Barbell Shrugged - How To Target & Train Your Weaknesses W/ Mike Burgener

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have iPhones in our pockets, let alone access to the world’s information at the click of a button. Back in the day, coaches and athletes had to figure shit out on their own.  Nowadays, the fitness industry is growing faster than ever, and with that comes new innovations and knowledge around training. That is mainly due to the fact that coaches and athletes are communicating and sharing their experience more and more.  We wanted to hear from one of the top coaches in the game on this topic, so we headed over to Bonsall, CA to visit Mike Burgener. Coach B has watched this evolution occur and has been apart of some of the biggest evolutions in the sport of weightlifting and strength training.  In this episode, Coach B shares his insights into the fitness industry as it is today, and tells stories of what it was like in the beginning. We talk about why most athletes who want to go from pretty good to competitive need to start focusing on training their weaknesses. Mike shares tactics and his philosophy around getting strong, the coaches that he works with, and how he gets his athletes to the next level. If you want to learn how to break through your plateau’s and start understanding how to train your weaknesses, you need to drop in for this one. Enjoy the show, Mike  

I know we've talked before about how CrossFit impacted it, but I want to talk about how the internet has impacted it. Because until 10, 15 years ago, coaches and athletes weren't talking to each other. If somebody was in Louisiana, they weren't talking to people in California. And there was secret training programs. There were secret squat programs and snatch techniques. And people were, they actually didn't want to share, and a lot of that's changed. How did people learn how to lift, say, 20, 30 years ago? Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson and Andy Galpin.

And we have traveled to Bonzel, California, a whole 30 minutes from home to visit Coach Mike Bergner. And today we're going to dig into all the secrets of the industry. All the weightlifting secrets. We're going peel back the the curtain coach b has all the secrets they're locked away in there we're gonna dig them out i'm old enough now that i can say that right i have all the secrets well we were talking about before the show one of the things we want to dig into is uh weightlifting has gone through a big change i know we have talked before about how CrossFit impacted it, but I want to talk about how the Internet has impacted it

because until 10, 15 years ago, coaches and athletes weren't talking to each other. If somebody was in Louisiana, they weren't talking to people in California. And there was secret training programs. There were secret squat programs and and snatch techniques that and people were they actually didn't want to share and a lot of that's changed yeah how did uh how did people learn how to lift say 20 30 years ago oh if you were lucky you got uh the strength and health magazine by uh you know bob hoffman york barbell Club, and guys like Bill Starr and, you know, John Grimmick

would write articles about this great system called five sets of five, you know. And there was all kinds of ways of doing five sets of five. You could do progressive sets at different percentages, and you'd want to end up with one heavy single. And then, of course, as everybody overtrained and they wanted to do more, they would do more, and they'd do five sets of five with three sets at 80% and two sets at 85%. And then eventually ended up doing all five sets at 85%. And they really over-trained.

But it was the barbell, you know, York Barbell Club program as written by Bill Starr and that it was like the American Bible for strength training. Is this why all these Russian programs seemed so, it was mysterious and it seemed to be working and what was that like trying to, thinking about what the Russians were doing and they had all these percentages and stuff? Well, it was just something that was entirely different because met the F came out with all his counting of reps and counting of load and, and, you know, and then the, the periodization model that came out by a guy by the name of Alan ball,

who was with the Duncan YMCA and, and, uh, uh, that era. And, you know, it was like totally different and from what we knew and understand, but our only information was from the York Barbell Club and from Bob Hoffman. And it was 90% of our information was five sets of five. You know, if you do five sets of five in the snatch and five sets of five in the clean and jerk and five sets of five in the back squat and the front squat and the pulls, then you'd be good to go. And, of course, back then it was you had three lifts.

You had the snatch, or excuse me, you had the clean and the press, and then you had the snatch and you had the clean and jerk. So you had to put your program all together that was going to take care of all of those attributes. And so, you know, five sets of five seemed like to be the way to go because it was simple and it'd make you strong. But it didn't address the weaknesses that you had of the body. Isn't that an originally why Star created that whole idea of you're going to do five by five, but it's going to be the it's going to be the the power clean, the overhead press and the squat.

Right. And that was like the American football version of it. And I've heard, I don't know if this is true, or maybe you can tell me if it's true or not, that originally his first hope was to do the overhead press, and people were kind of nervous or scared about that. So then he said, fine, the incline press. And that didn't work, so they said, fine, and it devolved to the bench press. But because that's what was, you actually needed to do that,

because the way you performed the clean and press was to basically lean backwards and press it. So the bench press was very sports specific at that time. Yeah, the Olympic press, which is, I think, a great exercise personally, but it was basically a push press without bending your knees. But you would end up squeezing your abs together and thrusting that weight up and then leaning back into it and so the bench press was very very important for us to get strong and we did incline benches as well but just not as effective as we did with the bench press and some of the pictures of guys doing that are pretty extreme like with it i mean they're they're locked they're locked knees but they're like they're like way back here, pressing the weight, and then they would stand up and drop it.

And they'd stand up through it. Exactly. It looks like they're – I don't know the exact term, but they're – I don't know if cheating is the right word. Like you see that, you'd be like, oh, like no one's ever going to count that lift. Like how is that even a thing? Or they're going to obviously hurt themselves or fall over backwards even. Some of the guys they're really good at were really extreme.

Yeah, and I was pretty good at it. That was my deal, that I could clean and press a lot of weight. And, you know, it wasn't strict military press where you put your heels together and just pressed it straight up and down with no back laying. It was actually you got to – I ended up learning how to – actually learning how to press from Russell Nip, who was an American record holder in the clean and press. I actually learned how to crunch my abs together and squeeze my butt together

and drive that weight up and then re-bend underneath it without re-bending my knees. I feel like most coaches, if they walked into a CrossFit gym or a weightlifting gym these days and they saw someone do a clean and press where they leaned back like that that they'd be like what are you doing in here like how are you even allowing that like it was it was it was so different than than how we perceive like a regular push press these days yeah and it was different and uh of course you know today's standards are you would you would never do that kind of thing you know it's just yeah uh it's just not it wouldn't be acceptable you know what you were talking about you were engaging your your glutes and then your abs were you sending like

a wave of energy up your spine essentially and then letting it explode to your hands yeah when you think about a push push where you actually bend the knees and you thrust it up and you drive it up with those legs and hips getting that acceleration on the barbell well you did the same thing but i would explode this up by squeezing the glutes, squeezing the abs, and then it would be boom. And, you know, it would come up through here. And then the bar would probably, just like the dip in the drive, we'd get about, you know, a little bit above the head.

And then I would time it where you would drive your hips forward and push your body back under the bar. Yeah. And then of course you'd have to stand up and hold the weight overhead. And the signal was, is that once you clean the weight, you'd have to get set. And then the referee in the front would give you a clap go.

And then at that point you could drive the weight, you know? And so there were different ways of getting set. Some, some people would sit back and get set, and then the referee would give the clap sign, and then he would drive up and go from there. I stood up, and then I got that little rebound,

which was as long as the knees didn't bend, then it was okay. Do you have any idea what roughly the percentage would be between the clean and press and the clean and jerk? Like the clean and jerk I would think would be a much higher total or much higher lift and then compared to that what are people pressing well it depends on who the person is i mean the same for you yeah the same for me what ended up happening i could clean and press the same as i could clean and jerk because i was hampered by the clean and of course and i was too stubborn to work my weakness, which was the clean. Yeah. You know, you'd think that, okay, well, okay, dumbass.

If you're cleaning and pressing the same as you're cleaning and jerking, you obviously need to work on that clean a little bit. Why didn't you do it? Because I didn't have a coach that knew what the hell they were talking about. Yeah. And we all did the same workout. There was, okay, you're going to do my workout, you're going to do my workout, you're going to do my workout, and I'm going to do my workout.

Guess what? But your needs are different than my needs, so your workout should be different. But no one back then even thought about that kind of stuff. Yeah, and you were talking about, I was calling it a wave coming up your spine because I've witnessed recently, you know, I think a lot of times in sports training, we think about drive with the hips, really solid back, don't let it move at all. And then that directly transfers the energy. But I've been seeing some people who do use like a wave of contraction up their spine and using that in order to throw and see some people throw some pretty

heavy things really far. So, and I don't, I don't see that taught anywhere i mean i haven't been taught how to do that yeah but i've i've witnessed it at this point so i'm actually curious to see could you could you teach that now i don't know if i could to me it was intuition you know i mean i i watched fred you know fred lowe i watched russell nip and these guys were great pressers. And I'm a very visual person, so I mimicked what I saw. Gotcha. And the other nice thing that, you know, the reason I became good at it, because at Notre Dame at the time I was playing football there, and my strength coach, Father Lang, gave us goals, right?

And the goals was if you can press body weight 10 times then he would give you 25 bucks or whatever and of course this is back in the 60s so you know i mean it's like okay i can do this you know and so one goal was to hang for five minutes from a pull-up bar you ever tried that okay i have tried that yeah i'm good about, I think my best is two minutes or something like that. That's still really good. Right. And it was, anyway, so that's the way we made money. And so I became a good presser because of Father Lang and his, you know, desire to help us poor students out.

And I was one of them. And, hell, I ended up probably making, in my four years at Notre Dame, probably $1,000 off of the father line doing these goals. Of course, today you can't. I mean, it's totally illegal. You couldn't do it. But back then it was, you know, no one really cared. NCAA would be coming in.

They would be coming in. And they'd take that national championship off the books. Of course, no one lifted weights, but there was about five guys on that 66 national championship team that lifted weights. For football, you mean? Yeah. Back then, it was just Father Lang was, of all the universities that I visited to offer me scholarships, Notre Dame was the only university that had a weight room. And it was by Father Lang who put all the money into it

and raised the money for it and built all the equipment. And, of course, back then it was all freeways. You didn't have machines. I think he actually made a contraption with the pulleys and did a pull-down machine. But it was plate-loaded like the regular plates. You put it on the post. So anyway, but Eric Parsegian, who was my coach, really saw the value of, you know,

kids coming in and the high school weighing 165, 170 pounds, but he wanted them to be 185 pounds. And so weightlifting made sense to him. Strength training really didn't take off in the collegiate setting until Boyd Epley in Nebraska got it going. When does any time stick out in your mind that it really exploded nationally? Well, I think Epley was the reason why. I mean, you know, he had that, I forget the coach's name at Nebraska,

but Epley was a pole vaulter and he used weight training, as I understand it. And their football coach said that he wanted Epley to train these guys and get these guys strong. And Boyd took it over. But the real – the first strength coach in all of America for weight training was Father Lang at Notre Dame. But he just wasn't recognized. I mean, Bob Hoffman recognized him. And Bob Hoffman would him uh and Bob Hoffman

would send him barbells and he sent him a leg press one time I think it was and uh all this other stuff but Father Lang was the true you know start of I believe weightlifting in the collegiate setting you know with a 1953 you know I think it was 1953 national championships in collegiate, in the collegiate nationals. But Epley was the guy that actually organized it, got it started, and I think he was real instrumental in raising the funds at the University of Nebraska and putting in this humongous weight room. And, gosh, the Big Red, the machine, was known for their strength program.

Turns out that lifting stuff kind of works. Yeah, no kidding. Those guys got really big and strong. Big and strong and fast. And won a lot of games. Won a lot of games. Bob Devaney, was it? I think the football coach's name was Bob Devaney, if I'm not mistaken, yeah.

It'd be really interesting to go from no teams are doing structured strength training. I'm sure some guys on the team did their own thing here and there and push-ups and whatnot were still a thing back then. But if you went from all the teams in the NCAA or whatever it was, nobody's training with a structured strength conditioning program. And then one team starts where the whole team is training. There's going to be a pretty big swing in how strong that team is relative to the rest of teams uh in the country yeah well you go back and and just look at the history of it and you take a look at i mean the largest man that played on my football team was a an all-american he's an all-pro uh defensive tackle named mike mccoy he was like 6'2 and weighed 280 pounds yeah and i've never seen anybody that large uh and i mean he could run okay

but i mean he wasn't fast fast but today i mean you're looking at guys that are 320 pounds and running under five second 40s and i really believe that it happens because that we are bigger we are faster we are stronger and that is because of strength training and back then the day is that no one lifted weights yeah i mean i mean until epley comes along and then you see you see nebraska winning national championships and their offensive linemen are now hovering around you know 290 300 and and running fast uh but back in my day, you know, when I played, no one was like that. They just had a guy in the combine who's right around 300 pounds. He'll probably be the number one pick in a few weeks.

I think he was one of the third guys ever to be 300 pounds and jump over 40 inches in the vert. Oh, my goodness. Damn, really? Yeah. And you're wondering why these concussions are taking place? Yeah. I mean, you why these concussions are taking place? Yeah. I mean, you think about that kind of stuff, and that's really hard.

You know, when you think about guys getting bigger, stronger, faster, and how much change can they do with the equipment? I mean, they can make it lighter, stronger, but you have a helmet-to-helmet, which is targeting today, thank goodness. You have that helmet-to-helmet, and, and man there's a lot of damage that can if you've never been in the room with an nfl football player or at least a division one football player like you don't really understand how big of a difference it is between those athletes and your normal local really strong guy yeah like when you watch them you know snatch 300 pounds having no clue what they're

doing and you're like wow that could be 500 really fast yeah or whatever it's not 500 but you get the idea like you've seen them power clean 450 accidentally yeah geez can you get that up to your shoulders from the floor yeah it's like oh that just happened yeah how do i do it one time okay show me five 500 cool like that Like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're so big and strong. It's unreal. Yeah, they are. But it's not just football.

You take a look at basketball. I mean, the other day I was watching the March Madness, and I saw this guy from Purdue that's 7'2 and weighs 290 pounds. That guy's a monster. 7'2. I mean, it's like, okay. And those guys are, I'm telling you, I was really impressed with the play. These big guys are moving down the court, and, you know,

the point guard is now 6'7", or something to that effect. But those guys all, you know, they all lift weights. And Mike Gattone and the Chicago Bulls, you know. And he was the guy that brought weightlifting to that sport. It's exciting that we just got him back. Yeah. So he's back with USA Weightlifting, if you haven't heard that. Yeah.

So he was with Gatorade for a long time. Now he's back. So he is back. Okay. Yeah, just like a month ago. Okay. You know, so he's coming back or something like that. Good.

So that's going to be a really good thing. Him and Roger Nielsen and, you know see he's coming back or something like that so good that's gonna be a really good thing him and him and roger nielsen and uh uh you know mike and then uh there's a guy down in florida harvey newton sure they're all really really big at one time in usa whitley and i know they've gone away but now they're coming back it sounds really good yeah isn't peristymous involved now too he is he's uh he's involved i'm not i'm not exactly sure what his he's a technical coach okay he's the technical director. Yeah. I don't know exactly what that means in function, but I think, I mean, I don't know. You can speculate, but if anything, it was a really good statement by USA Weightlifting to say we are trying to get very serious about this,

and we're going to bring in one of the guys who's the best of all time. I don't know how much coaching or programming or what exactly he's doing, but that's a really cool statement on their part, if anything. I think Phil Andrews is the director of USA Weightlifting now, and he in my mind, he's done a great job. Educationally,

he has acknowledged the relationship between weightlifting and CrossFit, and how thankful he is that CrossFit has come along, you know, and made the sport more adventurous for everybody. Because when I was involved in USA Weightlifting, I mean, we had 3,000 members in the sport, you know, and I was on the board of directors, but, uh, you know, you had to pass a hat to get a cold beer for God's sake, trying to try to try to get anything done.

And then when CrossFit came along and, and, uh, started talking about the black box and I went to USA weightlifting and I said, look, guys, I have this vision that we're going to get more and more kids involved because CrossFit is going to get these kids' parents involved and the kids are going to want to be like the parents. So we're going to take these kids and we're going to develop them. They thought I was nuts because they couldn't understand why anybody would want to do 30 snatches or 30 clean and jerks, which is a name, Isabel and Grace, which is part of the CrossFit training.

And I said, it's not about 30 snatches. It's not about 30 clean and jerks. It's about getting the kids involved with these parents that are going to be going crazy over this CrossFit. And they thought, again, they thought I was nuts. They said, you're going to ruin your career. You can't do this. This is stupid.

And then three years later, they're just like, okay, well, maybe there is something. Because those kids they they came into the other right hell the parents came into weightlifting yeah and they would want to go into do weightlifting contests and if you've ever been to a weightlifting contest it's the most boring thing in the whole world i mean you have the first lifter out on the platform and all of a sudden that first lifter who comes out lifts the lightest have the first lifter out on the platform, and all of a sudden, that first lifter who comes out and lifts the lightest weights, that first lifter is getting cheers. People are yelling for it. Good job.

You can do it. You know, they're just going nuts over this stuff. And it's all CrossFitters. The CrossFitters are lifting in weightlifting contests. And the stands, instead of having only the relatives at the meet for this kid. We couldn't even get our family to show up to our meet. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, how many meets did we drive to? In fact, I remember one we went to in, I want to say Chattanooga. Chattanooga. Or something like that. And I think I had to lift at like 105 because the only one in my weight class was a 14-year-old kid or something. I'm like, I don't want to get gold and then have this 14-year-old kid get silver. So I'm going to one of the fun. Or get silver.

There's that option too. Whatever. That was the real fear. There's no winning in that example. I actually looked for contests that didn't have anybody but me in there. So I would get the gold and then somebody would say,

well, how many people, how many lifted in this meet? And I said, said oh about 60 there's only one in my class i never said that but that that's that's been the revelation and now you take a look at you know phil andrews and he's seen this and he's cat you know capitalized on it i mean there's like 15 000 members of usa weightlifting now the last three years in a row we've had 150 at our spring meet. Wow.

Which is going on next weekend. We'll have another of that probably again. We have to cut off registration now all the time. I want to go back to the five sets of five. At what point did that become not a thing? I'm switching gears. There's a hard left we're taking. At what point was everyone doing five sets of five

and then someone thought maybe we should do something different? As I recall, the avenue of that switch came with a guy by the name of Valen Ball, which is the Duncan YMCA. And he brought us all up. We were at Notre Dame, and I went to the University of Kentucky and got my master's there. And we all came together and we would just go to different clubs. The Duncan YMCA, which is in Chicago and was an easy drive for us, had a plethora of information because that's where Bob Guida started. Alan Ball, you know, started coming in.

He would lecture us on this new concept called periodization and he did it by putting the date of the national championships here in the center and then he started drawing a big circle and around it and the farther away you were from the circle the more volume that you would do at a low intensity high volume low intensity right so that's all of a sudden you're getting three sets of ten four sets of eight five sets of six and you would you break down the cycles and you'd put a dot in on this little well i don't know what they call that thing but you know there's a start and you know 15 weeks 20 weeks away there's the end that's what you're going for and you'd want to hit maybe six

weeks out you'd want to hit a particular number and so you'd be on a high volume low you know low intensity until you got to this point and in between there you would reduce the volume and increase the intensity until that date a week before that date you would hit very very low volume and very very very high intensity and people started making pretty pretty good gains but you know as as we continue on with this quest there's nothing wrong with five sets of five today i still like going to five sets of five but i've learned that for me that if i'm going to put my athletes on a very heavy duty strength cycle then i can't expect those athletes to do very very well in the olympic lifts at the

same time what i can do is i can give them a heavy duty strength cycle and then every day or every other day they do a very very light five sets of three at 30 percent of the the snatch and the clean and jerk just so that they can keep the movement patterns going. Right. You know, and that's, I found that that's really been important for our development. Yeah, I mean, I noticed over the years that my squat and other things may go up, and usually when my squat is going up big time, my snatch and clean and jerk is staying the same, especially with the snatch has even gone down. Right, yeah. And then letting another cycle run through of training

and then having more focus on the lifts and then watch those go up. And I think a lot of athletes don't have the patience because, you know, a cycle might be 12 to 16 weeks. That means half the year you don't feel like you're getting stronger. Yeah. Well, you know, I like to look at, you know, my son Bo is the guy that really talked me into this style of training. And he would be, he would go up to, you know, John Welburn's place up in,

and John, of course, is a big proponent of Louie Simmons. And, of course, everybody in my world thought Louie, you know, they thought him being a great strength coach for powerlifting. But in reality, he is a great strength coach, in my opinion. And he really has taken – I can take my athletes and send them to Louie. And with the instruction that I'm going to have you snatch and clean and jerk with just the bar, you know, after every workout. I just want to keep those patterns going. And then, Louie, you can do whatever you want with it.

You're going to identify the weaknesses of him, which is typically posterior chain in his mind. And so he'll work with them really hard, and then my kids are still doing the snatch and clean and jerk with just the bar. And they come back and they make humongous gains. So, you know, for me, that style style of training which is what we never did before we did the five sets of five you know type situation for everything and uh the weakness style of training you know if i'm weak in this particular area i need to train that particular area how i

get to that turning area is going to be pretty much high volume you know low intensity that moves into low volume high intensity that's the way we're going to do it but i like to think of today that we now take the athlete and uh if he deserves five sets of five then that's what he gets but that's only because he deserves it because that's his weakness and uh today you know it's it's much more scientific than it was back in our day and like you alluded to earlier you know, it's much more scientific than it was back in our day. And like you alluded to earlier, you know, the Internet comes rolling around, you know, and all of a sudden you've got, you know, people that are emailing back and forth. And I can remember the first meeting I went to with the NSCA and some guys in there talking about emails. And I'm going, the hell's an email?

I didn't know what an email was. And he's talking about this. And I'm going, what the hell is an email? I didn't even know what an email was. And he's talking about this electronic letter that you get. And I'm going, how? Where does it come from? It doesn't have a postage thing on it? I mean, I was totally oblivious to this stuff. And now I can Google whatever and YouTube whatever, and I can find out whatever I want to find out about, you know.

Well, there were quite a few coaches that still, as information was becoming free and readily available for everybody, I remember watching that happen, and then a lot of coaches still trying to keep their things secret. And then you could go find, go download a spreadsheet somewhere and go, oh, I got the system. I got the system. Yeah.

But the system was never geared towards the weakness of the athlete. Right. And that's the bottom line. You mean the small off squat program doesn't work for everybody all the time? Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. I mean, and I get this all the time can you send me a program you know they can go to my website and get a free program you know and crossfit weightlifting gives you a free program but that's a very generic program it's it's geared for very general

you know the very general person but if if i was going to coach all five of us in here all five of us would have different programs because we're not going to have the same strengths and weaknesses you know so you you look at you know maybe maybe and it's going to have five sets of five you know uh it's just my personal philosophy that i'm good five sets of five in the back squat but i'd never do five sets of five in the front squat i do five sets of three i've done 10 sets of three but that's very generic and it's only my philosophy and i freely give that away because i think there's a lot of ways to skin a cat and they all work but you know some are going to get skin better than others and and depends on what my needs are as an athlete you know and that's what program i should be given so you, you know, in our cycle right now, we've got a very strict cycle going.

People are loving the cycle, but I'm giving them dumbbell bench presses, trap bar deadlifts. We're doing all this kind of stuff. But then day two is nothing but snatching, cleaning, jerking 20%, 30% just to keep those movement patterns going. And they seem to like that. Now we're going to come off of that in about six weeks. It's going to be a six-week cycle.

We're coming off that, and we're going to go right back into the Olympic weightlifting cycle. How far out in advance do you program typically? Typically, it just depends on the competition schedule. You know, I mean, when I look at, you know, my favorite cycle is a 16-week cycle that deals with four four-week cycles the mesocycles and it basically follows a a very generic type of template number one is i'm going to do a classical lift i'm going to do a classical pull i'm going to do a leg exercise i'm going to do an overhead exercise and i'm going to do a core so there's five components within that template

and I can manipulate that template any way that I want to manipulate it based on the information that I'm given through your strengths and weaknesses in my evaluation of you. So week number one is always going to be a little bit more volume. So I'm going to do three position snatches as an example. I'm going to do snatch pulls. I'm going to do front squats with snatches. Why? I just like it that way. There's no scientific background with it. It's just the way that I've always done it. I'm going to do some kind of front squat. You know, typically with the snatches, I like the front squat or an overhead squat if I want to.

And then I'm going to do a core movement. And my core movement can be back extensions with a weight, you know. It can be stiff-legged deadlifts versus romanian deadlifts because there's two different exercises there so again it depends on the person that i'm dealing with if i've got a really weak posterior chain then you know i've got to really be careful because the front squat and the stiff-legged deadlift could be an overtraining method that i i don't want to implore in that athlete who has a weak posterior chain. Let's take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how to find

weaknesses. Okay. All right, we're back. We want to talk about finding weaknesses. So I think, you know, there's, I think most people get in weightlifting or they're crossfitters who get, you know, then over to weightlifting. I imagine that everyone's doing a lot of these big general programs like what we were talking about in the first half. And are there common weaknesses that end up emerging from people doing, you know, the same types of programs? I think so in CrossFit, you know, especially with I combine both weightlifting and crossfit together because that's what our course is is being able to teach teachers and coaches how to teach olympic style weightlifting to their clients in the crossfit community and that style has been used with me

even when i was a high school teacher and then it's also been used with me as i was coaching weightlifting with usa weightlifting but basically it was the identification of weaknesses comes from three components. You have to have mobility, speed, and, you know, your strength. That's basically what we're looking for. So when we look at our athletes and you start talking about, you know, that generalization of muscle dips, muscle ups, you know, handstand push-ups, where is that going to affect you more commonly? Typically in the shoulders or, you know, the shoulder joints. They're really going to be inflamed and you're going to tighten it up.

So if you don't have that, whether or not to, you you know do your mobility exercises under tension in my opinion then uh then you're really going to be put behind the eight ball you know when it comes to doing the olympic lifts so the very first thing that i do is that when i identify weaknesses of a particular athlete is it's always the mobility more than anything else so you know if i have mobility issues with an athlete then i'm going to have to address those mobility issues before i do anything else i mean if we're if we're starting to work strength or speed especially something like speed with bad mobility the risk of injury is just well it's pretty much guaranteed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very good observation. You're now going to, you know, disengage what the snatch and what the clean and what the jerk are all about.

Yeah. You know, the movement patterns of those three lifts is all about creating acceleration on the barbell. It doesn't have anything to do with the strength yet i mean of course we want to have our strength the posterior chain is really and probably 85 of american weightlifters the posterior chain is really weak in my opinion uh back in the day when paul anderson and shemansky and you know tommy cono and all these great lifters were lifting the posterior chains were very very strong and they would do back extensions not glute happen back extension but back extensions

with two and three hundred pounds on their back coming up and pausing and going back down again why do you think we stopped doing that uh i just think it becomes in my personal opinion there was just so much out there the invention of weight machines uh uh you know different exercises uh you know come about and everybody wanted to work everything they wanted to work all the different exercises instead of just sticking to the basics back extension is one of the greatest exercises in the world as far as i'm concerned you know and uh but it has to be as a stiff legged deadlift and this would be basically a contraption where you get in it's 45 degree angle you load up would you put a barbell on your back oh hell not in the beginning obviously but i mean

back in the day we didn't have glute ham benches i mean back in the day we had what those gymnastics plumber horses yeah the roman chairs yeah we well actually the the the thing that you know we had the roman chairs but what we would use is the that gymnastic plumber horse and we would go put our bellies on it in between those two uh handles and somebody would be in the back holding our legs down and we would reach down and pull this daggum bar put put it up over our head, and we'd do back extensions. And we'd go up and do back extensions and pause and put it back down again. Would you be rounding the back as you do this? Sure.

Yeah, just like stiff-legged deadlifts. You always rounded the back. You're going down, you round the back. But if you talk about rounding the back now, you can't call it stiff-legged deadlifts. You can call it Jefferson curl. Right. That's what Chris Somer calls it jefferson curl right yeah that's what uh the chris somer calls it the jefferson curl if i taught stiff legged deadlifts in my classes at the high school level i probably

would have been fired so we caught jefferson curls it seems like those are getting more and more popular these days are you are you programming those in for your athletes no any point? No, because I don't program those in at my website because I can't control it. Right. See, I want to be able to control what I program. I mean, okay, people are going to snatch. They're going to clean and jerk. They're going to pull.

We give them instruction with that. Ray Regno, who I know you've dealt a lot with, he comes up and does our little technique segments, you know, on a weekly basis, and that's really helped a lot of people. But when it comes to stiff-legged deadlifts, and I'm talking about doing stiff-legged deadlifts, I have to have instruction in that, you know, with my athletes before I'm going to program something like that for them. And that's just basically for the legality issues more than anything else. But I really believe in stiff-legged deadlifts.

I believe it's a one of the best tools that one can have and develop in the posterior chain just like just like the back extensions not glute ham back extensions you know so i love that exercise do you think guys uh you know decades ago like you were just mentioning um have a stronger or had stronger posterior chains in part because they did a lot more manual labor i think that that's a very good point i i'd probably just say yes they were just stronger overall you know as we become more technolized and you go that hard manual labor kind of goes goes away with it you know i think a lot of people spend most their day being sedentary you know whereas even if it wasn't hard physical labor people in their work were moving

around it was just physical activity was higher yeah i remember my strength coach he growing up he was he was on a farm in a lot of cases and he he bailed a lot of hay as an example and so like you go lift weights and play football and then the rest of the time he was bailing hay and he was he was commenting uh on you know the guys that he grew up training with versus like the kids that he trains now are just a world apart. It's like you come in, you play video games, you go to school, you sit at your desk, you're on the computer, et cetera, and you're not out on a farm baling hay and doing heavy activities all day long. Your base just simply isn't there in the same way.

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, the houses when I grew up were all, you know, heated with coal. And so down in my basement, my dad had a furnace that was fed by coal. And the coal would come from the center and stoke itself into the furnace, and that would heat the house. Well, one of my jobs was to get into the coal bin and start shoveling you know the coal back into the middle of the furnace that fed the or the bin that fed the furnace and so when you

think about baling hay and you think about shoveling that coal or you think about shoveling the the horse dung or the cow dung or whatever from the farm you're doing a lot of rotational stuff and to me that's one of the biggest issues that we have as weightlifters today is that we don't train how much rotational work do you do you know i mean to strengthen up that area at the core well that's a good question like with the template you laid out earlier you had a kind of a classical lift you had a pull you had some type of a leg movement like a squat you had an overhead move you had a core movement um for all the kind of extra assistance type stuff you know maybe some of this falls into the core category that i just mentioned but like for pull-ups or or rows or or anything else that's

not something that strictly falls into one of those five templatized um categories where do you program in these other things i program it in like an opposite day, for an example. Here's a big example is that you take that template, you divide it into those five movement patterns. But I can do three of those movement patterns on Monday. And I can do Tuesday, I can do the last two or even more of the core if I want to. So a typical thing for me might be to do three three position snatches snatch pulls and snatch push press well so now i got on tuesday i'm going to do front squats and

i'm going to do back extensions or you know whatever my core i want to do my box jumps would be part of my core development training pull-ups would be part of my core development training even barbell curls nowadays, you know. I mean, you see so many people with that hyperextended elbow that when they're overhead, and, you know, nowadays I will actually program that barbell curls or dumbbell curls for that athlete to try to get them a little bit stronger so that that elbow will be stronger as well, making that bicep stronger. Yeah, of course

having strong biceps and just strong elbow flexion in general is a good thing absolutely as long as you don't as long as you don't put it on a pedestal where bench press and curls is like just all you do there's certainly nothing wrong with with having strong pecs and strong biceps and like the beach muscles so to speak as long as you don't overemphasize them. Well, that's been the problem, I think, within, I'll certainly say this for me, I went through a time period where I was only going to do snatch, clean, jerk, and squat. Yeah. That was it. You know, I mean, the Bulgarian method for me made sense, but it didn't.

So from there, the snatch, clean, jerk, and squat made famous by Abidjayev from Bulgaria. You know, that was something that, well, that makes sense. That's our sport. We're going to snatch, clean, jerk jerk and squat made famous by abajaya from bulgaria you know that was something that well that makes sense that's our sport we're going to snatch clean jerk and squat well then we thought well gee many christmas what about the weaknesses of this athlete you know so now we're going to snatch clean jerk and squat and work on the weakness so we changed the name from the bulgarianized program to the americanized bulgarian program which became the snatch clean jerk and and squat and work in your particular weaknesses And that is something that I really believe in but I don't believe in it where we're going to the one rep max

Right every day on a on a daily basis, you know, I mean I believe that you can you work to that I still believe in the high volume, you know low intensity and in working on your technique and doing tempo pulls and doing tempo pause pulls at the six different positions of a snatch those positions and taking 10 seconds to get up to a final finish. It'll definitely kick your hind end, you know, and then going back down and and going back up for two sets, three sets of two reps that takes 20 seconds or 10 seconds up and 10 seconds down, 10 seconds up, 10 seconds down. It really develops that good isometric contraction too you know and when's the last time that you've done isometrics yeah i've gone back to doing some isometrics now with some of our athletes because i believe that that's one of the patterns that we

used to do years and years ago but kind of got away from it but i think there's a place for it in various lifters uh programs depending on the on the lifter yeah what would because i like isometrics for anytime there's joint pain because it's a way to keep the muscle strong and take the load off the joints and actually help them out a lot more yeah i've had some patellofemoral pain in my right knee lately and so i've been doing deadlift isometrics just bottom of the devil position just pull maximally against an immovable object and it doesn't bother my knee at all but i feel like i'm still getting some high tension in that in that bottom position yeah yeah well that was a big deal with uh that we did with you know with our lifters you know uh god what's smitty the guy that was the strength coach for bob benarski and

the guy for uh york Barbell Club years ago, I mean, he put us through an isometric pulling program where you did pulls from one inch above the ground. You know, just bar comes up and you're pulling against that immovable object. And then you'd take one inch below the knees and then one inch above the knees. And then you'd be into that scoop position and you'd drive hard here. And he would only have you do one set one set of that six second pulls maximum and you're and you're lifting a heavy weight i mean it's not

just a bar against a movable object but i mean he's got a weight on there so if you had a 300 pound snatch can't let up at all you can't because as soon as as soon as you're pulling that bar wants to pull you back down but you're really pulling hard with that 300-pound bar against that immovable object. And I will tell you right now, you go through that program, and it is like OMG. It's like, oh, you couldn't do anything. If you tried to lift too much, if you want to do two or three sets of that, the next day you were toast. You wouldn't be able to do anything for a week it was the hardest

most intense program of isometrics that carried over in a positive way to my lifting we had coach cal deets on a year ago and he has this triphasic system where it's the first set of the program is eccentric and then it's isometric then concentric and so after that show i was like you know what actually i haven't done anything isometric in probably a decade or more so we went back and did it and we probably did eight weeks or something of it and one i noticed i was terrible in a lot of those positions horrible and then i also noticed my strength just shot up of doing only the isometric portion of his program and my wife who has only been lifting for a handful of years, her quality of movement went up so fast

because she couldn't get away with little crap movements at the bottom, bouncing out of control. She had to stop, control position, and then move it. And so her technique just shot through the roof because she had to own that position to control it to be able to move it again. It was really, really good. So we actually come back to it a lot now um with a for a lot of things we've done some pause snatches and stuff like that but this was a true program if you really

want to own the position i really think for beginners it's a very good place to start i'm imagining i'm imagining doing this with an overhead squat now yeah i mean geez just like overhead squat pin you know maybe 100 pounds on a bar and then pin it and just push against that yeah well you know what i immediately go to the most difficult thing i can imagine well you what's really going to be amazing because you're going to push up on that immovable object right yeah and you've got 100 pounds on there or whatever that figure is yeah number is and you're pushing up against it and then all of a sudden you're pushing as hard as you can and what happens you start to yep you start to go down yep and it's like oh

shit i'm pushing up as hard as i can but i'm really i have nothing left right and i go down under you know so you're suggesting like a six second max i you know i don't i think we ended up doing six seconds is what i think the protocol was at the time was six seconds max hold. And we did them with bench presses. We did them with presses. I mean, we're pushing up hard against this pin. And if you take a look at the old style of rack that I have in there that Hoffman had, the York Barbell had, those pins were what? One inch away from each other.

And you'd take the pins and put them in. And you'd have a bottom pin because there was no way. You could always, you'd push hard up here and then all of a sudden you're going down, you're going down, you're going down, you're trying to push it. And you were toast. You had to have a safety catch there to do that. But there is no doubt in my opinion that that is one of the best bang for the buck when it comes to getting strength training done. And for me, anyway, the fundamentals of teaching weightlifting are stance, grip, and positions. Stance and grip are easy, pretty much.

You know, I mean, that depends on you and where you're at. But the positions, how many positions are there in the snatch? Infinite. I mean, there really is and and i identify six positions in my pulls and you've got to get strong in each one of those positions and you think about taking a 300 pound snatch that which your max is 300 pounds and you address that bar and you lift that bar one inch from the ground and you hold it there for two seconds and then you that bar one inch from the ground, and you hold it there for two seconds. And then you come in one inch below the knee, and you hold it there for two seconds.

And then you've got to clear the knees out of the way. You don't want to go around the knees, and you clear the knees out of the way, and you go one inch above the knees. Now you've got to make sure that the feet are balanced, that the shin is perpendicular to the ground, that the shoulders are over the bar, and the back is nice and arched,

and you're looking straight ahead. Those are the five points of performance. And then all all of a sudden now i'm going to start extension now i mean my knees are now going to you know my hips are going to extend the knees are going to re-bend back under the bar that's where the scoop comes in so we get that we call that the hang position we're right at here at about mid-thigh that's our hang and then you go to that scoop position which we call the down and you hold that And then you go to that scoop position, which we call the down, and you hold that. And then you go to the finish, and you hold that. Holy cow.

I mean, you're getting strong in every one of those positions. Would you pick one position per day? No, we'd do all six of them. Though, if I was doing isometrics, then I would do, today's an isometric day. You're going to do one set and get the hell out of here because that's all you're going to be able to do so maybe you would do a whole workout and then finish with that or this that would be your workout my workout and i would actually have isometrics where you're pulling up against the bar one set six seconds one inch off the ground one set six inches one inch below the knee one set six seconds one inch above the knee one set six inches hang scoop up and you know you

have to go accordingly and that would be it because i'm telling you right now after you've done that you are toast and your recovery ability is absolutely non-existent if you do more than that you'll you'll be you'll be tired for three or four days i've been there i've done it i've over trained on that so many times it's unbelievable because it doesn't seem like you're doing much until the next fricking day. And then it's like, Oh, I don't feel good. I feel some experiments coming on. Yeah. Well, I think you should try it and see. And, uh, and then of course, everybody's different, you know, everybody's ability to recovery, recover is, is, is different is different you know so we've been

playing with the same idea too for diagnostic of breathing quality so you get into these bad positions or not bad positions but you get these challenging positions you imagine the overhead squat you hold it for 10 seconds don't do it maximally but just hold it for 10 you'll notice very quickly am i breathing because if you're not then what's happening is you're doing your set of 10 or 12 or set of 30. My God. Okay, so now I can tell you very quickly, maybe your squat looks good technically, but you're not breathing, so we're not there yet. Yep.

And so it's a very quick diagnostic. So Kelly has this funny thing he's doing right now with 100 kilos back squat for a minute. Kelly started that? Yeah, holding the bottom for a minute. Holding the bottom for a minute. He's insane yeah right now we can't get there maybe it's 20 kilos for you or a bar but yeah yeah like see see if you really in his words own those positions if you can't breathe you're going to get exposed

over the course of that minute i'd say over the last year i've been doing uh not like that but i make sure to take a full breath at the bottom yeah let it all out bring it all in while maintaining position. Yeah, while bracing. Like, be able to breathe and bracing. Definitely be breathing and bracing. For sure, for sure. That's a key word right there.

Yeah, there's a fundamental difference between breathing and bracing. And if you don't understand that, that should tell you exactly what you need to work on. Right. Because I give the example all the time in my class. If you can't take your thumb, you should be able to push out. Okay, now you should be able to do that, and then you should also be able to talk.

If you're listening, what Andy's doing is he's pressing his thumbs into his sides. Right above my ASIS, my anterior spirulic spine, right, just a little bit outside of that. You should be able to move your thumb. You know, that muscle. Look it up. That's a bone. Right?

But yeah. There you go. But more importantly, you should be able to move your thumbs with your abs, and then while they're out there, you should be able to talk. If you can't, you can't breathe and brace. Because if that's not happening, at the bottom of your squat, either you're losing bracing or you're losing breathing. One of the two. Now you should be able to move those thumbs out there, hold that,

continue to talk, and now be able to go into your full squat position. And if you lose either the talk or the thumb tension in the bottom, you've probably got some some issue there good point when you're coaching athletes how do you teach them to breathe or brace or both during the lift i don't teach them anything you don't mention it all i just what ends up happening the only time i really talk about you know the the breathing aspect is that obviously and you can watch the videos of olympic style weightlters, that right before they clean the weight or right before they snatch the weight, they'll go down at the bottom and they take a deep breath in. They'll feel that diaphragmic-type breathing and they'll explode.

And they're not going to be in the bottom, at least in my observations. They're not going to be in the bottom and sit there and breathe know breathe in breathe out what happens is i tell my athletes don't let go of your air until the referee puts the light down and then you let go of the air on the clean it's a little bit different because i do the clean i stand up i get all my breaths squared away and then i feel my stomach full of air probably hopefully to the effect that you're talking about and then i dip and i drive the weight overhead and I have that weight inside my air right here, my stomach, as I recover and I hold it up there until the referee gives me the white light and then I let it down.

So we do talk about breathing like that, but the biggest issue that I talk about breathing is is making sure that I'm consistent with my technique in my breathing pattern. For an example, in the jerk, if I have an athlete that's getting ready to dip and they're doing all this stuff and they get set and then they want to go too big of a hurry and they don't brace by breathing, they collapse. And they collapse down here. Whereas I try to get my athletes to sit, brace, boom, or breathe, brace, whatever you want

to call it, and then dip and drive that goes it's going to give them a thousand one count and then you dip the same way every single time because when i take in air and non-brace i never know what the hell the dip is going to be 90 of the time it's probably going to be out front i'm going to dip forward and the bar path is going to be out front but if i can get that pattern down of brace, breathe, or breathe, brace, whatever the hell you want to say, and I expand the rib cage to make sure I have a good platform for the bar up here, and I'm an elbows down and out type of a jerker, and then I can drive from there. Yeah.

It's very hard. One of the nice things about being heavy in overhead is it becomes very difficult to do that if you're not braced in your core. Right. So as you're saying, if you're doing a lot of heavy overhead work, sometimes you don't necessarily need to tell them to turn on your core because it's going to be tough to get in that position. If you're not. And not be on. Right. But inversely, though, if you're not doing that stuff heavy, you can get away with it.

Right. Right. So, you know, if you're doing heavy clean and jerks and snatches, you're probably okay there. That brings me to a point, too, is that you take a guy like Chris Somers or the other guys that are gymnastic-oriented or this, you know, you've got to understand that it takes a lot of time to develop the technique for Olympic-style weightlifting. And it's like you've got to cover the fundamentals. You've got to cover the very general things and get strong in all those positions that we have to have. And you have to know what the positions are.

But if somebody came up here to my gym and I brought them up here and they've never done the snatch or clean and jerk and they watch somebody do it and you ask them to identify what they're doing, explain what's happening there, 90% of those people would say, well, he's just pulling the bar over his head and he's dropping under it. And it is so far. And in the CrossFit community, that's exactly what takes place. Because you think of the 40-year-old housewife that now all of a sudden has got her three kids

and her three kids are going to school and she's got her best friend who's lost all this weight doing CrossFit. And she comes in and she's got a 20-year-old, a 21-year-old coach that's going to teach her how to snatch and clean and jerk. Well, she doesn't know anything about the snatch and clean and jerk, but she's the one explaining, yeah, I pulled the bar up over my head. So the fundamentals of stance, grip, and positions, the fundamental of teaching, you know, stance, grip, and positions become absolutely paramount. You have to get those patterns down,

and you have to get yourself strong in those patterns before you actually snatch and clean and jerk. If you can do that and you can be patient with that, the coach can make it fun so it is patient, and you can do your homework at home with PVC pipe, hitting those positions and holding there in an isometric position, even with the PVC pipe, then you're going to be better off in the long run. What I'm getting out of this whole thing is setting up like one inch at a time. Absolutely. And working that position.

And because I see so many times people who, you know, they can hold a position with a PVC pipe or an empty bar. And as soon as the weight feels heavy, they just start skipping positions because they're weak in that position. And getting them to stop and slow down is a big challenge. Most people, you know, the ego gets in the way. And I think the isolation hold would be a good ego dissolution exercise. exercise well you i like what somer says is that he talks about that very thing about saying look it takes you five years to get to 50 of your capability and that's gymnastics right you know and hell i even went out and bought his gymnastics you know his first program you got suckered into

i got suckered into and guess what guess what because you can't go to one level and unless you right so i'm still at the first level the first exercise i'm starting to do crab walks again you know and it's like okay it's funny how that works you go back to it like everyone like i the last time i got that program i was maybe five years ago and now everyone you know it seems like every two or three years i'm like oh i'm gonna go look at fuck man i've gotten back in my progression again that foundations course is really good oh it really is i highly recommend it yeah it is it's really good and and you know chris does a great

job and he doesn't pull any punches why would you want to go to level two if you're not done with level one well weightlifting is the same way why do i want to go to you know level two if i can't if i don't have the mobility see so my big deal is mobility speed and strength so if i if i got my mobility down my speed is going to come anyway because i'm going to teach you how to time the pull yourself you don't drop under a barbell you don't catch a barbell you explode through the ground you know ankle knee and hip extension basically create an acceleration on the barbell then you pull your body down and around in the snatch down and around the barbell and then you punch yourself through that through that barbell and that's the critical aspect so so if i've got my mobility

i'm the speed how can i pull a barbell up if i'm off the ground if my feet are sliding out so i've got this area i've finished and now i'm going to the ground, if my feet are sliding out. So I've got this area I've finished and now I'm going to turn it over, but my feet are sliding out at the same time as I'm turning over. That's where my speed comes from, from that turnover and my feet are off the ground. Now I punch myself down underneath that barbell. If I catch the barbell, there's going to be a give there. That's catching for me sends a vision of catching a baseball catching a football you know i want to punch my body underneath that bar yeah that was a big moment for me when i realized that i need to be as aggressive with my arms and shoulders as i'm

being with my hips absolutely because and i think there was some confusion in the beginning because there was there's so much discussion around weightlifting and hip drive, hip drive or even leg drive. But people talk about that 10 times more often. They are talking about, you know, shoulder, elbow, you know, hand drive. Yeah. And then once I once I started putting as much effort into that turnover and punch up, all of a sudden it felt better on my shoulders and could do more weight sure no that that's i think that's the most important part you can i mean depending on what your philosophy is i'm a vertical hip person i like the russian polish technique uh and i really try to teach that doesn't doesn't mean that you know that the hips and the bar don't meet the

hips and the bar meet automatically it's not something that i want my athlete to do i don't want them to bring the bar into the hips but the hips in the bar if you keep that bar close to the body the hips in the bar meet and there's an actual brushing action with a vertical pattern to me what ends up having too much if i think too much hips and that gives me too much to think about it's like taking a barbell and i can be in the high elbows high and outside as i'm going underneath that barbell now what happens if i pull in that barbell and I can be in the high elbows high and outside as I'm going underneath that barbell. Now, what happens if I pull in that barbell? You're not going to get that barbell from me because it's real close and I'm real strong.

But the moment I slip this thing out at outside that least line of resistance. Now what happens? Try to pull the barbell away from me and you got it just for a second. You've got that. I'm outside my strength base out of the out of my uh efficiency pattern is what i want to say so it's very important for me to be strong in that position all the various positions through the lift i have to be strong in each one of them so i feel like if i if i ask the average crossfitter like you know what do you do for mobility or what do you do to get stronger

they would have a lot of answers for me in a bunch of categories but you mentioned speed as the third component and i feel like that's not emphasized as much what do you do for drills or or movements or or just mindset around being fast one of the and i always talk about under tension you know like stretching under tension so the burdner warm-up consists of five exercises and the skill transfer exercises. There's five of those as well. And out of that, out of those 10 exercise for those exercises have to do with footwork and speed. So that's how important it is. So, you know, when I do the Bergner warmup on a daily basis, I mean, the down and finish is speed through the middle. That's driving with the legs straight up and down. And i put that in there because i am the hip vertical philosophy guy so i put that down and finish up here where

i used to is in the very beginning of my teaching i still believe the same way but i taught everything from the hang position and all of a sudden one of my students has a video that that i have he's playing it on in my class and he sees this lifter uh you know what he sees is banging the bar off the off the hips Nico Vlad was the lifter he's a Romanian he has beautiful vertical hips but what my kids saw was banging the bar off the hips yeah and so you're in this position and now what are the kids trying to do they They're trying to bang the bar off the hips. When you have 150 kilos on the bar and you bang it with your hip, it ain't going to go very far. It's not going to go very far.

With 40 kilos, that's going to fly out from you. It's going to fly out there. He can afford to smash it pretty hard because it ain't changing the bar path much. It doesn't. It doesn't. You're absolutely correct. My daughter, Sage, is a great example. She's totally vertical hips.

You'll watch one of the videos that I have on my courses of her snatching and You'll hear the bang But I choose not to use the word bang because all of a sudden bang becomes you freaking banging it right now And it becomes you know something that I I don't want I choose not to teach them, you know, right? It's a it's kind of the ankle extension to it's like generally something you don't teach them to extend their ankle But if you do the pull right you you're going to extend the ankle. You're going to extend the ankle. So actually I have a question on the hang.

I've heard people recently talk about, and this is a point that I think like seven people are going to care about, but I don't care. I want to know what your thoughts are. All seven of you. This is for you. And that is we classically talk about the triple extension. When we pull from the floor,

the order of operations is you extend the hip and then the knee and then the ankle, right? The ankle flexion or extension is the last thing that happens. But with the hang, some people say you extend the knee, then the hip, then the ankle, and others say it's the hip, ankle, knee, so it's the same order. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the order from the hang. And what do I care? Yeah, okay.

I told you, like, seven people are going to care. Yeah, they are. But see, like, for me. He just wasn't one of them. Yeah. Well, no, think about this question. Good question, Andy. To the 40-year-old housewife.

Yeah. Now, do you extend the knee first or the ankle first or whatever? You know what? I was taught this about, hell, 40 years ago. And I'm talking ankle, knee, and hip extension to a group of 15, 16, and 17-year-olds. And later on after the class was over with, this kid comes up to me, a little girl, 15 years old. She's a physics genius. And she says, well, coach, is this what you're talking about?

She says, well, why don't you just say jump? That's what she says to me. And I'm going, well, shit, that makes sense. So the point is, is that I want to take complex movement patterns and not make them more complex. I want to take complex movement patterns and make them simple. So the jumping action, now I've got to do my coaching job here. So when I told you, I said, Andy, jump, you're going to jump. You know, what do you do? Your knees bend and you explode up. Now, how do I do that? Well, a lot of times when I jump, I jump on the balls of my feet. So now I got to coach you to not,

to not jump on the balls of your feet, but jump full foot as far as long as you can and and when that happens in effect your your your ankles extend your knees extend the hips go up and you create acceleration on the barbell like that jump rope when i go like this and the acceleration comes up that's another thing she gave me she says coach, Coach, just do that. And I'm going, shit. You know, acceleration on the barbell, and when that barbell's going up, what am I doing? Pulling myself down and around the barbell and punching my body through it. So for me to try to be at your level intelligence-wise and think that way, hell, I can't do it.

You know, but I can say. Well, I don't know if that's the right way to term it. I think the bigger point is, point is it maybe doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. For the vast majority of people. And, you know, you take a look at froning. Okay, so you take a look at froning, and froning brings the bar into his hips with bent arms, right? And do I teach that?

And, first of all, would I ever want to change froning? No. This guy's snatching 300 pounds, and he bends the arms in and he gets a good whip and he's got the best pull under that anybody i've ever seen including weightlifters i've seen this guy's pull under the bar and driving himself i see this and it just amazes me if i tried to change him he would first of all he wouldn't do it but second of all he would absolutely have a falling off of performance yeah you know and uh so've got to choose your battles and you've got to choose what you want to, you know, for me, you have the goals of my course to teach coaches and trainers how to teach their clients. But then my sub goal is to be able to take complex movement patterns and make them simple to achieve, to do and to achieve.

You've got to be achievable. And if I can take my complex movement patterns and make them very simple to understand and achievable, then I've done my job. You know, so, sorry, didn't want to get into it. No, that's awesome. Yeah. So, everybody's got, you know, the thing that I always say, you said it earlier, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. And the cat's going to get skinned. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with the catapult method, but I know Don McCauley, one of my buddies, does. And if you take a look at everything from the ground to that scoop position, we're all the same.

I mean, we're really all the same. And Don has a different way of explaining it than i do i'm not going to argue with him it's works for him and he does a good job with it i was on the phone with him on the way up here he said you're full of shit he probably did no we have this we have this relationship that we both understand that he's not going to change my mind and i'm not going to change his but you know you can break you can break it down, and you can look at it, and you think, well, Jesus, Don, you and I are teaching the same thing except for one component. Yeah. So for people that aren't familiar with the two sides of the fence there, like what is the catapult method, and, you know, what are you teaching that's different?

Well, for me, it's, you know, you bring the bar. We're talking about those positions, and you're right in here, and you you're in this scoop position and you're basically flat-footed and you know you're you're you're flat-footed but the weight is centered and you're balanced the bar is close to your body here and then you for me you drive the hips up and pull yourself down and around he probably ends up the catapult as i understand it and forgive me don he's probably driving the hips more horizontal than i would teach with the hips going more upward so for me it's just it it's a hard point to see that bar you know getting away from their body now i know he doesn't teach that he wants that bar close to his body as well but i i think for an athlete that is learning this is that they're going to see that hip thing

and the bar is going to have a tendency to get away from them. It seems there's a hell of a lot more similar than different. Oh, absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind, other than his stubborn personality. Yeah, because you're not stubborn. Sorry. No, I'm definitely not stubborn. You're both trying to get to the same place.

You want to get there a little bit. Or you think it's better to get there a different way. Well, we both want what's best for the weightlifter. That's what we want to do. And if somebody comes into my gym, if Don brought his athletes to my gym and he wasn't there, I'm not going to mess with him. He's got his method of training. I respect his method. But if I have an athlete that's coming to me, then they're coming to me for instruction.

I'm going to teach them my method, and I'm not going to deviate from them. I have athletes coming down here that definitely are bangers. I mean, they bang the bar off their hips, and the bar swings right around. And you can get away with that stuff with real light weight, but you can't get away with it when the weight gets heavy you know and and consequently those guys that are bangers typically i've seen that they might go three for six in a weightlifting contest and they you know when the weight gets up there you can you can see their their failure uh and another great example is you go to the CrossFit Games and you look at the snatch ladders when they go up and away to Jesus' thing. And if that bar is kept close to the bodies,

it's in that least line of resistance, those guys really have a high success rate. But the minute that that bar starts getting away from their bodies, and that could be caused because their finish is straight up and down instead of finishing down and around the bar. That position of finish needs to be with open hips, and the shoulders are leading me down and around the bar. The shrug doesn't get the bar any higher,

but the shrug is leading me with a very high chest down and around the bar so that I can bring my body to the bar. If I try to bring the bar to my body with a heavy weight, I'm swinging it. There's just no way. And either that or I'm going to be jumping forward to get it and that's very inefficient yeah so at what point do you tell someone hey you know what your technique's only going to get one or two percent better the whole rest of your life and you really just need to take your front squat from 300 to 450 like when is that the advice you give? When they are, you know, power cleaning more than they're cleaning.

And they're just not, they're not understanding the technique. They don't feel very comfortable in that front squat position. And what is a front squat? For me, a front squat is ass to the grass. It's ass to the ground. That's a front squat. And how many times in the CrossFit world or even the Olympic weightlifting world do athletes squat ass to the grass? And that becomes an issue right off the bat.

And so for me, if I've identified this athlete that's power cleaning more than he's cleaning, you know, it becomes I'm going to give him a ton of ass to the grassthe-grass front squats, in the whole front squats, so that he becomes more comfortable. And he's going to have a huge falling-off performance at the beginning. These guys can clean parallel to the ground, and then all of a sudden they'll get up with it, but when they receive a heavy clean and they're driven all the way down to the ground, you see them bouncing 15 times to try to get past that sticking point. And so why not just front squat there and get strong in that position anyway? I don't know if you saw last competitive cycle's numbers on the accuracy of the pulls. In other words, I think it was juniors and at the University Nationals. But if you look at out of the six lifts in the competition,

they were epically bad. Like the average was like 2.3 out of 6 or whatever the thing is. I don't know exactly what it was. Pat Cullen Carroll had it, and he showed me. Those numbers might be off, but the point was they're very, very low. He wants them to be more like the group average should be like five out of six you should be making them so any he was like i don't know why the hell is this happening he has his theories but any thoughts on why people are missing way more often than i have before well it's just a numbers issue there's more people i think that

could be it but the other point is is that you know i know pat and i've worked together extensively on you know as coaching teams together he was part was part of Team Southern California back in the day. But I will tell you this. We both had the philosophy that, number one, it's not where you start. It's where you end. And my goal is to try to get this athlete mentally as well as physically prepared. And so if an athlete says to me, you know, I'm going to start with 90 kilos, and his best snatch is 90 kilos, then you know, I'm going to have a hard time with that. So I may

talk to this athlete, well, let's, you know, put down 90 kilos, and then but I'm going to put down 80 is your first attempt. And we're going to warm up and I'll see how you look. If you look really good, then then you know, no problems. We'll, We'll, you know, maybe let you start with 90, but I doubt it. You know, and I would just control everything based on what the lifter looks like in the end. And I've had various athletes. I had my son was a great one. He couldn't lift in the garage the week before the contest. He couldn't lift at all.

I mean, his opener might be with 180 kilos in or 170 kilos in the snatch and you know it's like oh my god he's missing 160 but i know that on game day he was really prepared and he could he could actually start with 172 or three you know and that and because that's the way we trained him. And I knew that my relationship with him was very observant. And he and I had this camaraderie together. And so I could do that. But when I'd go to a world championships and I'd have to coach an athlete that I wasn't with, that was really becomes a battle of wills and egos. And but I'm the coach.

And so you're going to have to do what I say. And a lot of times my athletes didn't like that and uh but i made him do that anyway because at weightlifting at that point becomes a team sport and your points become very important to us so you would watch the competition go and you'd know that your athlete wants to start with you know 150 kilos in the snatch but i'm going to start him with 145 because it's not where I start. It's where I end. So I'd like him 145 because he's got it.

That's a no-brainer for him. He's going to make it 100% of the time unless he has a huge brain fart. But 145, then I might let him go to 152 or so. And then he'll end up where he wants to end up anyway. I lifted for OBX with Chris Wilkes. And he said the first big meet I did for him, he said the first snatch is for me. 100%.

Second one is, I mean, so me is in the cup. Oh, okay. It's for Chris, right? Yeah. Second one is for the team, and the third one's yours. Yeah. So if you get to all three, you can do whatever you want. You can pick a number, but first one is mine.

Right. Second one is your team's, and then third you do. So if you miss along the way, and then third you do it. So if you miss along the way, well, then you're stuck at two or whatever. But that's because it was a team issue. It's a team issue. But it was a good principle of him basically saying, your opener should be 100%. Not 60, like 100%.

Your second, he said, was 75. And then third, if you're there, depending on if you're going to place or you're worried about that or if you're not placing, you don't care, it's a PR, then you just do whatever you want. But get on the board and get something done. That was a very big point for us in the Pan American Championships. I had an athlete that absolutely, he was a great athlete, absolutely wanted to start too heavy, in my opinion,

because the chances of him making that were not 100%. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 which is still pretty high but you know i dropped him down five kilos and he was so mad at me that i dropped him down five kilos because that five kilos got us on the board and it put us in a situation of meddling for the team so i dropped this opener down and he was so furious with me and then i said okay dude we're we got the medal what do you want for your second attempt went out and made it now what do you want for the third attempt he went out and made it he got a pr all i cared about was loring his attempt so i get one in if i would have let him do what he wanted to do and he would have gone out and missed that first one that's a mind screw right

there your your head is not squared away and that's 90 of the battle anyways between the years when you go out there and if you don't have any confidence in in lifting that weight you miss that first one and now you're going uh-oh you know now what so you know there there was no there was never any question and who was in charge when i did my my coaching weightlifting meets are super fun once you've made your first nap absolutely then it's all fun that's right exactly that's right coach where do we find you where do people find out more about what you're teaching oh you do www.crossfitweightlifting.com you have a that's my you know website you know that we have uh and It's dealing with programming. I write a program for a very generic, general program

for anybody that wants to follow it. And I even put my email address there if you have questions because I write these programs a week in advance, and so I never go back to the website. So I give you my email address if you have questions about my hieroglyphics of writing, how I write my style and stuff, you can ask me. And if I've had a brain fart and I deleted, you know, how many sets I didn't put the sets in there, you can email me and say, hey, coach, how many sets are we doing on this? You know, and you can get a hold of me there.

There is a great website that I keep up. It's called Mike's Gym dot org. And I haven't been on there since 2014, basically. But the information goes from 2005 up to 2014 where I wrote some articles and, you know, for the NSCA and a bunch of other stuff. And there are a lot of different programs in there that you can go to. Just go to the archives. And then Mike Bergener, B-U-R-G-E-N-E-R, at Mac.com is my email address. And, God, I'm going to put this out there, 760-535-1835 is my home phone

or my phone number where you can text me. Just keep it PG. All right. No pics. You're going to go landslide of people contacting you. I'm going to text next month from Coach B being like, I changed my phone number. Here's my new one.

Can you take that video down? Thank you. Actually, you know what? It's fun because I'm retired, so I tell everybody this, that my wife, if you see all this plants and stuff around our house, that's her gig. And if I don't get phone messages or emails or text or whatever then she wants me to work in the yard I tell people I'm busy please call me please call me keep me keep me busy so I

don't have to do this other stuff thanks so much for coming on the show this has been really great thank you for having me I really appreciate it thanks coach thanks