Practice what you Preach: Olympic Lifts

Hello Everyone,

This past Saturday July 31st, Coach Duarte, Coach Millender, Coach Colarusso and myself had the opportunity to train at Columbus Weightlifting with Coach Mark Cannella.

Mark offered to help us improve our own lifting techniques along with learning better cues to get our athletes to improve their Olympic Lifts. As sports performance coaches, we train our athletes with the Olympic Lifts because they require: Strength, Power, Speed, Stability, Flexibility, Mobility, and Coordination. All of which are extremely important in today's sports.

Coach Mark Cannella
Power Snatch
Power Clean and Split Jerk
Power Clean with Ride to the Bottom
OLift discussion, to shrug or not to shrug
Notice how fast he explodes off the ground (it is much faster than the rest of us). How smoothly his body moves. This is what we'd like to develop in our athletes: SPEED STRENGTH. Training like this transfers well to the competition field (train fast to be fast, train strong to be strong, train speed strength to be the strongest and fastest!)

Coach Gabriel Duarte
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
Some things Coach Duarte is working on is moving through the lifts more fluidly and faster. You will notice that Coach Duarte is training for movement, not weight, he is a very strong athlete, but understands that strength is only one piece of the athletic puzzle. By training with lighter weights and focusing on his technique he is becoming a better athlete (which is the ultimate goal!).
Mark quote for Coach Duarte: "Move faster off the floor. Speed kills on both lifts. With the lower hip, the bar sweeps really nice."

Coach Anthony Colarusso
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
Coach Colarusso is working on faster speed off the floor and fine tuning his jerk. He tends to dip and drive, but not finish with the final dip.
Mark quote for Coach Colarusso: "Track your knees over your toes at the start of the lift. Drive your hips more into the weight during your 2nd pull. Keep your elbows lower on the jerk and stay back on the heels."

Coach Amanda Kephart
Snatch
Clean and Jerk
Overall speed is my biggest focus, especially off the floor. For the Snatch I need to finish with bone-on-bone and strengthen my core and posterior chain to allow myself to get taller on the catch. For the Clean and Jerk, my jerk is fine, my clean needs to finish with active arms pulling myself to bar. I tend to fall into the hole, I need to use my arms at the finish to continue to rise the bar and at the same time get myself under the bar.
Mark quote for me: "Faster off the floor on both lifts. Stretch the bar on the snatch at the finish. Pull to the bar with your fists/forearms in both pulls."

Thanks again to Mark Cannella (and Drew, thanks for the impressive lifts!) for having us down. Mark is a wealth of knowledge and I highly recommend you get to know him and Columbus Weightlifting!

Keep Training!
Coach Amanda Kephart