EDIT: This post has been discussed on Mark Rippetoe’s Strength Mill here and the Functionally Fitness forum here.
In preparation for this weekend’s Yorkshire North East Open Olympic Weightlifting competition I mentioned the other week, I had a personal training session with Mark Beck my Crossfit coach on Sunday. The main aims were:
- Practice and time the warm up lifts, so that I know when to start warming up.
- Work up to my Personal Best lifts.
This is the video highlights of the session, not every lift is shown, mostly due to forgetting to start the camera! (Let me know what you think of the caption format I’ve used, I’m not convinced myself.)
There are 2 things to balance during the warm-up lifts, first is timing. If you warm up too soon, you are then left waiting for your opening lift and can come off the boil as it were. Of course if you leave it too late to start, you may not be ready to lift your opening weight. It took me about 20 minutes to get to my PB weight of 70kg on the Snatch, though there was some faffing about in that time with the camera.
The second point to consider is how many warm up lifts you do. You need to do enough to be “warmed up” of course, but not so many that you are tired before you even start your first competition lift. How much is enough is it seems, mostly down to personal preference. In addition, there is the question of whether you warm up with your opening lift weight or not?
After much discussion with Mark, I’ve decided not to. Partly that’s because I intend on opening with my personal best snatch of 70kg. That is probably not normally recommended, however I’ve been focusing hard on my technique and on making a 70kg Snatch a routine lift. As you saw I dropped the first one so I’m not quite there, but I do get it 75% of the time at the moment. Then anything after that is all PB territory. With a lift every 2 minutes or so, I plan my 15 – 20 minute Snatch warm up to be:
- Bergner style warm up with bar – 5 minutes
- 3 x 50kg (all as singles)
- 2 x 60kg
- 2 x 65kg
Obviously warming up for the clean and jerk is more about getting used to the weight and the movements rather than actually warming up your body, so there’s no bar work at the start. Again, I intend on opening with my PB weight of 90kg but will not lift that in the warm up (Clean only PB is 100kg). Here the danger of over fatigue is highest, especially as I will have just done 3 max weight Snatches. So I plan my 15 minute C&J warmup to be:
- 3 x 50kg (all as singles)
- 2 x 70kg
- 1 x 80kg
- 1 x 85kg
As the Yorkshire Open Masters is an official BWLA competition, there’s an outside chance that this competition will see me qualify for the British Masters Championships in March 2009. I need a total weight (from my 2 best lifts) of 175kg. As you can see, adding my current PB’s of 70 and 90 together only sees me at 160, so I need to find another 15kg combined. Here’s the plan, assuming I get all 6 lifts:
- Snatch 1 – 70kg
- Snatch 2 – 74kg
- Snatch 3 – 77kg
- Clean & Jerk 1 – 90kg
- Clean & Jerk 2 – 94kg
- Clean & Jerk 3 – 98kg
77 + 98 would give me the 175 total I need to qualify, however increasing my PB’s by 10% each would be a good day indeed!
