Finding What Works

Those of you who have worked with me over the last year here in Colorado know that I'm fond of saying "Do What Works." The Olympic lifts are very technical and we spend a lot of time with each lifter correcting and perfecting technique. Strength and speed of course are two other main ingredients in this sport, but in my opinion it is meaningless to separate technique from strength since technique is the means by which strength is expressed. While there are certainly some hard and fast tenets of weightlifting technique (keeping the bar as close to your body as possible for example) there is no "one true way" to snatch and clean and jerk. There are just too many variables in body types from person to person to successfully impose one way of doing things.

I look at it this way: on the one hand there is an "ideal" technical template we coaches arrive at and use for reference. And then there is the individual they are coaching with all of their particular physical idiosycrancies. More often than not, the ideal and the real are at odds. The art of coaching is finding the happy medium between what you know works in theory and what is going to work for the individual you are working with. For example, you can't force someone built like Halil Mutlu
to lift with the exact same technique as Simon Kolecki.
What I want to accomplish by reinforcing good technique is to allow the fundamentals of good weightlifting technique to be expressed, while acknowledging that the quality of movement for one person will, superficially at least, look very different than the same quality of movement of another person. Rather than attempt to mash someone into a rigid technical box, I attempt to help that athlete find and do what works. Mutlu will never sit up straight in the bottom of a snatch like Kolecki and it would be a mistake to think he should be able to. So which lifter has the more perfect technique? It's a meaningless question.
A young lifter I've known and watched progress over the last 6 or 7 years recently posted some videos on Facebook and he has given me permission to post them here. Dan Gorelik is a tall, rangy lifter. At 6 feet and 85kg class he is light for his height. Most lifters Dan's height are in the 105s, maybe 94s. Dan told me when this video was shot he weighed in at 79kg...so he is barely out of the 77kg class.
Dan has great technique and gets the most out of his frame with it. You will notice he has a very wide clean grip and widens it out even further for his jerk.



Here's some video I took of Phil Locker, also an 85kg lifter cleaning and jerking the same amount as Dan. Phil has just moved up to 85s himself, but is shorter in stature than Dan with different limb and torso lengths and proportions. He can use a more conservative grip and split because he doesn't have to move the bar as far as Dan does, either in absolute or relative terms.The results of these two lifting styles are the same, but the technical issues are resolved very differently.

The results of these two lifting styles are the same, but the technical issues are resolved very differently.