice a year) for the mags to run a ‘Why You Should Be Doing Power Cleans’ article or features some athlete on the cover who says they are part of his routine and folks figure that doing them will make them awesome like that athlete.  So Men’s Fitness or whatever will run an article and show an athlete performing some abomination of a power clean, describing the movement in a way that makes anybody who knows the lifts die a little bit inside.

And then for about a month, every commercial gym is infested with guys doing horrible, horrible looking cleans with inadequate equipment until the next super secret exercise for freaky mass and fat loss shows up next month.  The Ol’s don’t make you big and they don’t make you strong until you’re good enough at them to use some decent weight.  Why bother with these stupid ass things you can load 8 plates per side on the leg press and take creatine?

Of course, there are exceptions, as the numbers of lifters clearly attest to.  Where do they come from?

OL’ing for the Upwardly Mobile White Guy
So who are the adults that get into the sport of Olympic lifting at either a competitive or non-competitive level?  Often they are ex-athletes, who learned the lifts as part of training for their sport who then moved on from football or basketball and decided to devote themselves to lifting.  They often have the general physiological propensities for the sport but are either starting late or having to unlearn a lot of bad habits (see my comments below).

Usually it’s adult males, perhaps they pursued bodybuffing or powerlifting earlier in life and got fed up with its inherent silliness.  They may have started delving into the history of the sport, gotten into the old school cellar dweller movement as a reaction to the silliness of the mainstream gym world, whatever.  Usually they are a bit older (mid to late 20′s or late 30′s, past the time when there is the monstrous drive for BIG GUNS TO GET CHICKS although, let’s be honest fellas, it never goes away) and get interested in this other activity.

They often come from that same middle class white stock that fuels cycling, swimming and speed skating and I had to think long and hard to understand why the latter three sports succeed and OL’ing does not given that commonality.  And the best explanation I can come up with is simply one of age with kids in swimming and speed skating invariably starting pretty young.  Which is crucial given the technical and feel demands of those sports. 

And while one might argue that the lack of coaching (it’s abundant in swimming) might hold skaters back, the fact is that even if you’re doing some stuff wrong, if you do it for 20 years, you get pretty good at it.  And speed skating is weird enough to let some folks get away with stuff at the highest level (Chad Hedrick was certainly not the prettiest skater) so long as you’ve got a motor, ice feel and corners.

Cyclists often start a bit later but the sport is notoriously non-technical (tactics are another story).  The learning curve for cycling is about 10 minutes or so and the training comes down to ‘ride lots’ because it’s low impact and your joints don’t fall off when you start drilling 400-500 mile weeks. 

If you have the genetic propensity (VO2 max for example is massively genetic and many are born with a higher Vo2 max than others will ever achieve with training), you can start seeing pretty early success in the sport.  It’s not unheard of for cyclists to start approaching the highest level in a few years of consistent training if the talent and drive is there.

But that doesn’t apply to adults entering Olympic lifting.  Assuming no bad habits to break, the technical demands of Ol’ing are just as high as swimming or speed skating (another reason I wanted to discuss both).  Learning basic technique may not take long but the nuances and mastery (especially in the snatch) may take a decade. 

And strength/power sports have that age cutoff since peak strength/power is around the mid-20′s.   Even a sport like cycling is more forgiving since endurance guys often peak later in their 20′s or early 30′s.  A guy starting cycling at 18 or even 20 still has 10+ years to fully develop.

But from the standpoint of high level Ol’ing competition, if you haven’t gotten under the bar by the time you’re 15 or so, you’re not going to make anywhere close to the top 99% of the time.  By the time you’ve put in your 10 years, you’re far past your peak of power production.   Even if you start at 15, you’re still going to be facing kids who started when they were 5 and have twice as long as you do under the bar.  That’s an insurmountable disadvantage.

That’s on top of greater difficulty developing the needed mobility and flexibility, feel and fearlessness to do the Ol’s when you’re starting older.  It’s the same reason it’s hard to learn gymnastics as an adult: your adult brain rebels against throwing yourself into the air upside down.  Kids bounce and don’t have that fear response, they learn backflips as kids and it’s no big deal when they are teens.  The same applies to Ol’ing and many adults simply won’t commit to the lifts because of that fear response.

Which brings me full circle to talk about kids and lifting.  Because, as it has always been, teenagers (or even pre-teens sometimes) often get into lifting for various reasons.  And, given the demands of the sport, the age issue and the time under the bar issue, they are what’s required to find potential US champions.  The sport needs lots of kids entering the sport.

I Believe That Children are the Future
Realistically, the sports needs kids starting young to have any chance of getting the time under the bar that they need to master the lifts.  But kids don’t usually join commercial gyms and are only exposed to whatever sports they get access to in school.  And outside of a handful of programs (at least one high school in SLC had a small OL program that took kids to competition), OL’ing as a sport simply doesn’t exist at the high-school or collegiate level outside of individuals who may pursue it for their own reasons. 

About the only time athletes at those levels are exposed to the OL’s is in training for another sport like football.   And there the coaches are typically incompetent, teaching a bastardized powerclean that is more of a power reverse curl.   This is what cleans look like most of the time in this group because the goal is just about moving the most weight (you see the most amusing rationalizations for downright shitty technique from strength coaches who are simply too lazy to learn how to teach the movements properly).

This isn’t universal, sometimes you get someone who can coach the lifts and takes the time to do so but that’s like finding a virgin in the senior class of a Catholic girl’s school: it’s more of a Platonic theoretical construct than reality.   And from a recruiting standpoint, even if you could take some of the high-school kids who were ‘taught’ the lifts and convert them to the Olympic lifts (which would make them start caring in the first place) they’d have so many bad habits that you had to fix that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

The same holds more or less at the collegiate level, many strength programs use the Olympic lifts, some teach them competently  but most do not.  And, as I said above, there are some athletes who come out of collegiate athletics to pursue Olympic lifting.  But if they graduate at age 23, that gives them all of 1-2 years before they’re past their peak.  It’s just not enough to break their bad habits and allow them to master the movements.

Mind you, this goes to the idea of development and having one in place.  I’m really not in a place to comment heavily on the USA Weightlifting federation or what it is or isn’t doing.  The impression I get is that it’s doing very little for the developmental end of the sport.  But that’s just reality, you can’t develop what there isn’t to develop in the first place. 

You could have the facilities and train the coaches and have the development program and all for what?  To train the immense numbers of absolutely NOBODY who shows up.  Because they are busy doing other more interesting stuff like trying to get big guns and bench the world to impress girls/their buddies.

Because this isn’t like a niche sport like cycling where development was relevant because there were athletes involved in the sport who had the potential to get good (at least at the Olympic or national level).  The kids pursuing cycling weren’t being pulled into other more interesting activities the way that teenaged kids in the weight room are being pulled towards bodybuilding or powerlifting or what have you.

Exceptions That Prove the Rule
It’s worth mentioning exceptions to the above which sort of makes the point: some of the US’s top lifters did start young due to some odd circumstance or another.  Casey Burgener comes to mind; his father Mike has been teaching Olympic lifting since before Dan John was born (read: since the dawn of recorded time) and Casey was brought up in the sport and trained properly from a young age because of it (this is not unlike many speedskaters, swimmers or cyclists whose parents had been involved in the sport and passed down both any genetic propensities along with interest in, love for, and support for the sport).

Others like Wes Barnett got involved in the sport (I’m not entirely sure how he got involved) at a young age and put in 12 years under the bar. Wes would take 6th in the Olympics after 12 years of completely self-supported training.  He lamented in the pages of Milo that he had to work 40 hours/week to make a living and then work another 40 hours/week in the gym.  I’m actually going to wait to address our current lifters and some of the issues that they face until later (probably tomorrow or Friday) so it won’t interrupt the flow of what I’m on about right now.

But again, those are the exceptions and the handful of lifters who get into it young for various reasons don’t provide the numbers needed to find a world beater.  The reality is that most teens entering the weight room are either doing it to facilitate their pursuit of the big three/track and field or bodybuilding/powerlifting.  So how do you get more people into the sport in the first place? 

Proposed Solution #1: Recruit Athletes from Other Sports
This is one potential solution and has been tried to at least some degree with Shane Hamman as one of the most well known.  As a 1000+ lb squatting powerlifter, Hamman switched to Ol’ing after high school and actually made a fairly good showing, finishing 10th in 2000 and 7th in 2004 before retiring.  

There is still actually much debate as to the ability to powerlifters to make the transition, there’s been a long-held belief that excessive benching prevents them from ever achieving the mobility to truly master the overhead lifts but this may just be a leftover of some old ideas about training (some Olympic lifters in the modern era do bench pressing as a limited assistance movement for general upper body whatever though they usually do it in a fairly loose and explosive style).

Certainly there is potential here but keep in mind my previous comments about the role of limit strength and such in Olympic lifting: it’s relevant but clearly far from the whole picture (Hamman’s back squat is far in excess of anything that a top Olympic lifter would do and they still outlifted him).  Starting late, his technique was never going to get to where it needed to be before he hit that age 24-25 peak.  Again, this is a place where you’d need to start them young to have much of a chance.

But this isn’t like speedskating where what you do on the ice and what you do in inline are fundamentally similar on a lot of levels (technically and physiologically).  PL’ing and OL’ing are distinct sports, only sharing the squat (and PL’ers usually squat very differently than OL’ers) and with the deadlift looking kind of like start of the pull.   The speed of movement is totally different, the neural demands are totally different.

Even in other sports, trying to convert a great athlete at a later date often fails.  Consider Lance Armstrong’s marathon performance (he didn’t have the decade of running specific training to convert his aerobic motor to the movement) or even Jordan’s failed attempt at baseball.  Converting other athletes only works if they have a similar physiological background or they have some innate capacity to pick up the new activity quickly.  And that last bit is key for the OL’s if you’re not starting guys when they are 5.

One possibility that occurs to me here is gymnastics.  It’s a large sport (of predominantly middle- and upper class white folks) with a large enough junior and collegiate level for there to be lots of athletes.  But many can’t cut it past high school (they can go into cheerleading just like football players).  And they are invariably explosive as hell.  In this vein Kim Goss used to recruit female OL’ers from the ranks of gymnasts who had gotten too old for their sport. 

Mind you, female gymnasts are past their prime at age 14 and often looking for something new to do, you can convert them and get them 10 years under the bar by the time they are 23.  Male gymnasts usually don’t give up the dream until college when/if they can’t cut it. So the development period would be a lot shorter.

Gymnasts are already fearless, have amazing flexibility and typically have levers that are at least close to what might be ideal for OL’ing.  Perhaps more importantly they always have just amazing body awareness and proprioceptive skills.  If there is any group that might be able to pick up the nuances of OL’ing technique more quickly than average it might be this group simply because of their background in movement.   Anybody who has trained a gymnast knows that you can tell them ‘shift your weight back 1/4 inch’ and they will know exactly what you mean.  Get a gymnast out of high school and you might just turn them into a lifter before they peak out at 23-24 years of age. 

Of course, there is a final group, one that is tremendously underrepresented in the sport of OL’ing (dominated by pasty white Europeans), which America has in large number, a group that would appear to have a propensity towards speed, power and explosion.  A group from which several of Americas recent top finishers (i.e. Wes Barnett and Kendrick Farris) are members of.  That group is, of course, blacks of west African descent. 

I suspect that if there is potential for US Olympic Lifting to succeed, that success may reside here.  It’s unfortunate that neither Barnett or Farris were able to medal this is a place where a single winning athlete might have started a tradition in the sport, a tradition that has simply not existed to this point.  But I’m not sure how the sport would go about getting folks involved.  

The relative inexpensiveness of equipment would be one facilitating factor (you could outfit a basic facility relatively cheaply compared to some other sports). I am aware of at least one group Inner City Weightlifting that may be working towards this.  Perhaps like the Philadelphia swimming program, something might come out of this.  But OL’ing is competing here against the monstrous draw of the big three and track and field which have something that OL’ing hasn’t had since the 1950′s.

And that’s incentives which is right where I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 9.

So having looked at the events that allowed us to be dominant (tho again some think that the US Golden Age is more a myth, just a function of the competition being lower which allowed the US to get away with what they were doing), let’s look at what was going from 1960 forwards.

Make no mistake that a lot was going on and I can’t possibly cover everything. I’d point folks to Bud Charniga’s 6 part series again for a truly comprehensive look at what was going on in the sport both in America and elsewhere, I’ll just try to hit some high points. And the following isn’t meant to be in any sort of order of importance (or even necessarily chronological order though I’ll try to sequence it right), this was all sort of developing at the same time.

A Rule Change in 1964: Thigh Brush Now Ok

Again I want to thank site reader Josh for contacting me to remind me about this, I was aware that this rule had changed but wasn’t sure when it was and didn’t realizes that it coincided quite so nicely with the US’s downturn in the sport. To understand this and why it had such an impact on the sport, I need to explain one of the technical rules of the sport which was this.

In the early days of the sport, one of the rules was that the bar couldn’t actually touch the legs. I don’t know why this rule was in place and it doesn’t matter but this was part of the sport. Among other consequences, this meant that the bar was held slightly in front of the body and, due to that physics thing again, it change the nature of the lifts considerably. First and foremost it slows down the lift since the lever arm relative to the axis of rotation is longer. Secondly, it ends up requiring more upper body strength to control the bar (since the bar is ‘swung out’ from the body).

Lifters often find out both the hard way when a heavy weight gets out in front of them, suddenly a lift that should be easy and quick becomes much slower and harder (as well the bar is put out front of the lifter making it more difficult to keep the bar path right for a proper catch). In modern lifting, keeping the bar close is a key part of technique for the grand majority of lifters.

In 1964, this rule was eliminated and the bar was allowed to brush/touch the thighs which basically reversed all of the above. The bar could be kept in closer, increasing movement speed. It also decreased the reliance on the upper body both for stabilization and pulling (you might have noted a lot of arm pulling in the video of early lifting I posted a few days back) and put the emphasis onto the legs and lower body for generating power. It would cause a major shift in the approach to OL’ing going forwards and was likely as much a key in this as anything else (especially given American fascination with a jacked upper body).

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The Rise of the Europeans

It was about this time that, having rebuilt from the war, that the Eastern Europeans were really able to put their effort into sport for their own political goals (as discussed back in 2007 when I started this series). Among other things they would start to throw resources and people at the sport but I already talked about that in a previous section. As well, they started really looking at the sport in terms of technique, optimization, and what was needed to succeed in the sport.

In terms of technique, the focus started to shift more towards speed, especially in how quickly lifters ‘switched’ from the pull to the squat under. Americans had always more or less muscled the weight up, focusing on pulling the weight high to get under it. Europeans started to focus on what is now known as speed-strength and the rapid switching.

So rather than take time trying to pull the bar up, they focused on just pulling the bar high enough and then getting down under it as quickly as they could. You can see this clearly in some of the videos I posted last week. These guys spend a heartbeat at extension (and many don’t even quite get there) before flying under the bar for the catch. And since it’s way easier to move your relatively lighter body down that it is to move a heavy bar UP…..

Mobility and flexibility were also emphasized since it allowed lifters to move more quickly without their own bodies getting in the way (mobility also allowed for the deep squat position to be hit more easily, and the deeper you can squat under, the lower you have to pull the bar; another benefit).

In terms of training, slow grinding movements were avoided for the most part (or at least used in a very limited degree) since it wasn’t found that those carried over to the more dynamic movements terribly well. This was demonstrated both empirically and in research (Charniga examines a lot of the research on the carryover from maximal and limit strength to speed strength in his articles sourced below) where various lines of research pointed away from high-tension, pseudo-isometric work and towards much more dynamic explosive work for optimizing the qualities required for OL’ing success.

I imagine that a big help in this regard is that the Eastern European countries were coming at the sport from a purely OL-centric standpoint. That is, recall that the US had come at the overhead/Ol’s from a background of physical culture, maximum strength and hypertrophy. That was what they knew, that was what they liked (because it appealed to the simple, appearance obsessed lifters), that was what they did.

Ol’ing for Americans was just part of the overall goal of being strong and jacked and this was reflected in the training of the top stars which was a mix of maximum strength, bodybuilding and some OL practice. Many Ol’ers would spend a good part of the year just bodybuilding or strength training and then jack in the OL’s when it was time to compete. But Ol’ing was just part of the overall package.

In contrast, the Europeans didn’t have that background since they weren’t coming out of a niche subculture for rich white people. They were looking to go to the top of the sporting world for political and ideological reasons and their focus on OL’ing was part of that. But for them, OL’ing was it’s own activity and they approached it from the standpoint. Basically they started with a fresh slate and built from there, developing training methods and philosophies that only served the purpose of improving the OL’s.

The goal wasn’t to get strong and jacked and then hope you’re OL performance went up; it was to optimize your OL’ing with everything else as a purely secondary goal. That was especially true for the snatch and clean and jerk but even in the press which was still contested, the Europeans were treating it more as a speed lift. Whether this was a cause or an effect of relaxed judging I can’t say (I’m sure Charniga addresses it). But they were approaching it from a speed of movement type of way.

I’d also note that some of their early research found an inverse relationship between pressing strength and the snatch; if you improved one the other got worse. Which was a good indication that maximum/limit strength and speed of movement were at odds with one another.

They also came at it from a far more centralized viewpoint due to the communist/socialist nature. The title of Charniga’s series “There is No System” is really referring to the fact that the American system of training didn’t exist. There was no central philosophy, no central idea; it was just as decentralized as everything else in the US. Lifters sort of did what they did, or did what they liked, or did what other lifters were doing and hoped it worked.

We just threw people at sports and let them work it out. And that got us pretty far in certain sports. Especially the ones where we had the sheer numbers (i.e. baskeball) that a lack of system didn’t matter at the end of a day (throw enough people into any system and someone will rise to the top). But Olympic lifting was a niche activity in the US without monstrous numbers, there was no system of training or coaching or anything.

And against countries that were investing massive resources and manpower specificaly towards that goal, it got us into trouble. That was on top of treating sport as a profession (while Americans were hamstrung by the amateur rules) and having their athletes train full time at levels that were heretofore unimagined. Training frequencies and volumes went up and the majority of it was dedicated to movements that enhanced the OL’s specifically. And, effectively, these countries were just mobilizing every resource they had into optimizing performance in this one sport (along with others) on top of focusing on winning at the Olympic level.

And as soon as it happened, their lifters started to jump ahead of the Americans, their results started to improve, they started to win medals and set record after record.

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The Fall of the USA

And this change in the climate of the sport was reflected as US lifters started to lose ground fairly rapidly though their results during this period indicate to some degree what we were doing wrong. Because while our results in the press stayed fairly high early on, our results in the quick lifts rapidly fell behind the European nations. It was obvious that the focus on maximum strength that had ‘worked’ to this point was no longer working except in the one lift that relied heavily on it.

And for reasons discussed at length (I’d say ad nauseum but I am in no position to criticize) by Charniga in his series, the US was resistant to accepting reality. They were working from the standpoint of what had ‘worked’ before and weren’t going to change. This was what I was referring to yesterday that American success would end up being part of their downfall: what they had done before had put them on top and they saw no fundamental reason to change their approach.

But there were other apparent factors such as good old fashioned inertia and the fact that coaches just tend to hand down what they personally did to their charges (see also: American football and how long it held onto outdated conditioning ideas). The guys who had been successful in the 50′s were coaching the new breed the same way that they always trained. They didn’t know any other way. And it’s not as if anybody really knew what the Europeans were doing, the information just wasn’t available.

But as big of an issue is the fact that Strength and Health was still the dominant magazine for disseminating information about training and the Olympic Lifts just as it had been for damn near 3 decades. And here the commercial interests of the magazine got dragged into it (this is where capitalism can go awry, when commercial interests are more important than the truth).

About this time, Hoffman was on a big push for his new isometric/power racks; he had done work with some athletes that just generated what seemed like amazing strength results and it was in his commercially best interest to keep pushing that. What was left out of the early reports on such amazing strength gains was the fact that they had also test run a new compound called Dianabol. Not recognizing the profound impact of the drug on gains (or preferring to downplay it because it wouldn’t sell racks), it’s impact was minimized or simply ignored.

Hoffman heavily pushed functional isometric training as the key to strength gains, in as little as a couple of minutes per day, pressing against the pins of the rack, you could get strength gains that he was certain would push American lifters back to the top (it didn’t hurt that he had a financial benefit to be gained by pushing this). And he pushed it heavily as the solution to our Olympic lifting woes because he was still working from the base idea that maximum strength was the key to performance.

That, coupled with American lifter’s focus and enjoyment of pure strength training kept OL’ers training the way that they always had: some bodybuilding work to get jacked, a focus on big strong muscles throw slow work, functional isometrics. Occasionally working on the OL’s and not understanding why they couldn’t keep up with the countries who were focusing solely on OL’ing as it’s own sport. And starting to train with progressively higher volumes and frequencies in very specific types of work (if I have space I’ll try to briefly discuss some of the primary training ‘schools’ before I finish).

Effectively the sport was changing, the Europeans were focusing on speed of movement and higher frequency work in the Ol’s to improve technique in the lifts while the US were doing what they had always done: training the Ol’s a few times per week and doing a ton of maximal strength or isometric work. Physiques were changing already, with a shift to a leaner lighter look (and the big boys were just chubby). And Americans, still confusing appearance with performance couldn’t understand it.

This is even reflected (as quoted extensively by Charniga) by writer’s in Strength and Health commenting that the guys dominating the OL’ing stage didn’t look muscled at all; to an American mind these guys certainly didn’t ‘look’ like lifting champions. And they seemed fixated on that rather than on the fact that these ‘unmuscled’ guys were setting record after record and handing them their ass. And didn’t make the connection between what they were doing that wasn’t working and what they had always done. Their guys were buff and strong as hell but they were getting ass kicked on the platform by guys who didn’t look the part.

They just chalked up European success to ‘working harder’ (see also: the Puritan work ethic that I talked about before) and certainly that was part of it. But it wasn’t even remotely all of it. The sport had changed and American lifting had not changed with it. But that wasn’t all that happened because 10 years later, a host of other stuff would occur that would continue to degrade the US’s previous performance and lead us to where we are today.

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The 70′s Were an Ugly Decade, An Ugly Ugly Decade

I’m no historian as I have proven throughout this series but I’m going to throw out a handful of different things that happened in the 1970′s that probably signalled the final death knell for Olympic lifting in this country.

At least one that probably deserves mentioning was the rapidly increasing stupidity in terms of payment for professional sports. Here I am truly no historian but it seems that about this time the incentives for playing the big three were starting to grow and grow (and I’d make a correction to an earlier part of this series: steroids were already prevalent in football in the 70′s, not the 80′s as I previously stated. Thanks, Glenn).

That alone would serve to dilute any potential talent away from Ol’ing, not that most interested in the team sports would have been pursuing OL’ing in the first place. But as the money got bigger, the incentive to really pursue one of the big three got bigger and bigger. Today, it’s just moronic the amount of money guys get paid to play a game.

And while there were certainly a ton of other things going on socioculturally (think the 60′s and flowerpower, the 70′s and Vietnam, etc), I really want to focus on three big things that were happening in the US specifically in terms of gym culture that I think drastically impacted on the sport of Olympic lifting in this country.

Because even in the 60′s, the US was still trying. Sure, it was trying with totally outmoded ideas of training, technique and the rest but it was trying and still hoping that it could return to its former glory. It was just failing and couldn’t come to terms with why. But going into the 70′s a number of things would occur that truly destroyed the sport in this country.

The Press is Dropped

As I mentioned previously, the press was always one of the big focus lifts for US Ol’ers for reasons I talked about yesterday. And to at least some degree it had been the press (along with being able to muscle the clean and jerk to some degreee, especially before the thigh brush rule change) that had put them ahead. Simply, you could give up a bunch of kilos in the snatch (a more technical precision lift that required a lot of practice; hence: something that Americans weren’t interested in) and just make it up in the clean/jerk and clean/press.

But in 1972 even that potential advantage would be lost. The Europeans had already reconceptualized the lift as a speed lift as I mentioned above although part of that had to do with some of the judging issues. They could make it a speed lift because judges were letting more shit slide in the lift. And as that problem kept getting worse and the press was becoming a standing bench press, the solution was to finally just drop the lift entirely. And suddenly one of the biggest advantages that US Olympic lifters had had in the first place was now gone.

And now the US lifters were totally screwed in competitions. They were still using outdated training and methods (spurred in part by what I talked about above) and now the only lift where it might have helped was gone. They had already slipped in the quick lifts and that slippage was just magnified when the remaining strength lift was removed.

But there was still more going on about that time that signalled the final death knell of the sport in this country in my opinion.

The Rise of The Terminator

The first was the final mainstreamization (is too a word) of bodybuilding, an action that can be attributed to two names: Joe Weider and his protegé Arnold (no last name needed). Weider was in the process of creating his empire, based around magazines, equipment and supplements. And Arnold was the perfect poster child. Joe took this unknown Austrian kid and helped to turn him into an absolute superstar.

As I mentioned yesterday, previously bodybuilding was looked askance on as a cult activity for self-obsessed narcissists (who were probably gay). It didn’t make sense for grown men to do nothing but get big muscles and then primp around in their bathing suits covered in baby oil. The majority wanted nothing to do with it. And Arnold made it ok. Or at least more ok than it had been.

He was clearly no poof, he kicked all kinds of ass in his movies (and the 80′s were a decade of massively muscled superhero action figures), he made the activity ok for the mainstream to be interested in. Americans were even willing to overlook the fact that he was from Foreignland ™. His personality and sheer force of will couldn’t be ignored.

Arnold would win his first Olympia in 1970 and make his first movie the horrible Hercules in New York in the same year. A couple more flops would follow before Pumping Iron produced in 1977 showed people that bodybuilding was more than just a bunch of weirdos in their bathing suits on stage; these guys were hardcore. And while the OL’s are fun and all, who wouldn’t rather get this out of their training?

Finally, in 1982, he would shoot to stardom due to Conan the Barbarian and his fame would just continue to increase. He became the face of the American action hero, another true to life (and bigger than life) action figure. He’d even be elected to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness in an attempt to stem the (then new) rise in childhood obesity.

Like Pre before him and Lance in the future, Arnold just had that same force of will character that made people pay attention. He succeeded at everything he put his mind to; I have no doubt he’d be elected president if he were allowed to run. Arnold took the American mind by it’s ears and made it listen to him talk about coming and coming and coming from bodybuilding training. And they listened. Along with this was a change in how people looked at training.

Previously, bodybuilding had been done in addition to maximum strength training and with the overhead lifts as part of the relatively non-specialized physical culture movement. Certainly some, bodybuilders of the 70′s and 80′s often did a clean and press but that would rapidly disappear as ‘modern training methods’ were developed that were focused solely on bodybuilding to the exclusion of anything resembling actual strength, power or ability. The insurgence of anabolic steroids into the sport, which allowed guys to train in a fairly silly fashion (compared to what had gone before) helped with this; why grind out sets of 5 with monster weights if you can just pump it up and take a pill and get jacked?

And the American lifter, which already had that ‘I want it all and I want it now’ mentality grabbed onto an activity which not only fed into their ‘form over function’ mentality but also their need for immediate gratification now that it was suddenly ok to do. The supplement industry, which had always existed, really came to the forefront thanks to Weider. Muscle gain and fat loss was as easy as buying the newest concoction and that’s a whole lot easier than training.

Competition was also changing for those that didn’t just train for personal or vanity reasons as along with this was the development of the IFBB under the hand of Joe Weider. Previously bodybuilding was run by the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) and bodybuilding had height classes; as well the clean and jerk was part of the score which forced guys to train it to one degree or another. Weider threw that out and the Olympic lifts, which had been part of gym culture for decades slowly started to slip out of the training of the day.

And seeing a marketing opportunity in all of this the magazines changed as well. Even Strength and Health had been downplaying it’s Ol’ing coverage. Hoffman stated that a mere 0.5% of the 200,000 readership he had were Ol’ers and he knew that the money was in the masses. OL’ing was on the way out and bodybuilding was on the way up.

Soon magazines like Muscle and Fitness and Flex would change the landscape of lifting ‘literature’. Whereas kids getting into the activity in the 40′s had seen images of big strong men lifting weights overhead, the focus shifted to getting huge, and jacked and buff by using the Weider methods and pumping it up from all the angles.

Much of which was spurred on by….

The Rise of the Machines

At about the same time Arnold was mainstreaming bodybuilding was the first major development in gym technology and that was the development of exercise machines, primarily Nautilus as developed by Arthur Jones. His first machine, the Nautilus Pullover would be sold in 1970 and the gyms, such as they existed, would never be the same. Jones was a consummate salesman, running ad after ad in magazines to sell his product.

He claimed results from miniscule amounts of training (compared to what the bodybuilders were doing) due to his focus on High Intensity Training. He had his own mouthpieces, bodybuilder Mike Mentzer being the most well known who claimed to get the same gains in muscle mass from short intense workouts as the others were getting from their hours in the gym.

This happened along with the development of the first commercial gym chains such as World Gym and Gold’s Gym, both started in California (where, honestly, most of this was really going on). Previously, when gyms existed they were dank dungeons populated by cellar dwellers (a term still used by old school purists) and filled with the most basic of equipment. Basic barbell training was all that was done for the most part.

But with the development of the mainstream commercial gym (because the money is ALWAYS in the majority) and the rise of machine training, coupled with the new focus on bodybuilding as a totally separate identity, gyms started to change. People wanted fancy machines and America is all about style over substance.

Barbells and chalk and noise and grunting scares away the masses which is where you make your money in a capitalist society, the quick lifts were dangerous and exposed owners to liability and made all that awful noise when the weights were dropped. Numerous companies would jump on this bandwagon producing endless lines of fancy, easy to use machines.

To get the most money means making training easy and simple and that meant doing away with the platforms and bumpers and filling your gym with machines where the hardest thing you do is pull a pin on the stack and then pump until you come. Even the remaining bars and racks and plates were unacceptable for the overhead lifts; it’s rare enough to find a bar that spins well in a typical commercial gym. Bumper plates? Forget about it.

The Rise of Powerlifting

And the final big factor that i think played a role was the formation of powerlifting as it’s own sport. Coming out of the odd lifts that I referenced yesterday, powerlifting started to develop as a competitive sport based around the squat, bench press and deadlift. And at the risk of irritating the powerlifters again let’s face facts: from a technical standpoint, the powerlifts aren’t even in the ballpark compared to the OL’s (that’s along with the powerlifts inherently lending themselves to what Americans like to do, get strong and jacked).

Because while you can learn the OL’s at a basic level in as short period of time, mastery takes years and years (it can take a decade to master the snatch, ahem). The PL’ing movements are trivial by comparison, you can be competent in a short period of time and have the movements more or less dealt with in no time at all (again, I realize that mastering current GEAR takes time but we’re talking about the 70′s when the cutting edge of gear was putting half tennis balls behind your knees).

They didn’t require specialized equipment (just a basic bar and the same plates every gym had) and America was already forming it’s unending bromance with the bench press as the key movement. Even gyms that were machine crazy could keep a squat rack and bench press in and guys could train for the powerlifts. They didn’t take much room, were relatively easy to learn and teach and most folks used a type of training that they always enjoyed which was slow, grunty strength. Comparatively speaking, the OL’s just had no real draw.

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And That Was That

And that all meant that in addition to everything else going on, the rise of the Eastern Europeans while the US stayed stagnant, what few people entering the weight game who might have pursued Olympic lifting were now going into other activities. Bodybuilding and powerlifting were both far easier to get into, there were more people, they fit into the type of training Americans liked and gave a much more immediate bang for the buck than Ol’ing ever could.

Gyms were changing towards a machine based approach as training methods got diluted by pure bodybuilding methodology and barbells and bumpers were considered old school (except to the niche) and were relegated to the corner of the gym if they were kept at all.

And the cycle was started, the number of lifters was diminishing, the ones that did exist couldn’t produce for a number of reasons, the facilities were disappearing and that sounded the death knell for the sport. Less facilities meant less lifters, less lifters meant less interest, less interest meant less coaches and knowledge development, less coaches and knowledge meant less lifters and less facilities and the spiral downward couldn’t be stopped.

Some also feel that the remaining lifters started to get into a psychological spiral of failure; their inability to produce at the highest levels caused them to start to decrease their expectations in competition. Basically, they simply gave up (in the same way that runners may be giving up when they see 10 Kenyans at the line).

Charniga points out that foreign lifters started to be disallowed from US competitions; basically helping American lifters do better. Amusingly, a similar trend appears to be occurring in American distance running with America-only events or American-only prize money. Since we can’t beat ‘em, we just won’t let ‘em compete. Like the World Series. I’ll talk about this more as I wrap this stupidity up in the next few days.

The sport, already niche to begin with became even more niche with a handful of enclaves in the country. Usually ex-lifters themselves who maintained the old teachings. All in the face of an American lifting community that simply no longer gave a fuck. It didn’t even matter that American sports fans didn’t care, they had never cared in the first place. But the lifters that had once gone into OL’ing, or at least been exposed to it, no longer were in the fact of bodybuilding, machines and powerlifting (strongman would show up later to further dilute any potential talent).

And, again, all of this was happening as the Europeans were continuing to throw endless athletes and resources and research into the sport. Powerlifting and bodybuilding weren’t state allowed sports and weren’t Olympic events, they didn’t have the big three sports pulling potential talent away for money. They were throwing thousands (or hundreds of thousands in the case of the USSR) of athletes at Olympic lifting just as the US was losing what few lifters it had had (and the ones left weren’t adapting to the changing sport).

Sources
There Is No System Parts 1-6 by Bud Charniga Again, I’d refer people to Bud Charniga’s article series on the decline of American Olympic lifting, very interesting are the bits about how American lifters just couldn’t understand why the lifters handing them their ass didn’t ‘look’ the part of why their old methods weren’t working anymore. His site sucks (it’s still in FRAMES, for god’s sake) but the information is excellent.
Farticles by Bud Charniga. I’d also point readers to articles 5-8 in this list which examine varying aspects of the OL’s along with the issue of maximum/limit strength and what role (if any) it plays in success in the lifts (Article 5 specifically addresses how the allowance of thigh brush significantly changed the nature of the lifts). And check out the URL if you’re wondering why I called it that.

And that’s where I’ll cut it today. Tomorrow I’ll look at where things stand now in the sport (almost finally answering the original question and the title of this series); if there’s space I’ll start to examine some of the ‘solutions’ that have been proposed to try and elevate the US back to a high level of importance. If not, that will wait until Thursday and Friday for the final wrap-up (I mean it).

Read Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: OL’ing Part 8.