Workout of the Day:
Back Squat
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Previous Back Squats
July 9th (CFT)
May 18th (1RM)
May 1st (5RM)

Colm in Mid Flight under Coach B's watchful eye

The World According to Monsanto (Full Documentary) – Twilight Earth

A Weekend With Burg

It was out-fricking-standing, it really fired my ass up!

We travelled up quite late on Friday night, and had a brush with the PSNI en route. It was okay though, because they saw we’d a GPS.

Sat was going to be all about the Snatch, and I introduced myself to Coach B before the cert kicked off. Coach B comes from a strict Irish Catholic upbringing, went to Notre Dame, and served in the Marines, so this definitely influences his group teaching style. But in person, he’s really just a pussy cat who gets very excited about lifting.

We warmed up with some sprint drills, which isn’t that much fun when you’re in weightlifting shoes. Then back inside where Burg introduced us to the Burgener warm up and the reasons for it.

Burg drilled it into our heads that on every single lift and drill, we should watch for stance, grip, and position in all our athletes. This, like the Burgener warm up, helped me understand why everything is there. Before this, I would have usually just gone through the movements to warm up, but now knowing their purpose, I go through the warm up a lot more consciously.

When lunchtime rolled around, I took the opportunity to get Casey and Mike Burgener to have a look at my snatch. I took these from the high hang position, and Casey noted that I didn’t really have a third pull. I was getting good extension, but really hoping I got underneath the bar. So I worked on aggressively pulling myself under the bar to receive it. Coach B also noted that I’m weak at the bottom. Amazing, he’d never heard the expression ‘weak like kitten’, so we added that to his repertoire. To fix this Tom-esque weaknees, Coach had me stay at the bottom of my snatches. I’m to do this from now on, so I can develop that strength and stability down there.

After lunch, we started working from the high hang position down to Pockets – you’ll be hearing this from us a good bit – mid thigh, below the knees, and floor position. I felt this was really beneficial to me, as my start position to the second pull is never consistent, and the large amount of high rep drilling of this positions certainly worked for me. Of course, it took it’s toll on the legs as well.

Day two and we all made sure we were in our runners/vibrams for the warm up – we’d learnt our lesson. Coach B also learnt a lesson too, that fanny did not mean the same thing. He’d spent most of Saturday morning wondering why his “Fanny Whacker” exercise had gotten such a giggle from participants.

We quickly ran through the snatch from the floor with a bit of weight (twenty odd kilos) to dial in technique and make sure our drink-fueled antics hadn’t destroyed our progress from the previous day. From there, we moved on to the clean, which was a lot shorter learning progression once you got the rack position down. The one thing Coach B stressed during the clean was how wide you could go with your grip. This led to a faster turn over speed at the top, something which has definitely caught me out in the past.

This brought us up to lunch time, where I bogarted some more of Burg’s attention. After one or two cleans at 60Kg he told me I moved like him. This turned out not to be a compliment. Again I was too slow on the third pul and getting underneath the bar. Once I got this sorted my catch got a lot stronger.

After lunch, everyone was pretty tired going into the Jerk.

Now, if I have a complaint about the weekend it would be here. In Olympic Lifting circles that they’ll spend quite a considerable time working on the snatch and the clean, and the jerk is just added in as an after thought. Oh sure, put that overhead.

Granted Burg didn’t make it that simple, but this could be because I’ve had so many failed jerks (snigger, snigger) that I was hoping for some wonderful aha! moment to take place and I’d put 100Kg overhead with ease. Nope, turns out it really does just boil down to making sure my dip-drive is vertical.

Over the weekend, we were broken into groups and spent a considerable amount of time coaching one another in the lifts, with our chief coaches looking out over us. I didn’t make things easy on my coaches I have to admit, with R*Dawg and Karl Steadman (of HQ fame) having to deal with simple Colm. I really thought this part was beneficial as it both helped cement in the cues and also develop our ability to coach the lifts.

I’ve prattled on for quite some time now, and probably only told about 10% of what happened at the weekend. I for one thought it was unbelievably good in terms of value, expertise, and the lesson plan. And of course, I got to hang loose with some cool CrossFitters from across the UK and Ireland.

Let’s hope it serves me good in the Leinster Open next weekend.