posted on January 13, 2020
This past weekend Union Fitness had our first ever Olympic Weightlifting seminar. I realize that most of our lifters are more accustomed to the power lifts and their variations, yet I have always been amazed by great Olympic Weightlifters. If you have any free time please watch Pyros Dimas and consider that he won 4 Olympic medals in weightlifting. Consider this as we age as lifters. Olympic lifters don’t tend to last as long as us powerlifters so his feat of strength is amazing.
We were very lucky to have a good friend of Union Fitness, Cameron Davidson come in and speak and teach the lifts to about 20 of us who were not afraid to try something new. Cam is a strength coach at The Pennsylvania State University where he works with volleyball and men’s ice hockey. Cam has also been a competitive Olympic lifter for more than a decade and coached many other weightlifters. His best lifts are 140 snatch (308 lbs) and 175 clean (about 385 lbs). Clearly, we had a good person to show us how to perform the lifts!
The first hour and a half were spent in the classroom with Cam and he went over the finer points of the snatch as well as the clean and jerk. Cam is a true technician when it comes to leaves lifts and made so many points that I didn’t even consider.
Biggest take-homes were;
Stay full foot as long as possible.
Learn to move your body around the bar.
Know when to be violent with the bar and when to be patient.
Most of us stink at these lifts.
After the hour and a half in the classroom, Cam brought us to the weight room where we went over the lifts from top to bottom. I will caution anyone who wants to try Olympic lifting- don’t do it if you are also training for powerlifting. The two styles of deadlifting are too different from one another. The weight room time really opened my eyes, and I believe others as well, on how technical these lifts really are. If you are interested in learning more about these lifts contact us and we will do more work with them. If you are not I still recommend you watch some great lifters and see the similarities as well as the difference in different lifting styles.
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