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.