The year was 2016, and Crossfit Norwalk was hosting its 2nd ever Crossfit competition. That year I had decided to throw my hat in the ring and duke it out with some excellent athletes from some other gyms. After the first event of front squats and C2B pull ups, I was sitting in third place and I knew I was in the mix for a shot on the podium. However, the second event was a test of strength, and my main competitors were all stronger than me….and I knew it.
The event was a snatch ladder. If you don’t know what that is, it works like this. There’s a line of barbels going across the entire gym. The first barbell is 135lbs, the next barbell is 145lbs, the next is 155, and so on and so forth. These barbells progress by ten pounds all the way up to 275. You have one minute to snatch the barbell at each weight. You take as many attempts as you want within that minute (so you really get around 2 attempts.) If you hit the weight you progress to the next one. If you don’t complete the lift, the previous weight you hit is your score for the event.
Luckily, the snatch is the only lift where impeccable technique counts for more than brute strength. If you have no idea what a snatch looks like, it's essentially a circus act with a barbell. The bar starts on the ground, you latch your hands on the barbell with a ludicrously wide grip, pull your chest up till your back is flat and your chest is above your butt, and then you proceed to pull that bar up and jump as hard as you can keeping the bar close to your body. If you’re doing this right your hips crack against the barbell launching it up in a straight line, and then you proceed to dive underneath the barbell at the speed of light and catch it over your head in the bottom of your squat with your arms locked out overhead. Assuming you haven’t fucked up any portion of that lift and you haven’t dropped it on your head, proceed to stand up.
As you can imagine, a lot can go wrong.
And it did. For my competitors. Two of the guys completed the snatch ladder going all the way through 275. Those guys were in another stratosphere, but the beauty of a Crossfit competition is that I don’t have to win every single event, I just have to stay ahead of the pack. As the men moved through the snatch ladder, it became clear that the 225 bar was proving to be the barrier between the boys and the men. 5 of the top ten dudes hit the 215 bar but missed the 225 bar. It was the bar to hit.
I noted this as I was moving from minute to minute at the lighter weights, calmly sipping a cup of black coffee and dialing in my technique. When the 215 bar came up I knew it was going to be a big lift, not hitting this meant falling behind a large number of guys in the competition and would effectively ruin my chance for a spot on the podium. What the competition didn’t know was that I had been religiously practicing the snatch and clean and jerk for about two years. I was the equivalent of an olympic lifter who didn’t mind doing pull ups and cardio.
As soon as I got to the 215 bar I knew I had it. The grip felt right, and it was a weight I had hit on a number of occasions. I set up the way I had a thousand times before, and stuck it. The crowd went nuts, and I knew I had secured a tie for at least 3rd place in the event. However, I wasn’t all that interested in tying, I wanted to beat these guys.
The 225 bar was a whole different kind of beast. I had only ever hit this weight once in my life during a particularly good training session. I knew I had to pour some emotion into the lift and psych myself up for it. I purposefully hyperventilated. I stomped the ground and clapped my hands together. I was the only home gym competitor so the crowd was going nuts. I felt the adrenaline pumping in my ears. I gripped that bar as hard as I could and drove my chest up out of the bottom of the lift and felt my hips crack against the bar as I went for my final pull. I dove underneath it…and missed.
It was like all the air had been sucked out of the room. The entire crowd had collectively let out a disappointed “ohhh.” I had thrown the bar over my head and missed the lift behind me. I felt one hot second of disappointment, but then remembered I still had the remainder of the minute to try again. A phrase of encouragement passed through my mind as I started psyching myself up again, “if you can throw the bar over your head then you have the power to make the lift.” It was something we always said when we missed in training. It was a technical error, not a strength one. I knew I had another shot.
I walked into my second attempt with one thought. Drive your hands UP! It was a cue to lock out the elbows in the bottom of the catch position - the position where you’re in the bottom of a squat and you're holding 225 pounds over your head like a circus animal. I waved my hands up to encourage the crowd to maximum volume. They obliged. I gripped the bar with 10 seconds left, and drove my chest up like I always did. “Drive hands up!” was the only muted thought that pushed through the roar of blood and crowd in my ears. I cracked the bar against my hips and shoved my hands up as hard as I could, locking out my elbows.
I caught the bar in the bottom of my squat - I didn’t throw it over my head this time. But I was out of balance. My weight teetered all the way on the back of my heels. I drove the bar up as hard as I could and felt my weight shift toward my toes. For a couple of seconds the world went quiet as I battled on a teeter totter to find my balance. When I finally found it, I let out a roar from the bottom of my squat position and stood tall with the bar overhead. I smashed that bar to the ground and whooped with joy. To this day it’s one of my favorite competitive moments of all time.
So I get it. Why the hell am I telling this story about the utter joy practicing olympic weightlifting can bring when the title of the article is, “Olympic Weightlifting Is for the Birds”? Am I click baiting you? Well, here’s the rest of the story.
I took 4th. I missed the podium, and the reason is simple; I didn’t have enough strength to keep up with my competitors. In the workouts with a moderate weight on the barbell I couldn’t keep up, and when the final came around with 95 pound thrusters (a light weight in Crossfit world) I couldn’t maintain unbroken sets because my legs simply couldn't handle the weight. I had an overabundance of technique and not enough strength.
When I stepped back from that competition and reviewed what I had been doing in training, it soon became very clear to me that I had spent too much time in training focusing on a lift that demanded a high degree of skill, but didn’t actually cause enough stress for getting stronger. My numbers at the time were hilarious. I had snatched 225, yet I could only deadlift 335. For anyone who knows anything about weightlifting, that is a ludicrous ratio.
So I dropped the weightlifting and slowly began to focus on the finer things in life. Like becoming an absolute meathead. Snatches and clean & Jerks were replaced by squats and deadlifts. All the extra technique work was replaced with bodybuilding movements like RDLs, Bulgarian split squats, and hip bridges. Now that I wasn’t spending so much time perfecting technique, I had time to focus on important things like the bench press and bicep curls. A neurological training philosophy was slowly being replaced by a philosophy based on simple large physical stress.
Cool things began to happen. I got bigger for one, and my strength numbers for the squat, bench, and deadlift increased dramatically. I knew this would happen, but what I didn’t expect to happen was just how much easier everything else started to feel in the land of Crossfit. Any workout with weight started to feel easier, after alI, I had more mass to move mass. All of the machines such as the Echo bike, Concept 2 erg, and Ski erg began to feel easier as well. Gymnastic work with pullups largely stayed the same because my lats were growing along with the rest of my body. Overall, I just became bigger and more badass.
Perhaps the most surprising adaptation came to the Olympic lifts themselves. I hadn’t really touched the lifts in over a year when one of my buddies goaded me into maxing out the snatch with him. I didn’t really have much to lose because I hadn’t practiced it in over a year. But as soon as I started going through my warmup weights I quickly realized everything felt way lighter than it should have. It was like someone had put gravity on “low” that day. My hips were cracking against the barbell and the weight was flying straight up. For shits and giggles I put 225 pounds on the bar just to see if I could hit it.
Not only did I hit, it was the easiest I had ever felt the weight go up. I proceeded to put 240 on the bar in an attempt for 15 pound PR. I gripped it and let it rip: no technique work, in all likelihood slow under the bar, no crowd to hype me up… I stuck the lift in a pair of vans and proceeded to stand up and slam it to the ground. My thought proceeding the lift was, “Well. This lift is useless.”
A week later, the same thing happened to my power clean. Without practicing the movement I added 20 pounds to my best of all time, and officially felt like I never really had to practice the movement again.
So here’s the deal. The Olympic lifts are cool and flashy. They certainly allow you to work on explosive power and hell, sometimes they’re just plain fun, but if you’re wondering where the bulk of your training should be spent, and you’re not competing in olympic weightlifting ...then get a heavy bar on your back and deadlift some heavy ass weight. Embrace your inner meathead, and stop chasing a slightly better lockout over head. No one at the beach cares about your olympic lifts.
You’ll be more jacked and harder to kill, which I’ll take any day over looking flashy in a gym.
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To the people who read all the way through. Thanks! Hope you enjoyed. And to the people who decided to donate to this substack, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I appreciate the hell out of it.
The pic made me laugh out loud
How interesting @FitToTeach!
I've been doing Xfit for about a year and was just wondering: why am I not stronger yet? Lol. And I have yet to have the technique down for snatches. I recently went lighter in an attempt to improve technique.
You make me consider doing a bout or season of my tried-and-true weights in the gym in order to pump up my Xfit (the explosive Xfit IS fun). Thank you for making me think I am not so hopeless, lol.