Clean & Jerk
Today we’ll be working on our clean and jerks. We’ll do some skill work first, and then start loading up the bar. Yes Uncle Rob, that means the WOD and the skill work is the clean and jerk.
As part of my homework for the day, I’ve been researching weightlifting. In watching videos, I’ve been reminded of a few subtleties that it’s important for all of us to know. And that is that it takes very little weight to take a perfect looking movement, and make it impossible to accomplish. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to predict your absolute max lift, even when training is your life.
The perfect example is in the sport of weightlifting. You have 3 attempts, and usually there is around 10 kg difference between the lightest and the heaviest attempt. We do these things on a monthly basis, the professionals are living this by the minute. In watching their competition lifts, some lifters make all 3 look easy. Others make the first look it’s a PVC pipe, while 5 kg’s later, it looks like an impossibility.
Why am I telling you this? Yes, it is important to know that by adding 2.5kg to a bar is enough to make your lift fail. The margin of error is that small. In fact, we don’t have fractional plates here at the gym. They come as small as 0.5 kg. Imagine the feeling of adding those plates to the bar, and not being able to lift it. So, that feeling is common, it’s a part of the process. And just about everyone yesterday felt that attempting their crossfit total. The more we lift, the more we can feel when we are at our max. So please, log everything, there is no such thing as useless information.
Here’s a little video on one of weightlifting’s most accomplished athletes. Isn’t that what you use youtube for? Watching weightlifting and crossfit?
Wednesday 02/24/10
Clean and Jerk
5-3-3-1-1-1-1
February 24, 2010 5:00 am 
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