Maximize Your Strengths, Don’t Minimize Weaknesses
“It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between Multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.”
We’re off to the Russ Knipp Weightlifting Championships tomorrow
morning bright and early (2 hour drive, lift, 2 hour drive back!). It’ll be Me, Roy, Chris, Celia, and Noel
competing this time.
Leslie is both driving us down and taking video, so she’s doing the hard part!
Wish us luck!
OH, and check out this great shot of Jessica Gee, one of Oregon’s top lifters, in a full clean at the American Open (that’s 92 kilos, MORE than 200 pounds!)
A nearby weightlifting club is running a level 1 coaching course on May 23rd right here in the Metro-area of Portland – specifically in Vancouver (known as “the ‘couve”). It’s being organized by Bridget Raach, and the coach will be Harvey Newton.
It’s a good certification to get if you have any interest in coaching weightlifting at any level (or if you just want a quick crash course in how to lift correctly). This includes strength coaches who never plan on coaching competitive weightlifters but would like to be better at coaching the clean and snatch to their athletes – which should be ALL strength coaches!
Dates: Saturday, May 22nd, 8AM – 6:15 PM and Sunday, May 23rd, 8 AM – 3:30 PM
Location: Crossfit Fort Vancouver, 1901 East 5th St., Unit D, Vancouver, WA 98661
Blazer’s Edge has a massive collection of pre-playoff Blazer links and articles and info from all around the interweb compiled into one place. Like this gem from Henry Abbott:
But for Portland’s meaningless Travis Diener-laced special last night,
the two teams would have identical records (Suns 17-4, Blazers 16-5)
since March 1. Meanwhile, guards who muscle into the paint can cause
Steve Nash problems on defense, and Miller does that like crazy,
especially in Roy’s absence. Big men who rebound have also wreaked
havoc for the Suns, and Camby has that potential. Not to mention, the
Blazers are not the young team we know them as. They’re Miller and
Camby and veteran tricks galore, including and especially in how they
relate to referees.
Having watched every minute of those two
teams going head-to-head all season, it’s impossible for me to see that
series as anything other than a toss-up, which is more or less how I
called it.
Two new studies add points to the Superset corner. For most of my non-Olympic Weightlifters, I vastly prefer supersets to straight sets. [a super set is: do one exercise, rest a bit, do the second, rest a bit, go back to the first and repeat. A straight set is: do one set of an exercise, rest, repeat.] These studies just confirm it for me:
Reciprocal supersets produced greater exercise kJ.min, blood lactate, and EPOC than did [traditional weight training].
EPOC stands for Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption. This is the system that causes your body to continue to burn calories long after you’ve stopped your workout (from 12 to 48 hours depending on how hard your workout session was – imagine how intense the EPOC is for Guergui Gardev in the above pic! That’s intensity!).
1. Kelleher et al. The Metabolic Costs of Reciprocal Supersets vs. Traditional Resistance Exercise in Young Recreationally Active Adults. JSCR 2010 Mar 17. [Epub ahead of print]
2. Paoli et al. Effects of three distinct protocols of fitness training on body composition, strength and blood lactate. JSMPF. 2010 Mar;50(1):43-51
You see, all serious weightlifting gyms have wooden platforms that
are regularly trod upon by sweaty athletes lifting heavy weights. Most
of the athletes have higher than average levels of testosterone which
leads to more perspiration to cool down overheated bodies. They’re
overheated because of the large amount of muscular work performed. The
sweat drips down on the wood and soaks in—everyday. So sweat soaked
wood is the basic fragrance.
Throw in some hard rubber sediment, mix it with some magnesium
carbonate, some bits of powdered rosin, and waft it over with the
active ingredients (methyl salicylate) of various topical analgesics
and you have the potent mix that combined with sweat soaked wood gives
a weightlifting gym its unique aroma.
I love that fragrance. As repugnant as it may be to some, it means
to me a place where amazing events take place as performed by amazing
people.
Blazers kicked butt against the Thunder (previously the Seattle Super Sonics – RIP). This was both good and bad. The bad is simply that it nearly guarantees that we won’t be playing the Lakers in our first match up of the playoffs (we’ve got a better shot against them then a few of the other teams). The good part is … well, we won, and we did it without Brandon Roy.
But, the most important thing about this game is that it allowed the ever ridiculous Trail Blazzer analyst Mike Rice to get in a couple fantastic quotes. Seriously, replay the game and look for both of these. They’re there:
“Bayless … Penetrating … Rudy!”
and
“Oh … Oh … Backdoor!”
The man is a quotation machine, maybe only matched by Dan Rather.
Don’t you think the vampires-are-people-too thing has gone a little too
far? I mean, the whole point of a vampire is that they survive by
sucking your blood. I don’t care if his skin glows and twinkles and he
smells like kittens and fabric softener, he’s still just a glorified
syringe. Remember the last time you had blood drawn? Yeah, me too, and
it sucked! It’s time we put an end to this nonsense: Edward, may I
treat you to a stake dinner?
The great British comedian just ran 43 marathons in only 51 days! He had nearly no experience leading up to it. He’s 47 years old. And he is more accostomed to spiked heels than running shoes.
He’s raised over 200,000 British pounds for sport relief, in the process. He had this to say before he finished:
“It’s been hell, 26 miles a day is a lot. Try that six times a week. At first the last six miles were pure agony. Then it changed to the first six miles. Then it was the middle chunk. But now it’s pretty much all the same. My feet are disintegrating, the small toes have lost their nails and they look like alien monsters but I’m told they will grow back. But I’ll make it; my body isn’t really determined but my brain is.”
The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us.
Keep laughing people. It’s the best medicine we’ve got.
Nick Horton is head coach of the PDX Olympic Weightlifting team in Portland, OR. He is a Sports Performance and Strength Coach who believes in combining hard work in the gym with a fun and relaxed attitude. He is a competitive Olympic weightlifter himself, Highland Games thrower, and a recreational softball player.
Killer Comment!
"Don't trust ... anyone who claims that you can be fit without any effort on your part. Most importantly, pay attention to what you eat, try new things, take the time to learn about what you want regarding your health and fitness and how to achieve those goals, stop being lazy about it, and for Christ's sake stop with the self-imposed guilt about it all! "
--Jessica Fraver
