23:1 Rule.

"It is a favorite belief of mine that no student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him; it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.", Educator Charles Kendall Adams. That is a fairly apt summation of the 23:1 rule. What are you doing outside of the gym to perform better inside the gym? 

I first heard of the 23:1 rule while attending my first CrossFit certification. The theory is that there are 24 hours in  a day. Most CrossFitters spend about one hour in the gym. That leaves 23 hours to screw up all the gains you made in that hour. It does no good to bust your tail in the gym and then go out and eat HoHo's (no matter how delicious they may be) and McDonald's for your meals.

If you know you have a weakness (like posture or adductors) work on that daily. My weakness is grip strength. I have a couple of choices on how to work this. I can either, 1) spend part of the "hour" (one my weightlifting days I might spend a lot more than one hour in the gym), or I can, 2) work on it throughout the day. I chose 2. I bought a grip device that I take to work and work on my grip strength throughout the day. Maybe your weakness is your posture. You can work that very easily. Sit up straight while you're at your desk. Don't have a desk job? Work on it while you drive (or commute if you don't drive). Don't make excuses not to, find reasons to. 

"Don't pray for an easy life. Work to be stronger men."

Watch What You're Doing

Technique, technique, technique! So important I said it thrice. Proper technique ensures efficiency, safety,  and proper imprinting on the nervous system. It would be very difficult for me to try to teach proper technique of the classic lifts on a blog, but I can tell you where to look and why.
Head position plays a vital role in proper technique and overall posture. Thrusting the head forward initiates forward momentum while throwing it backward initiates rearward movement. That helps us out a little in weightlifting, but how does it really effect movements? We teach a neutral head position in the starting positions (cue would be look at a spot on the ground four feet in front of you) because flexion of the neck (looking up at the ceiling say) causes a relaxation of the erector muscles of the back. Conversely, exaggerated extension  (looking down at your feet) might cause a arching of the lower back which, needless to say, would place the lifter at a bio-mechanically disadvantageous position. Placing the head in such a manner to facilitate the lumbar spine being in placed in a neutral position is ideal.
Perfecting the classical lifts (snatch, clean and jerk) are hard enough as it is, but the lifter must also focus on proper head  position at different stages of the lifts. Rotating the head can cause the spine to rotate. Titling the head too soon while pulling from the ground can cause the bar to fly too far away from the body. While looking up at the bar at the bottom position of the snatch or over-head-squat can cause the lifter to fall backward.
Watch what you're doing. Not really. "Action of the eyes is closely related to action of the head, so it is essential to facilitate correct body or limb posture by using the eyes to guide the head into position which is most appropriate for each stage of a given movement. Generally, the neutral spine position is maintained most easily if the eyes are looking almost directly ahead and fixed on a distant object." (Supertraining  by Verkoshansky and Siff)  Fix the eyes to keep the head neutral to keep the spine neutral.
A drill to help this (and a good drill overall) is to pick a spot on which to focus then close the eyes. This will also enable the lifter to have better awareness of where the body is in space at different stages of the lift.

Practice Makes Perfect

Visualization, mental readying, focusing call it what you like, but the relationship between mind and body cannot be ignored. We've probably all heard that old saying that "practice makes perfect" or "perfect practice makes perfect", but I submit to you that "Mental and physical practice makes perfect". Let's focus in on mental readying (which fits the discussion). If we want to get good at something we need to wrap our minds around it. No one was perfect the first time they tried something ( basketball for example). Through practice and watching "film" (either games on TV or in real life) we learned movement patterns from our favorite players. How many kids started hanging their tongues out after watching Michael Jordan do it? And not just that, but they studied his style of play and started to emulate his actions. We can do the same thing for weightlifting. In this day and age of the of the information superhighway it's easy to find video of your favorite weightlifter to watch. Watch their style, their movement, and their technique. Watch someone with a similar body style. It wouldn't be quite as effective for a superheavy weight to try to emulate the style of "Pocket Hercules". 

Become a student of the sport. Watch video and then replay that video in your head the next time you head to the gym. 

Watch it, think it, do it.

Box Squats

What is the Law of Accommodations? In laymen's terms it means that doing too much of one thing will get you nowhere. We, as humans, are highly adaptable to our environment. Sometimes we need to shake things up in order to progress and move forward. Box squatting can be one method to rattle the tree.
So how do we box squat? Sit back, knees out, back arched, and head up. Ok, that was overly simplistic, but not really. When learning to box squat build from the bottom up, In this case the bottom being the lower body. We want to take a wide (a lot wider than shoulder width) stance and move the hips first and back so that we end up sitting on the box in a position that will allow the shins to be perpendicular to the ground (or slightly behind the heels if we're focusing on Glute/Ham strength). The knees are pushed outward and track over the feet. The back is arched and the head is neutral (looking straight ahead or slightly up). Pause at the bottom for a second or two and relax the hips, but nothing else. Then explode out of the hole by flexing hard with the hammies like you're performing a leg curl. Think "spread the ground apart" with the feet and knees instead of applying pressure straight into the ground. See, easy.
Don't get too hung up on the details. The bar should be place on the shoulders where it is "comfortable". If the bar is in an uncomfortable place for the lifter it will throw them off. The depth of the box will be based on the flexibility of the lifter. Ideally it will be 1-2 inches below parallel. Fill the abdomen with air (belly breath) before the start of the movement and hold it until you're standing again.
Keep repetitions and weight low while the sets can be higher. We're looking to improve explosive strength by moving the bar quickly. Once the bar stops moving quickly (either through too many reps or too much weight) we're wasting our time.
If done right (as with most things in life) box squatting is safe. One last thing to remember: most people sit on the toilet with better form than they squat with.

When Specificity Fails

Have you ever been told that the best way to improve a skill is to do just that skill? It makes some sense. If you want to improve your squat, squatting more frequently is going to be a lot more beneficial than doing leg extensions or leg presses. What happens, however, when you have a weakness that isn't addressed in the exercise you're trying to improve? Let's just say, as an example, that your hamstrings aren't as strong as the rest of your lower body (i.e., quad-dominance). So when you squat you shift forward coming out of the bottom position. Doing more squats won't fix this problem. Your quads will just compensate and carry the load that your hamstrings should be taking. Now is the time to train our weaknesses. 

How does this apply to the Olympic lifts? Maybe we have good hips and can dive quickly under a clean of 100 lbs., but we can't front squat 100 lbs. Is doing more cleans going to help us stand up with the weight? Eventually it will, but not as quickly as if we focus on the weakness. 

Train smarter to train harder.

Trajectory

Today let's spend a couple of minutes on the path of the bar. If we examine the diagram above we can see that the bar does not follow a straight vertical trajectory. The bar will start in front of the lifter's area of base (A) and as the bar rises and the knees shift rearward and straighten the bar moves over the area of base (B). The bar will continue in an flat "S" shape as it moves forward after brushing the upper thigh in the clean and the hips in the snatch. Completing the arch as it is caught slightly behind its original starting point. In examples (C) and (D) we can see faults in the trajectory that in all likelihood resulted in a missed lift. Example (E) shows comparisons of three outcomes. A miss to the front (dotted line 2), a good lift (1), and a miss to the rear (dotted line 3).
Also of note is the minimum height required to receive the bar in, this case, the snatch. The bar only need travel high enough for the lifter to dive underneath it. Due to the snatch being received in a higher position than the clean it needs to pulled higher.
Pull steadily from the floor, explode near the hips, shrug hard, and dive under the weight and you will be successful.

My first Foray

                                                                        Ivan Stoitsov
Bear with me as we're starting on this Oly blogging journey together. This will be a learning experience for one and all.