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.

Fishin' in a Crawfish Hole

Developing comfort in the bottom of the squat, aka "The Hole," is very important for a weightlifter, as the snatch, clean, and all variations of the squat (back, front, overhead, and even the squat jerk, if performed) require the athlete to spend time down there.  This much is accepted by all members of the weightlifting community – athletes and coaches, alike.  Where these respective parties differ is how to build this comfort.  Some coaches prescribe exercises such as pause squats to build strength and emphasis speed for driving out of the hole, believing such work as a hand in producing heavier lifts.  This may be true, and I have several friends who advocate the use of pause squats.  Others, like Donny Shankle, for one, shun the use of pause squats, arguing they make a weightlifter sticky in the bottom.  And I can understand this line of thinking, too, especially when it comes to the clean. 

In my own training, I try to strike a balance between these two diametrically opposed positions. When performing strength-building exercises like back squats and front squats, I bounce out of the bottom as quickly as possible, for any time spent down there only robs me of kilos on the bar (and the whole point of strength-building exercises is to add weight to the bar).  The same is true for cleans.  I always seek to bounce out of my cleans.  After all, the jerk is my goat (In the event a weightlifter consistently fails to catch the bounce out when recovering on the clean, there may be a fault with their pull line, possibly a coming onto the toes or not finishing through the hips). Conversely, when performing other exercises like snatches, overhead squats, and squat jerks, I try to "stick" my lifts and hold the bottom position for a few second.  This serves two purposes: it affords me the opportunity to regain my balance, and it strengthens my truck and overhead position.   After all, I stopped “doing abs” years ago.

This approach has served me well – and I think it would work for others, too – but everyone is different when it comes to training.  What works for one person might not work for another. Experimenting with cycles of pause squats might help a weightlifter who continues to get pinned at the sticking point by heavy cleans, or sitting in the bottom of an overhead squat might alleviate fears in another.  But the only way to learn is to try it for yourself.  At worst, you will probably succeed in strengthening your spinal erectors and improving your mobility.  That's a pretty reasonable risk, if you ask me.

My words of caution are this: a weightlifter must have the prerequisite mobility before performing movements such as the pause squat.  Holding a valgus knee, i.e. an inward collapse, for a prolonged period of time would most likely, if not certainly, wreak havoc on an athlete's knee structures (ACL, MCL, etc.).  Therefore, it is essential for a weightlifter to continually improve their hip and ankle flexibility, as well as strengthen their glutes, so that a valgus knee can be avoided.  Strive to have the femur track the toe angle.

Eat Organ Meat to Grow Big and Strong

Before reading Bill Starr's seminal work, "The Strongest Shall Survive," I was not a connoisseur of organ meat.  Far from it.  My idea of "adventurous eating" was wolfing down the dark meat after Thanksgiving.  And by that point, the giblets were long gone via the trash. 

Several factors contributed to my "fear" of consuming organ meat: (1) neither my mother nor my grandmother cooked liver, heart, or kidneys for me as a kid, (2) finding high-quality product was more difficult than popping down to the neighborhood grocery store and chatting up the butcher (more on this shortly), and (3) the texture grossed me out a bit.  But I am the type of athlete who will eat just about anything if a respected coach like Bill Starr says it will improve performance. So with that, pass the salt, bro. 



 

Starr discusses liver and its many health benefits in his chapter devoted to "super foods."  "The liver acts as a storehouse for vitamins, it balances hormones, builds amino acids, it secretes bile to govern intestinal activity. The liver controls bleeding, combats dangerous clotting, fights viruses and bacterial poisons, releases energy from food, and performs an amazing variety of functions," he writes.  Starr then goes on to describe an experiment in which liver-fed rats outperformed their vitamin-enhanced peers in a genuine test "life or death" endurance – the rats were placed in a drum of water from which they could not escape, and were required to keep swimming or else drown.  While the vitamin-enhanced rats swam for an average of 13.4 minutes before they gave up, the liver-fed rats swam for 63, 83, and 87 minutes, respectively, while the remainder of the latter population was still swimming vigorously at the end of two hours.

Now was Starr ahead of the proverbial curve in touting the health benefits of liver, or was he merely regurgitating long held beliefs?

Of course it is the latter, but, to his credit, he was smart enough to recognize the success of certain practices.  Prior to the industrial revolution, the cuisine of native populations often included the consumption of organ meats.  In fact, in Steve Ambrose's book, "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West," the author, citing to Lewis' original journal entries, describes in graphic detail the eating of buffalo organs by Native Americans immediately after a hunt.  If memory serves me correctly, the natives supposedly began eating the organ meat before the buffalo was even dead (apologies for not citing to the specific passage, but it seems I have misplaced my copy of "Undaunted Courage"). 

Here in the non-buffalo roaming swamps of Washington, D.C. I have been able to procure high-quality beef liver at Eastern Market, an all-season farmer's market located only a ten-minute walk from my apartment.  For those unfamiliar with cooking beef liver, or for those just curious about someone else's preparation methods, I have provided a recipe below:

Ingredients:

Whole milk – 1 – 1 ½ cup(s)
Large ziplock bag - one gallon with zipper top
Bacon, preferably of a thicker cut – ½ pound or slightly more
White or yellow onion - one, large
Beef liver - 3 pounds, fully thawed
Garlic - fresh, one clove
Cast iron skillet - one
Large bowl - one, just about any size will do
Himalayan salt and pepper

Cooking Instructions:

Place thawed livers in large ziplock bag.  Add whole milk so that milk covers all livers.  Let sit for one hour.  This step is critical and should not be overlooked, as the milk eliminates any funky smell from cooking the liver.  If pressed for time, allow to sit for at least fifteen minutes while oven pre-heats and bacon, onions, and garlic are prepared.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Remove outer layers of onion and garlic and slice into long, thin strips (I halve, then quarter the onion, at which point I cut on a diagonal line to produce thin slices).  Garlic cloves need only be chopped roughly.

Cut bacon into approximately one inch chunks.

Once oven has reached temperature, warm skillet on moderate-high heat (I use a 7/9 setting at home), then add onion slices, garlic bits, and bacon chunks.  Allow several minutes to cook on each side.  The pieces should be about 75 percent cooked through by this point.  Remove bacon, onions, and garlic while attempting to keep juices in the skillet.  This is good favor.

Turn down burner heat one notch (6/9 for me), then remove livers from bag and place in skillet (avoid “overlapping” livers in skillet).  Season to taste with salt and pepper.  Allow to cook for approximately two minutes before flipping (this should be enough time for moderate browning, but if not, allow to sit for another 30 seconds).  Repeat on other side.  Cooking on other side will probably need less time than first due to residual heat in skillet.

Once second side is browned, add bacon, onions, and garlic back in, dispersing evenly across skillet's face, and place whole skillet in oven.  Set timer for four minutes.  Chef beware: overcooked liver is gross, and I have read it tastes like shoe leather.

After removing skillet from oven, let sit for five minutes or so.  When you cut into liver, it should still hold a slightly pinkish color.

Now, personally, I don't like hot beef liver, so I let pieces cool then pack them up for breakfasts. That's right, I prefer my beef liver as leftovers served with three-four fried eggs over easy and sweet potato hash browns for breakfast.  Save your Wheaties, this meal is the breakfast of champions.

My Public Opinion Baths



Every day I spend roughly an hour riding the D.C. metrobus to and from work.  My commute is sobering, to say the least.  As I look into the eyes of my fellow passengers, I realize this country is full of listless people.  Assuming there was a fire, it was extinguished long ago.  These people now "exist" in the "gray twilight" that Theodore Roosevelt reserved for those who know neither victory nor defeat.

My rides on the city bus are checkered with the usual suspects: young mothers, homeless men and women, day laborers, construction workers, and various working professionals, like myself. Two of these populations routinely catch my eye.  The young mothers, many of them still girls, not yet women, are often times lugging around two or three children under the age of five.  All are eating candy and drinking soda for breakfast.  Some of the older ones are already showing signs of Type-II Diabetes.  This breaks my heart, because these children stand virtually no chance of success.  Maybe a few will rise like phoenixes from the ashes, but the vast majority will not, and these are the ones who will continue to perpetuate the downward spiral.

The other population that draws my attention are the "blue collar" workers, the construction guys, the day laborers, etc.  These men and women inspire me day in and day out.  Though low on energy, many are justifiably exhausted from working two, or even three jobs, all while struggling to raise a family in one of the country's most expensive cities.  Who am I to complain about lifting some weights, or working a 10-plus hour day?

Even as I write this post, a pungent "aroma" of ammonia, a smell derived from human urine, and cigarette smoke is wafting through the bus, courtesy of the homeless woman sitting in front of me.

President Abraham Lincoln used to call receptions with "average" members "of our whole people" his "public opinion baths."  And although Lincoln supposedly heard a number complaints from citizens on "utterly frivolous" matters, he nonetheless concluded these receptions were critically important because, in his own words, " . . . I have but little time to read the papers, and gather public opinion that way; and though [these receptions] may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty."  With the utmost humility, I share President Lincoln's view that if one only interacts with a small handful of people their views will, as he said, become "arbitrary."  Against this backdrop, my public opinion baths give me great cause for concern, but rather than leave me depressed, they serve to reinvigorate me and challenge me to exemplify the changes I want to see in the world.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19^th century French political thinker, who wrote, “ . . . a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to is individually weak; and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens.”

Strickland Syndrome

 

"Far better is it dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure . . . than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

 -- Theodore Roosevelt

It goes without saying that failure is part of life, but most people never experience full-fledged failure because they never committed themselves – mind  body, and spirit – to their goal in the first place.  And it is easy to understand why.  Far easier is it to stand on the sidelines and say, "Well, if I had tried as hard as him (or her), I would have done just as well or maybe even better."  That's the definition of cowardice, in my book.

I call this "Strickland Syndrome," named appropriately after my sophomore year college roommate.  Anyone who saw him, or watched him swim, could tell this guy "had the goods." Vested with all the physical skills one needs to be great in the sport of swimming – tremendous size, a beautifully efficient stroke, and good “feel” for the water – Strickland never reached his potential (and that's putting it mildly).  Part of the reason for this was Strickland suffered from an inflated view of his own "talent."  Sure, he had some skills, but not nearly enough to coast through practice every day and still win multiple All-American honors.  The other reason for Strickland's underachieving was his unwillingness to give a damn.  Apathy was the comfort blanket, which allowed him to "pack it in" when times got tough, both in training and in the biggest meets.  As a result, he had zero tolerance for pain.  Zero.

I've always been the opposite kind of person, the one willing to sacrifice or endure pain.  This approach, however, is not without fraught.  Most people can't handle my intensity or single-mindedness of focus; sometimes my wife is even taken aback, this after five-plus years of living together.  But I've come to expect this from people.  In college, some of my teammates laughed at me, called my goals "outrageous," and ridiculed me for my subtle self-motivating tactics.  Whatever.  The clock never lied, and I learned to let my performances do the talking.

More recently, I've learned that life is full of "has beens," "back in my day-ers," "just wait till your my age-ers," and "if I had your talent-ers."  Yeah, guess, what?  I don't give a shit, and I would have kicked your ass back then, too.  Go home, and tell yourself whatever you must to fall asleep.  And sleep well, for tomorrow, when you roll over, I will have already been hard at work for several hours.

I will end this post the same way I started it -- with a quote.  "Anything in life is worth over doing, moderation is for cowards."  Thank you to our Navy Frogmen, and their families, for their service.

Just Eat More Broccoli: A Rant Against Needless Complication

"I hope my wife remembered to get more toilet paper at the grocery store..."

For whatever reason, our society has shown, and continues to show, a tendency to associate "complicated" ideas with higher orders of intelligence, while at the same time dismissing "simple" ideas as the mere daydreams of amateurs.  This post will attempt to strike back against such thinking.  In other words, simple trumps complicated.

Well thought out programs focus on only a handful of concepts for the athlete: (1) training the body as "one piece," (2) minimizing their chances for injury, (3) building strength, and (4) improving mobility.  Other concepts like building aerobic base or improving balance coordination are secondary in importance, only because most athletes reap these benefits to a sufficient degree through the previous four.  You think me wrong?  Attempt a 20-rep max back squat -- if you have never given the "window maker" a run before, try it with 70-75% of your one-rep max – and check your heart rate. I would venture to bet its north of 170 beats per minute. The same basic concept applies to higher rep, combination movements, like front squats and push presses (i.e. thrusters), power cleans and push presses, power snatches and overhead squats, etc.

Athletes who require a more developed aerobic base, such as swimmers, track athletes, rowers, speed skaters, etc., should build this capacity primarily through the practice of their sport, but supplementary conditioning at different times of the year could also come in the form of burpees (shudder), KB work (snatches, clean and presses, getups, swings), or intervals on a rower or airdyne (shudder, again).  In the absence of sport specific conditioning, supplementary work could indeed prove beneficial, especially for the layman.  This conditioning would be shorter in nature, less than ten minutes in total length as a rough benchmark, but very high in intensity (expressed in terms of heart rate).  Conditioning at this high intensity level carries many benefits for the athlete and layman, alike: (1) it builds confidence, (2) provides an opportunity to simulate the "suck" of racing/competition for athletes, and (3) develops efficiency at lower heart rate levels.

Improved coordination and balance are other concepts that can be addressed through barbell strength training. Higher skill exercises like snatches, cleans, jerks, and their respective power variations will develop levels of improved coordination and balance that will carry over to other everyday tasks, like dance classes (I know this from firsthand experience).  Two good KB exercises for improving balance are the getup and the Romanian Deadlift.  Both could be incorporated at the end of a workout or on an “active rest” day.

Throwing together a random set of exercises – like half squats on a BOSU or bizarre med ball exercises – in a "secret sauce" type of “matrix” might convince a novice of your "expertise," but such complication only reveals a lack thereof to the educated.  No, sets of five in the back squat are not imaginative.  No, eating more broccoli will not land your diet on the front page of the New York Times “Lifestyle” section.  But at the end of the day you will be both stronger and healthier, and probably more so than the vegan balancing on the BOSU ball over in the corner.

 

PS - I love this post from Justin Lascek over at 70sbig.com.

 

http://70sbig.com/blog/2012/08/a-part-of-me-died/