Train Like A Champion
Possibly the biggest mistake I see people making with technique training is simply not investing enough time into the training itself. It’s easy to spend hours and hours searching, reading and asking about technique, technique training, exercises, corrective drills and then whatever tangential topics sprout out. Yet when it comes to actually applying that information, athletes often fall short of what’s necessary.
If you’ve been training for a couple years, you’ve done thousands of reps of any given common exercise. I find it fascinating that athletes will employ a corrective drill or exercise for maybe 30 total reps and be shocked when it doesn’t cure their technical problem. They then abandon the exercise because it doesn’t work, and move on to another one that, unsurprisingly enough, doesn’t work either in the same 30 reps. Do this for a month, and you can quickly exhaust the list of potential corrective exercises while managing to make no progress at all and becoming convinced fixing the problem is impossible.
Technique changes need to be an active and full-time endeavor. If you’re trying to change habits, you can’t relegate the work to a fraction of your training time and then forget about it for the remainder of your workouts. Every single thing that’s related to the problem must be done in a way that reinforces what you’re trying to accomplish. A good example of this is overhead position. An athlete with a terrible overhead position may do a lot of specific corrective work, but then not do anything when actually snatching or jerking to support that work. The athlete will drop snatches or jerks before even standing all the way up, warm-up jerks won’t even be fixed in the proper overhead position, and the overhead position will be only as active as absolutely necessary to not drop the bar on their head.
The point is that every single thing you do in a workout is an opportunity to improve if you choose to use it. Not approaching every training session with this intent is undoing your corrective work; you’re walking in circles—getting tired and going nowhere. To stay with the overhead example, by doing nothing more than holding every overhead lift for a second or two before dropping it and holding the bar as forcefully as possible whether it’s 20 kg or 150 kg, you’ve just multiplied the volume of practice you’re getting without adding a single repetition or exercise to your training. This is such a simple and effective thing to do, I find it stunning that I have to tell anyone to do it more than once.
For the most part, athletes should be focused on technique to the fullest extent during corrective exercises, then minimize thought to technique when performing the competition lifts we’re trying to improve. That doesn’t mean no attention to technique is paid when snatching and clean & jerking, it just means that the athlete should put in most of the work with the corrective exercises so less needs to be done when executing the lifts—generally focusing on a single issue in a session and definitely in each rep—and more energy can be put into actually being aggressive and generating force.
Habits are the product of practice, whether intentional or not. A bad habit is the product of practicing something you shouldn’t be doing. This can be anything from foil-smoking cocaine to shifting your weight back to your heels in a snatch. It’s very difficult to simply stop doing something habitual—generally you need to replace a bad habit with a good habit. For example, if you have the bad habit of dropping your jerks prematurely, the only option is to start actively choose to hold them overhead longer; you can’t simply not drop them early.
When performing corrective exercises and attempting to apply improved elements to the parent lift, always be focused on what you should be doing, never on what you should NOT be doing. In addition, don’t make the mistake of trying to correct or think about too many elements at once. My rule is that you get one before the lift starts and one during the lift. For example, prior to the lift, you might focus on generating tension in the start position with your arms relaxed; then once you start the lift, you might focus on maintaining even pressure on your whole foot until the bar is all the way into your hips. Think about more than that, and you’re likely not to do anything right. It’s far better to successfully correct one thing at a time then fail to correct five.
Finally, it’s important to recognize the importance of engaging in positive behavior and attitude rather than negativity. I mean this in the conventional new-ager sense of actually being mentally positive about what you’re doing, but also in the sense of actively doing things rather than not doing things. Instead of thinking about how stupid your habit of dropping your jerks early is and wishing you would quit missing lifts, create a new habit of holding all of your jerks overhead for a couple seconds before dropping them. Not only will this improve your lifting, but it will improve your attitude and your training experience. You can stop stressing out about what a terrible failure of a weightlifter you are, and instead take pride and feel satisfaction in your hard work to improve. We don’t need to hold hands or anything, but I can’t stress enough how critical a positive, active and engaged mindset is to success in anything, particularly something like weightlifting, which is hours and hours of often monotonous and brutal work for years at a time for only a handful of very brief opportunities to demonstrate and enjoy its effects.
Champions and successful individuals in all arenas are the ones who understand this and are willing to put in the time and energy into all the minutiae that the common person will never even notice or care about. Champions know that everything they do is important and affects performance, and never question the need to make every repetition, every action and every thought positive and aimed at improvement.
If you’ve been training for a couple years, you’ve done thousands of reps of any given common exercise. I find it fascinating that athletes will employ a corrective drill or exercise for maybe 30 total reps and be shocked when it doesn’t cure their technical problem. They then abandon the exercise because it doesn’t work, and move on to another one that, unsurprisingly enough, doesn’t work either in the same 30 reps. Do this for a month, and you can quickly exhaust the list of potential corrective exercises while managing to make no progress at all and becoming convinced fixing the problem is impossible.
Technique changes need to be an active and full-time endeavor. If you’re trying to change habits, you can’t relegate the work to a fraction of your training time and then forget about it for the remainder of your workouts. Every single thing that’s related to the problem must be done in a way that reinforces what you’re trying to accomplish. A good example of this is overhead position. An athlete with a terrible overhead position may do a lot of specific corrective work, but then not do anything when actually snatching or jerking to support that work. The athlete will drop snatches or jerks before even standing all the way up, warm-up jerks won’t even be fixed in the proper overhead position, and the overhead position will be only as active as absolutely necessary to not drop the bar on their head.
The point is that every single thing you do in a workout is an opportunity to improve if you choose to use it. Not approaching every training session with this intent is undoing your corrective work; you’re walking in circles—getting tired and going nowhere. To stay with the overhead example, by doing nothing more than holding every overhead lift for a second or two before dropping it and holding the bar as forcefully as possible whether it’s 20 kg or 150 kg, you’ve just multiplied the volume of practice you’re getting without adding a single repetition or exercise to your training. This is such a simple and effective thing to do, I find it stunning that I have to tell anyone to do it more than once.
For the most part, athletes should be focused on technique to the fullest extent during corrective exercises, then minimize thought to technique when performing the competition lifts we’re trying to improve. That doesn’t mean no attention to technique is paid when snatching and clean & jerking, it just means that the athlete should put in most of the work with the corrective exercises so less needs to be done when executing the lifts—generally focusing on a single issue in a session and definitely in each rep—and more energy can be put into actually being aggressive and generating force.
Habits are the product of practice, whether intentional or not. A bad habit is the product of practicing something you shouldn’t be doing. This can be anything from foil-smoking cocaine to shifting your weight back to your heels in a snatch. It’s very difficult to simply stop doing something habitual—generally you need to replace a bad habit with a good habit. For example, if you have the bad habit of dropping your jerks prematurely, the only option is to start actively choose to hold them overhead longer; you can’t simply not drop them early.
When performing corrective exercises and attempting to apply improved elements to the parent lift, always be focused on what you should be doing, never on what you should NOT be doing. In addition, don’t make the mistake of trying to correct or think about too many elements at once. My rule is that you get one before the lift starts and one during the lift. For example, prior to the lift, you might focus on generating tension in the start position with your arms relaxed; then once you start the lift, you might focus on maintaining even pressure on your whole foot until the bar is all the way into your hips. Think about more than that, and you’re likely not to do anything right. It’s far better to successfully correct one thing at a time then fail to correct five.
Finally, it’s important to recognize the importance of engaging in positive behavior and attitude rather than negativity. I mean this in the conventional new-ager sense of actually being mentally positive about what you’re doing, but also in the sense of actively doing things rather than not doing things. Instead of thinking about how stupid your habit of dropping your jerks early is and wishing you would quit missing lifts, create a new habit of holding all of your jerks overhead for a couple seconds before dropping them. Not only will this improve your lifting, but it will improve your attitude and your training experience. You can stop stressing out about what a terrible failure of a weightlifter you are, and instead take pride and feel satisfaction in your hard work to improve. We don’t need to hold hands or anything, but I can’t stress enough how critical a positive, active and engaged mindset is to success in anything, particularly something like weightlifting, which is hours and hours of often monotonous and brutal work for years at a time for only a handful of very brief opportunities to demonstrate and enjoy its effects.
Champions and successful individuals in all arenas are the ones who understand this and are willing to put in the time and energy into all the minutiae that the common person will never even notice or care about. Champions know that everything they do is important and affects performance, and never question the need to make every repetition, every action and every thought positive and aimed at improvement.
