A Boy Named Sue

 

Straight Cash, no chaser.

Growing up I had the good fortune of swimming for tough coaches.  They recognized my abilities, challenged my mental toughness, and kept their approval just outside my reach.  Their approach paralleled John Broz's teaching that "a minnow can never become a shark."

 

But growing up this way was hard.  My innate talent lent me to swimming with high school kids when I was just 12 years old, but I was not ready physically or mentally to handle the training environment.  Exacerbating the situation were my training partners – the high school boys, in particular – who picked on me mercilessly, both in and out of the pool.  Their idea of fun after practice was pushing me in the handicapped shower, and throwing my clothes under the running water (Thank god Facebook had not been invented yet, for I may not have survived.).   Nowadays people frown on "hazing," but all of it, much to my chagrin, helped in my preparation.  To quote Johnny Cash, ". . . I grew up quick and I grew up mean, My fist got hard and my wits got keen."  I never forgot those guys, especially the ones who were mean to me, and I made sure to kick the crap out of them later in life.

 

Another dark side of my coaches’ philosophy was my feeling like an underachiever.  The best race of my high school career came at the national meet my senior year, but the most disappointing race came the following morning.  Of course my coaches harped on how I bungled my best event, never mind I swam lights out in my second best event.  This was a bitter pill for me to swallow, and it took me the better part of two years to recover from that disappointment.  My situation did not improve in college where I felt the weight of lofty expectations starting on Day One.  I went on to win 13 NCAA All-American honors, but my worst championship meet came my senior year when I swam terribly.  This was a difficult way for me to end my career, and I still suffer from swimming-related nightmares from time to time.

 

It was this disappointment that I think fueled my pursuit of weightlifting.  I did not want to end my athletic career "a loser."  I wanted a chance at redemption, and I saw weightlifting as my ticket.  Maybe that's why I have never felt a desire to compete in the sport.  Knowing that I did not end my athletic career on a low-point has been enough for me.  I've conquered my demons . . . or locked them in a closet . . .  at least for the time-being.

Weightlifting Platforms: The Dance Floors of Strength

 

An 18th century map of anciet Boeotia.  This is where the shit went down in Ancient Greece.

Warfare in Ancient Greece, circa 700-650 B.C., was dominated by hoplite soldiers, heavily armored infantry who took their name from the hoplon, a bronze-covered wooden shield that stood approximately one meter high and weighed upwards of 15 kilos. Individual hoplites formed a phalanx by standing in a series of rows with their hoplon shields overlapping, thereby allowing each soldier to protect not only himself but also the right side of the man standing to his left.  Advancing, fighting, and holding this formation amid a chaotic battle required precision and discipline.  In one of history’s great paradoxes, the phalanx formation emerged as the national tactic characteristic of the Greek poleis despite a scarcity of level, unbroken land suitable for set-piece battling.  Thus, geography explains why Epaminondas, a Thebian general writing later in the 4^th century B.C., called the Plains of Boeotia, a large fertile plain in central Greece, the “Dance Floor of Ares,” i.e. the Dance Floor of War.

Weightlifting platforms are reminiscent of the Plains of Boeotia in that success there requires both precision and discipline.  Footwork is where it all starts, and weightlifters would be well-advised to take a page out of the boxer’s playbook and jump rope for several minutes before moving on to dance with empty bar.  Jumping rope “wakes up the feet,” and gets a weightlifter thinking about moving fast in all three lifts – the snatch, clean, and jerk.  However, weightlifters should not confuse jumping rope with rolling onto the toes in the lifts, for, as Donny Shankle says, this is “the cancer” of weightlifting.  Instead, stay back, be patient, and pull through the heels. 

Wait, “dance”?  Yes.  Weightlifting is a dance more than anything else, a ballet between an athlete and the bar.  Watch any great weightlifter, and see how they move in tandem with the bar.  It is beautiful.

Several Greek poleis fielded hoplites during this time period, but history remembers the Spartans as the premier fighting force on the Peloponnesia, and possibly the finest heavy infantry anywhere in the world.  Sparta’s victories at Marathon and Plataea – plus its eternal last stand at Thermopylae – support this claim.  Sparta also defeated Athens in the Pelopennesian War, a victory that turned the polis into region’s hegemonic power.  Why were the Spartans victorious time after time?  Because they trained the hardest.  Case in point, all Spartan boys deemed physically fit for military service were sent to the state-sponsored military training school, the Agoge, at age seven, and it was there that they learned the skills, both mental and physical, required of a hoplite warrior.  Surviving the Agoge was no cakewalk, and it was not until age twenty that Spartan men were allowed to move into the military barracks and become full-time soldiers.  Their military service lasted until age forty, after which time they were held in the reserves for another twenty years.  (Fun facts: (1) Sparta was the only Greek polis without a city wall, inspiring the phrase, "Our men are our walls;" and (2) neither Alexander the Great, nor his father Philip II, ever tried to conque Sparta, fearing its marital skill and not wanting to risk heavy casualties.).

Aspiring weightlifters – and athletes of all stripes, come to think of it – need to learn it takes years to “master” their craft, not weeks or month.  Years.  Just like the Spartan warriors before them.  And channeling that inner grit on the tough days is what separates athletes over the long-run, with weightlifters being no exception.  If an athlete has ever found themselves standing alone in an empty training hall trying to lift a heavy, innate object they know what I am talking about.  It is these athletes who are continuing the dance that started several thousand years ago.

There's Something About Mary...and Fives

"Hey, you want to go upstairs and watch SportsCenter?" into my garage and front squat?



Why do I advocate fives for basic barbell movements, like squats, presses, and pulls?  Because they work.  Plain and simple.  To paraphrase Burton Malkiel, an economist at Princeton University, strength training should not constitute a random walk down the training hall floor. Instead, athletes' training should be modeled on the successful protocols of those who came before them.  And what former lifters/coaches advocated the use of fives?  The list is impressive, to say the least (listed in alphabetical order): Aita, Furnas, Gallagher, Karwaski, Koan, McCallum, Pendlay, Rippetoe, Starr, and many others I missed.  They all used fives to some degree or another.

Mark Rippetoe put it best when he said, "Fives are almost too powerful.  They should be reserved only for those who want brutal strength."  Fives can indeed be used for a wide range of barbell movements -- back, front, and overhead squats; presses; bench presses; and Pendlay rows.  Not many people use fives for the front squat, but Starr recommends using fives until an athlete can front squat 300# for a set of five, aka until they are damn strong.  Starr also calls for fives in the power clean, a recommendation some in the weightlifting community would consider a cardinal sin.  I, myself, donned weightlifting's scarlet letter by performing fives in the power clean and front squat during my last training cycle (For reference, my 5rm front squat was significantly more than 137 kgs prior to this training block  My best was 164 kgs for three sets of three).

Having never performed front squats or power cleans for fives before, I started my progression at 80 percent of my best triple in both exercises.  I figured this would afford me at least a month to adapt to the increased training volume.  The lighter weights of the first few weeks also provided me an opportunity to work on positions and speed, two points that should never be far from an athlete's mind.  Fast forward six weeks, and the fives are starting to pay dividends.  The musculature in my back has never been more pronounced, particularly through my spinal erectors, and my "yoke" is...well more "yoke-ish," albeit I'm still a ways away from Jim Wender level. A second benefit I overlooked originally was cardiovascular conditioning. Fives in the power clean can definitely get an athlete conditioned as well as help them shed some bodyfat, assuming their diet is locked down.  My rest heart rate, taken first thing in the morning, fell from an average of 43 beats/minute in Week One, to 39 beats/minute in Week Six, an almost 10 percent reduction in the absence of traditional “aerobic” conditioning.

In conclusion, I would encourage athletes to use fives in a wide range of barbell movements, including the front squat and power clean (I would, however, restrict the use of fives in the power clean to intermediate athletes who understand positions, speed, tempo and proper lifting technique, in general). Who knows, an athlete might even grow a pair...of spinal erectors that is.