Barbell Shrugged - The Best Way to Get Started w/ the Olympic Lifts - EP 182

Episode Date: June 17, 2015

Part 1 of 5.

This week on Barbell Shrug is the first of a five-part video series on the Olympic lifts. Today, we're going to be talking about how to get started. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrug. For the video version, go to barbellshrug.com. Just in case you didn't know, you can watch the full, exclusive video version of this show over at barbellshrug.com. You think you love us now? Just wait till you see our nuggets and pearls in high definition. In three, two, one. You think you love us now? Just wait till you see our nuggets and pearls in high definition. In three, two, one.

Shaka, everybody. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe, standing here with Doug Larson, Chris Moore, CTP behind the camera, and Charlotte. Today, we are kicking off the first epic, epic, epic adventure series. We're going to do a series of shows on weightlifting, Olympic style weightlifting at that. And today we're going to talk about how to get started with the Olympic lifts. And we're going to kind of talk about the history of weightlifting and how it got us to where we are now.

Because that's how you know where you're going. Right, guys? By knowing the history? You look at where you've been and find out where you're going. You said the best history is prologue to the future, right? Charlotte told me Shakespeare may have been making all that shit up and that it was some dude named, what was his name? You're ruining the effect. Marlow.

I was trying to sound smart with a quote. Marlow. There you come with history. The poet. Well, I'm just saying it may have been Marlo, not Shakespeare. Make sure you go to barbellstruck.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Check out what's happening over there. Every day I hear

there's people that don't know that there's a website where stuff is happening. Sometimes people are like, oh, I'd like to get one of those t-shirts or something. What do you mean you offer awesome information on the website daily? Yeah. So anyways,

there's also blogs over there. Chris Moore, he cultivates this blog that is just amazing. That's the best on the internet right now. And you know, we're gonna make it better. In fact, all of this,

all this effort, you referenced a five part series. We're really putting a lot of effort into making this show even better. People can get their minds around that. Just get ready. Be titillated. The expectation should be titillating you right now. All over your

titillating zones. Alright, let's talk about how weightlifting got started. I mean, it didn't just start with CrossFit. It didn't just start with weightlifting as we know it now. It started with Ancient Greece. Well, I think people will they know the most recent history.

They know it's been the Olympics and stuff. But that kind of displaces the fact that for, I guess, since there have been humans, strength's been a thing. And that we have prepared for labor and for work and for battle, of course, by any means necessary. So I think pretty early on, hundreds, thousands of years ago, humans realized that adding a little bit of resistance seemed to allow you to do more. So that idea has been around a long time. I guess we've been on this long march towards refining that, which is we're kind of getting to that point now

where we're reaching a new stage. But yeah, the history is really long and deep and it's really fascinating. A cool book I would point out to people, Peter McAllister, Manthropology, a really cool book. I've referenced it before, but he goes all over the historical history

where man has used tools to become, he'd say manlier, but really it's like how do you cultivate strength, prepare for battle. Stones, implements, clubs of all kinds, even the original form of yoga. We've talked to Seal Fit and, oh, God, Mark Devine. I almost lost it for a minute. Don't forget Mark's name. But talk about how really the roots are in preparing yourself

for work and battle even with yoga it's really cool yeah if you think about hundreds of years ago before they had you know

nice you know lego barbells rogue barbells and what not to prove you were the strongest person you would just grab

any random odd implement rocks you know logs or whatever around you and you would just see who could take it off

the ground and put it over your head. If I get over my head and you can't, then I'm stronger. And that's the highest you could lift something. So I feel like with the snatch and the cleaning jerk, the old way they used to do it was, uh, wasn't exactly like you see the snatch and cleaning jerk today. It was, um, originally, I think, I think this started in the Olympics. I'm not mistaken that I could be wrong about that, but you know. But 100, 140 or so years ago, before the Olympics started, maybe right when the Olympics was starting, like late 1800s. The second foundation of the Olympics, a new form, like the rebirth of the Olympics, what do they call it? The modern day Olympics. Yeah, not like ancient Greek Olympics, but like modern Olympics.

The first modern Olympics was like 1896, if I'm not mistaken. And they had two events. One of them was the two hands anyhow was just pick up the thing and put it over your head with two hands. And then there was pick up the thing and put it over your head with one hand. So I don't even think they had barbells at that point. I think they were almost like dumbbells with like shot lead. Yeah, like big bowling balls on the ends is what they look like. Yeah, there's some barbells, but from what I've seen,

the issue is consistency. Sometimes they're thick, sometimes they're thin. They're going to break all the time. They're hollow, they're iron, they're whatever. So any one day you can lift and get stronger, but consistency from event to event and everything, that was still a very rough idea. It was more of a strongman type environment.

If you go and look at some of the history, it's like anything that was pre-1950s almost looked like what they were doing with strongman stuff. If you go to a strongman event now, they're taking the single dumbbell and putting it overhead and that's something that's not really trained for much anymore. There's a cool golden age

where from this old stuff we're talking about, it becomes like circus events and ways to impress people at carnivals. It becomes a way of demonstrating and entertaining. Yeah, they were freaks. Yeah, and guess what? They weren't like heroes like they are now. And people assume that this is old

and that they were maybe not quite as strong. Their strength, Louis Cyr and those guys, Eugene Sandow, right? That first bodybuilder guy who became the first popularizer of squat movement. These are cool things we've referenced and seen before now that bodybuilding.com video from our friends over uh that cory gregory and his team muscle farm helped put together and everything we'll link that the show notes yeah cory and uh john bros was in that too very cool guests have been on the

show before yeah you get more detail there but you see a stepwise emergence of the barbell slowly it hadn't always been there but people were still finding ways to be really, really, really strong and muscular. But it's cool to see how it didn't really start taking shape as a modern tool of developing strength and maybe, I'd also argue, human potential until like maybe, would you say the 30s? It was something around the 30s, I want to say. That's a guess, but I'm pretty sure

that's close to right. It didn't used to be like it is now either where it had to be like one fluid lift from the floor to shoulders and then overhead for the clean jerk or one fluid lift overhead you know locked out elbows like a clean lift that used to be kind of more like mike was saying um a strong man type movement where they just had to get it overhead any way they could and then slowly standards evolved um there was actually three olympic olympic lifts until like the 70s i want to say where it used to be clean and press. Many people forget that.

Yeah, that wasn't that long ago. Big change, big controversy. People also, I guess, want to see it brought back for a lot of reasons. But yeah, clean and press was awesome movement. Yeah, I mean, it turned into like a, you can look these pictures up online. It turned almost into like a standing bench press in some cases. They would clean to the shoulders and then they would kind of do like a little bit of a little heave, and so they would heave,

and then they would kind of come back with it, but you'll see pictures of people that will tear this out. They weren't allowed to bend their knees. Well, yeah, they would be here, knees locked, and then they would like hinge at their back, and they would be like pressing the weight like this. Literally turning it into a bench press. Hundreds of pounds, you know, 400 pounds.

I don't know if they, 500 pounds is probably. I want to say there's a 500 pound clean and press at one point. Yeah, and those guys, I don't think it's a healthy way to go about it. Yeah, like Alexiev and Shemurkin. Serge Redding was my favorite presser.

Serge Redding could clean and press over 500 pounds. Jeez. The only guy I've ever seen do that is the contemporary, Zydrunas Avicis, my favorite straw man. It's about a person who can press,

not jerk, not push from rack, not front squat, which is still really good. 500 pound front squat is still really great, but to compress just strictly 500 pounds is so impressive. But yeah, there have been beasts around for a really long time. And what I dig about that, Doug,

is like specifically about weightlifting, it seems like it has emerged even separate from the other strength sports because it represents something a little different yes you want to lift the most amount of weight but what i see in that sport independent of the actual lifts is that there's an inner purpose an intent behind weightlifting to find the most you can say beautiful elegant efficient way to move in order to get the load overhead like gymnastics is uh regulated by there's a certain way you're going to do this. That's the right way. That's the efficient way.

That allows you to do these movements. Well, heavy snatch is a fine-tuned representation of how a human can best get underneath a load in that one movement. That's why I think it's so special and unique. That's something that took me a while to really appreciate, coming from the raw strength, power, and background, and really get that that's the purpose. Yeah. When done right, it's a beautiful thing and it actually doesn't look heavy. You can see a guy that's a 69 kilo lifter snatch 170 and it doesn't look that heavy. And then you think about, well, shit,

that's over 350 pounds. Like what does that feel like to deadlift? And then you think about that guy being like 50 pounds lighter than you and him, him just throwing overhead, like, like it doesn't even look hard. And how much respect you have for that person for just being that fucking crazy athletic yeah it's insane yeah and then uh the movements coming along like they couldn't be refined until like the modern barbell came along so it's like a lot of a lot of the variation from like competition to competition from athlete to athlete they're using different stuff or when we talked to a lko when we did that show, they were talking about how the bars were breaking.

They couldn't even finish the competition. They were having to change out barbells. Can you imagine trying to do a CrossFit class? Technology wouldn't allow CrossFit to be a thing. Every time somebody dropped a snatch, they're like, fuck, man, this is really expensive. Every set, I got to get new. Or they were like truck axles that were this big around, just like an axle that you would actually find

buying an axle barbell that really is this big around that came from it actually coming out of a truck originally where or like a you know like with like wagon wheels on the side of it that are made out of cast iron steel yeah like like paul anderson one of the first guys 1200 pounds it works yeah he squatted well over a thousand pounds like he did it i forget what the stat is on him he did like he's like over 900 over a thousand like every day for like some ungodly amount of time like every like for like a year or years or something like that just because he could and one of the interesting things about him was uh he was one of the guys that very very similar to like the ancient story of milo where he did kind of progressive resistance

training the you know the story milo basically goes, if the audience hadn't heard this, where this guy named Milo would carry around a calf, like a not quite fully developed cow. And the cow would get bigger. He would carry it every day. And as it got bigger, he got stronger. And that was kind of like the theory behind how progressive resistance training got started. And well, similar to that, in a way, Paul Anderson, the story goes, he would have a bar attached to two big like 55 gallon barrels full of water or full of rocks or lead or whatever you put in them. And then what he would do is he would he would stand in the middle of it and he would do like a very small quarter squat. And then he would dig a hole underneath his feet to make it where he had. Excuse me. He would dig a hole underneath the barrels to make it where he had a, or excuse me, he would dig a hole underneath the, the, the barrels

to make it where they would move down and he would squat under it and he would increase the range of motion with the same weight over time. And that's how I got stronger squatting well over a thousand pounds many, many times. So it was a different way to do progressive resistance training before we had squat racks and, and plate loaded bars and whatnot. If you only have just two big barrels and you just attach a big bar in between them, then you can't really adjust the weight quite as easy. So he adjusted the range of motion over the course of many days. It doesn't seem like inventing a squat rack

is so like, oh shit, mind-blowing technology. In hindsight. They think the same thing about Velcro, man. Really? They didn't just think, how about we make something we can put this on? Or bend over sideways. People wrote with pens.

We haven't even mentioned that yet. People wrote with bird feathers and ink for hundreds of years and shit, man. Of course it took a long time to figure out a squat rack. Shit is not obvious. Well, I mean, they started squatting like maybe early 1900s with a barbell. What did it take 20, 30 years to go,

oh, man, we should like set this on something so we could start at the top. Maybe a side bend. Side bend hoist is not the most efficient way to set up for your squat. If you pop your back before you even get in the position to do a lift, you can see that there's room for refinement

in what you're doing. Or maybe they thought about it when they first were invented. Like, oh, there's that guy using the rack. What a poon. Yeah, it was cheating. It's like a wrap. The rack is the kipping pull-up.

It's like, guy's cheating. Guy's cheating. Honestly, I will say that's funny, and I'm almost certain that's got to be true. If you go back and see what happened, like, look at this guy over here. Thinks it's too good for a back bend or side press. What they used to do, to CTP's point from a minute ago,

what they used to do before we had racks and before they were doing the dig the hole in the ground thing, which I'm sure some people did do that before they did this, but they took a bar, a straight bar, once they they had them and they would stand them vertically on one end. And then once they were vertical, they would grab the bar like this, put it on their back and then they would rock it into a full squat and then stand up. They would squat, squat, squat, and then they would do the same thing and put it back on one end.

And that's how they got it onto their back. If I bend over like that to pick up anything, I'd hurt. You're not a trained strongman with a single arm single arm. Oh, my jeez. No kidding. Yeah. But the cool thing, like we're saying, is the barbell comes along, and I think the beauty of it is that basically it's like a printing press type thing

where strength can come to the masses because now we have, especially as equipment gets better and they don't break, one kind of thing that usually weighs about the same, holds the same size weights, can be loaded for your grandmother who's picking up for the first time or for a strong man picking up 800 pounds. All in between, it's standard. And then the cool thing is now people can go, I see what's working for lots of people.

Maybe this works for everybody. I can capture it in a book. I can spread this information. I can start spreading how to train more effectively. And to me, that's a huge revolution point, like a big tipping point in the history of sport. They took the barbells and were able to put discs on it. You take it for granted now, but that's just a contemporary thing. Very recent development.

Made it much more convenient to train and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, we had the barbell. And then we were putting shot in the ends and just kind of adding it in and having to do that. We got the squat rack. And then Aleko came along and I guess one of the guys there was saying

that was working at a Was the female lead there? I forget. 1954 was the date, right? 57. It was one of the They were making toasters. One of the guys was working there

and they were doing waffle irons and they he was like oh we should make these barbells because they're always breaking. They have they invent like the modern barbell in 57.

And with that, things got to take off for the sport of weightlifting. And so a lot of rules that existed back then were like the bar can't touch your body on the way up. And so we were talking earlier about gymnastics and how fluid that looks and how weightlifting used to not be that way. It was more of like a brute strength from A to B type of thing. And because now the barbells uh they turn when you when you move and uh they started uh you can grip them better and then yeah they're putting they actually put knurling on the bar and then they uh they were they changed the rules where it can touch your body and now like the movements now

there's like debates over how the movements have been but like the snatch and the clean and jerk that we see now we've only been doing them that way for like what? 40 years, like 30, 40 years. That's been the competition. And I'm sure it'll continue to change. I mean,

that's why like things are actually still changing. And I think they're changing at a really rapid rate because before, like back in, you know, the seventies, eighties, even in the nineties, it was like all these countries had these coaches that had developed these athletes,

and everything was a secret, especially like, you know, Eastern Europe and Russia and all that. I can remember watching the 1996 games. You watch those games? That's the first time I really watched weightlifting intently. You had to stay up like 3 o'clock in the morning

to catch the replays of the weightlifting because, you know, they don't show it. It's always so infuriating. That's the first time I saw like Andre Chemerkin, these big, Ronnie Weller for Germany, like my favorite super heavies in recent history. All these lifters, Pierce Dimas, battling it out and doing things that I really didn't understand at the time.

I was like, I've tried to do this in gym. Well, not gym, but in a high school gym, an asium. I'm trying to learn like a power clean. And I'm doing like 135, and I know what it looks like even then like this doesn't look like what that looks like

I've never seen this makes this look really easy yeah and then I remember thinking next like these Russians these is that Pyrrhus

no I don't know these Russians the Germans like the secrecy Soviet Union oh and then a few years after that when I'm in college

I get into the Soviet text and I geek out on the secrecy which in hindsight created false walls for a long time that I think really mystified and improved the sport maybe for a while for the time, but it's only now that that's been removed that we've seen an explosion in the popularity. Yeah, it feels like a lot of that mysticism has been removed just the last few years. The internet has come along, coaches are now, you know, who have hung out with the Bulgarian coaches and stuff like that.

I go, oh, this is exactly what they told me. When I trained with them, this is exactly how it was. So like the advent of the internet and then, you know, YouTube videos. I mean, when we first- And now Instagram, which has been, I think, it's only accelerated the reach of quick weightlifting education.

Maybe even compared to anything else I've seen on Instagram, people like Diane Fu sharing video instruction and tips through that medium, I think it's just a viral explosion in how many people can pick up and then learn weightlifting. It's nuts.

And that Doug Larson guy and Alex Macklin dude on TechniqueWad. They really look at it too. I'm jealous. In one way, I'm jealous because when we first discovered weightlifting, there was, like, no YouTube channel to go check it out. Comparative Stone Age.

There was, like, VHS tapes, man. You had to put... Yeah, that's right. And you had to, like, know to hunt those down. There wasn't, like, a Google search. You had to watch Strassen's videos from Iron Mind. Yeah, we would go over Brian Schilling's house and spend all Sunday afternoon, like, eating angel food ice cream, loading up, because you know it's important.

Window gains, maybe. We didn you know it's important. Window games, maybe. We didn't know that then, though. But watching Ironman videos of all these Bulgarian training camp videos, going, oh my God. I remember watching the 1998 training hall tapes from the World Championships on VHS, and I was so lucky to have it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, even knowing that existed

was crazy. You show those videos in your class, to your college class. Like, check it out. These people are doing this. You're like, what in the shit is this? Like, they're seeing this. They don't understand what's going on. When I first discovered weightlifting, I had no idea.

I was like, this is awesome. What? They bench too? No. No bench. No bench. So describe the day you learned about weightlifting the first time. Yeah, so I had been training.

It was in 2006. And I had been training since like 90. How old was I? 96. So I had been training since like 90, how old was I? 96. So I'd been training for like 10 years. Most of my workouts were coming out of flex magazine or whatever. Um, righteous.

Yeah. Uh, and then I, I had to take this class in school, uh, for exercise science degree. And it was like weightlifting one-on-one. I was like,

all right, whatever. I know what I'm doing. It's like, here's the PVC pipe. Uh, we're going to go over snatch. And I was like, all right, whatever. I know what I'm doing. It's like, here's the PVC pipe. We're going to go over snatch. I was like, you kidding me, bro? That day, I stayed late after class and I fell in love

with it, but there was no real resources at the time either. It's like the only person I could learn weightlifting from at that point was Dr. Brian Schilling. No resources. Stop with Schilling. Except for Schilling. What I was going to say resources. Stop with Schilling. Except for Schilling. All of this fucking expert.

Schilling's awesome. But what I was going to say is, let me finish. But it's like I really lucked out because we got to hang out with a guy who probably knew more about it than almost anybody in the United States. And so it was just like really, really fortunate. So we were all kind of like just happening to be in the right place at the right time, which is great. Yeah. And of course, we all know Doug had the more ideal than you and I situation. We're all kind of like just happened to be in the right place at the right time which is great yeah and of course we all know doug had the more ideal than you and i situation we're all

jealous of doug i was very very lucky growing up but in 96 or in 2006 also that's when i showed up to university of memphis and started training with brian as well and that was that took what i had already done for the previous 10 or so years. Cause I originally learned about the Olympic lifts at a bigger, faster, stronger convention when I was, that was probably 97. I want to say I was probably like 13, 14 at the time. And then I had done it for about eight or nine years and I, I was like 80, 90% proficient, but there were still a few details that I, that I hadn't quite ironed out yet. And, and Sch And Schilling and Lauren Chu, they both helped me really perfect and refine those last few things

to where now my lifts really haven't changed much in the last 10 years or so after getting those last little tweaks. Yeah. Yeah, we've seen it explode since then. I kind of like watched, I remember CrossFit came along and my buddy showed it to me.

I was like, oh, there's weightlifting. And then they're doing box jumps and then wall balls and kipping pull-ups is very interesting. So I started looking into that. I was like, this is a lot of fun. But I saw an explosion. I mean, we all got to watch the explosion of weightlifting through CrossFit and the internet. And we all know that like that helped really fuel the whole thing. Referring to it

in past tense I think it's still an unfolding explosion that I don't know how long it'll be before it slows down because like I said it's building and building

and ramping up in this country we have the world championships coming in Houston later this fall ramping up to that the fallout of that event

where I think you know this podcast and our efforts willing we're going to try to shed as much light on that as possible to get in the Houston area, in the Texas area, in the Southern area of the United States, everybody within flying distance come there and see up front what this sport looks like.

Oh, it's going to be the best in the world. This is, last year you had to go to fucking Kazakhstan for this experience, right, or whatever, or you had to go to a big time park. It hasn't been here in a while it might not come back and who knows when it'll be back so this is an event that we're bearing witness to that we need to get on board of and if you are a young person interested in lifting time is fucking perfect i'd say yeah it is a really good opportunity like it it's not in the united states very often as you said simply because weightlifting is more popular in most

other areas of the world but now again because CrossFit came in and helped popularize weightlifting, I think it's, it's more likely to be in the United States in the future, but still it's the world championship. So it's going to be all around the world all the time. So, so it might not come back to the U S for five, 10 or even more years. So that's a super good opportunity to go watch the world championships. It's, you know, it's a cool event. It's a couple hundred bucks to go to like any other cool event would be. And you get to watch the best weightlifting in the world. We're going to be there. We'll probably throw a big party.

Come party with us in Houston in November. Houston, we have an uh-oh. You got to go see Ilya and Ilya set a world record. I don't know about you, but it seems pretty cool. All right, let's take a break real quick. When we come back, we're going to talk about. Doug wants to say something. Yeah, maybe we should let Doug talk.

I was going to say, we're working on getting our audience a discount on on world weightlifting championship tickets um if you enter the code word shrug when you check out you get some type of a discount i haven't finalized that yet but that should be i called him up nice yeah we asked nice crazy things happen sometimes excuse me sir uh can we come up with a favorable arrangement to help promote your event and offer some sweet benefits to our audience? I figure we're going to be there. We want our audience to come. If we can get a few percentage off of tickets for our audience, then more people will come. We want you to come.

It'll be fun. Everyone's flight has to be there. It will be a party. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the challenges new weightlifters face when trying to get in the sport of weightlifting. This is Tim Ferriss, and you are listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com.

Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. Yeah, but fuck. Fuck hockey. All right, yeah. All right, here we go. Three, two, one.

Three, two, one. And we're back. Whoa, did you get scared? I did actually a little bit. I was like, oh, what am I talking about? I blacked out there at the break. What happened? Yeah, we were just talking about how internet, CrossFit has kind of helped make this a big boom.

But at the same time, like even though it's brought like this big awareness around weightlifting, I feel like it's actually gotten more confusing. So you have this big discovery process where it's like, oh, these people are doing it at CrossFit. A lot of gyms have a weightlifting team now. A lot of people don't want to do the CrossFit as much, and they want to start doing weightlifting. And they don't know exactly where to go because in the beginning, there was one place

to go and that was like the crossfit stuff if crossfit was the way you found it or you found your one coach or the one coach that was in town there's like oh this is exactly where i get it from for us there was like not a lot of that confusion uh but now when someone discovers weightlifting there are so many places you can go you can jump on almost any blog there's probably hundreds of blogs out there. It's a rabbit hole. There's a workout listed that day, and you can just start doing it. It's information overload right now.

It's not that they can't find the information. It's that they find too much information. They don't know how to filter through it and figure out which is the actual high-quality information, what's kind of average, and what's actually not very good. If you're a beginner, it's really hard to distinguish between those three levels. It all looks kind of the same. And in addition to that, it's kind of hard sometimes if you have a coach

who thinks they're really, really good, but they're actually kind of average, but they don't know the difference themselves. They're so new that they think that they're pretty good. I've seen that many times. I've gone into CrossFit gyms and the coach teaching weightlifting, I can tell they've only been doing it since they started doing CrossFit

two years ago as well. And they are kind of okay by poor CrossFit standards. CrossFit has high standards, but people that go into CrossFit don't have the same view of weightlifting that weightlifters have of weightlifting. That's why the standards aren't quite as clean with press outs and whatnot. But people will come in as a brand new lifter and they'll see someone who looks better than them and just has some amount of confidence in how they're talking about it. And they'll think that that's the right way to do it.

And then you see a bunch of people doing snatches, but they look like they're about to do dead lifts. And then all of a sudden it goes over their head in kind of a funky wonky fashion. And having those bad habits established from the beginning makes it almost harder to learn it down the line it'd be way easier if you just learned it right the very first time yeah and talking about like where people people kind of categorize themselves as beginner intermediate advanced and i don't think i've ever met anybody who was doing weightlifting for for less than three years who would be considered intermediate like if you haven't been doing weightlifting for

three like specifically weightlifting not not you had snatches and cleaning jerks in your workouts every once in a while, like you actually trained the lifts. It takes two or three years to get out of that beginner phase. And a lot of people think that they're, they may be intermediate or advanced and they're not quite to that point because of who they may be comparing themselves to. Yeah. Less than three years, probably. That three to 10 is probably the intermediate phase. 10 plus years, you're probably an expert. 15 plus years, you might consider yourself to be elite as far as knowing what is right and what is wrong.

Maybe you never actually went to the world championships, so you're not technically elite as far as strength goes. But if you've been coaching it and doing it for 10, 15, 20 years, then compared to the rest of the population, you're probably still in the top 0.001% or what have you. So this is like a really new problem is when we discovered weightlifting, it came from a coach. There was no one else in town to learn it from.

We had one resource, no confusion. Now you get online and there's hundreds. And so it's like hard to choose. More chances to get lost in the rabbit holes. Yeah, and it does create a lot of confusion.

So, I actually can't imagine what that's like because I didn't have to go that myself. But I see it as a problem now.

I talk to a lot of athletes and they're like, one month they're doing this blog, the next month they're doing that blog. It's just like, I can't figure out why I'm not making progress.

And they think it's a strength issue. And I was like, you've never taken it back. It's not that much different than what if you were trying to be a basketball player or a football player or any other sport where there's a lot of technique to bring into you and to get clear on. There's a lot of history to learn, a lot of plays and all this context. You had to live like that athlete. Anybody good at those sports doesn't, within two years, maybe in rare occasions, you don't jump from, I just

picked up a football to now I'm playing in the NFL, which people expected themselves for some reason when they're trying to reshape their body and learn weightlifting. It's not reasonable. It's easy for us right now to see something online and know if it's good or bad information because we have context, we have experience, we have knowledge of what's actually good and what's not good. But for any other category, if I'm learning about something that's relatively new to me,

something more obscure, and I'll say, like, I've been researching Bitcoin or something that's like new to the world, new to me. And when I go to research Bitcoin, I'm like, OK, well, I'm reading an article about it. Is this like some random dude that just learned about it and he's just writing like a blog post or just like like some guy that actually really knows what he's talking about? Cause he's like one of the people that's developing it. I don't know. And so in that case, it's really hard for me to, to distinguish because I just don't know that much about it in general. I'm brand new to it. So I like to look at things like that. That way I can

project what it's like for someone who's brand new to a CrossFit gym to, to see how it feels to them to come into this new environment where they don't really know what's going on. That way I can project what it's like for someone who's brand new to a CrossFit gym to see how it feels to them to come into this new environment where they don't really know what's going on. That way I can have that experience of being a novice or being a beginner. And it gives me context to help people where I happen to be the expert and they're the novice or the beginner. Yeah. Another challenge I see with a lot of weightlifters and I've experienced myself as self-doubt is like, I think a lot of times, I think the biggest point for me personally was like most self-doubt when it came to competing, you go to a competition and you feel like everybody else in the room knows exactly what's going on and they have coaches and like,

you don't know. Everybody feels too. Yeah. And that's like, I remember going and like when we first started competing, like, like we'd have our coach, like, when we first started competing, like, we'd have our coach there sometimes, but not always.

And it was just like, and it's one of those things you start looking at what's happened, how the other coaches are interacting with the athletes. Oh, I'll get some head quick. And it's like, oh, why are they slapping them on the ass? I don't get slapped on the ass. Hey, Doug. Is that right? Can you slap me on the ass when I'm out there?

Sure. Okay. Can you rub my earlobes just like that guy's doing over there? Yeah, there's so many different styles. And then you get to weightlifting meet, and then now you have this timer that's going on, and people are changing weights, and you thought you were going, and now you're not.

And for me, when I was first weightlifting and going to competitions, it was very unsure of what was going on. And it took a while to settle in. You had this history where you were not a rookie to lifting, you know, about basic ideas, nutrition,

training, all that. But you said like when you get into the training hall where in this case we had laboratory equipment and force plates and whaling platforms and the people teaching you were Dr. Lauren Chu, Dr. Brian Schilling,

Dr. Fry, these people who their whole life had been the study of mechanics and physiology and everything that goes into weightlifting, and their passion was weightlifting, and this was new to you. A lot of people probably in gyms feel that when they have their coach showing this thing, and they just feel sort of maybe small and really greenhorn

in comparison to what they know. I definitely felt that way when I first started weightlifting. I started in the summer of 2006, and I got to train with Brian Schilling exclusively. You were in there doing powerlifting, but you weren't really paying much attention to me at the time, I don't think.

Who's this guy? He's so pale. God, so pale. Barbara won't save that. Doesn't even have a beard yet. This guy needs a beard more than anybody. That's what I thought at the time. How does he expect to be strong? When Doug and Andy show up two months later,

there was others that showed up. And Mike Falvo was there and would show up at times. And these guys would show up that had way more experience than I ever had. And I'm like, oh. I felt really good about my lifting until they showed up. And then I was like, oh, shit. This is embarrassing. I definitely had insecurity at that point.

And I know that keeps people from like jumping in the gym and trying something like snatch and clean and jerk. That's probably the first time you'd ever been in a weight room recently. And you are the least experienced person there. Like the number one least experience. Cause you were brand new and all the rest of us have been doing it for years and years. yeah like even uh like i don't leave cory out of this he'll be probably he's probably watching this right now like what about me he was fairly new too he's canadian was fairly new at that point if i remember correctly but he but he probably had been around since he'd been in that program for for over a year at that point he at least had like one year experience and the difference between one year and zero is is a pretty large gap so um in that case that's probably a very unique experience for you being brand new when everyone else is very experienced and in that

in that case like you probably can use that experience to project what it's like for someone coming brand new in across it and brand new in the weightlifting because you really have been there where you were the number one least experienced person in the gym at some point so you know what it's like yeah i actually was getting there was a i remember one day specifically one day i was getting input from like you andy filling like like three or four people had come by and like give me advice on like two snatches yeah i was And I was like, too many cooks in the kitchen. It's one of those days I was like, everyone shut the fuck up. No one talk to me for the rest of the day.

I'm just going to lift. Leave me alone. Usually when that happens, someone's like, why don't you just like extend your first pull just a little bit and then the person

after them is like, you probably need to cut that a little bit shorter and you're like, fuck. Yeah, it was like one of those things where like everyone gave me

something different and I was like, are they fucking with me? They are fucking with me right now. Yeah. Another thing though, so sorry Yeah, it was like one of those things where everyone gave me something different. I was like, are they fucking with me right now? Another thing, though. Sorry, Chris. Another thing is that there's just too much. It's not that there's just too much info, but it's just highly technical in itself. And then especially if you're coming from CrossFit, it's just like, damn, man.

How am I going to squeeze this in when I'm worrying about everything else? So you're not getting like the – it's like a lot of info to like digest on top of not having proper time to just focus on that thing. I guess that would be the equivalent to now like people getting, you know, getting coached by multiple coaches at one time would be the same as like jumping from blog to blog and reading different, different coaches text on or watching different videos or it'd be the same as going to seminars back to back

where they're teaching different techniques or using different terminology to explain how to do the lifts properly. I think a lot of times people stack information too much different information too close to each other. They don't give it a chance to settle in. It reminds me of reading books. You could pick all these books off a shelf and they're all random,

written by different people, how they fit together in one body of like how you can think better for having read them is all the work that remains. Like how you link the ideas together, what ideas cross over and correlate, not just all these specific outcomes you have to somehow memorize. Of course, that's going to feel a little burdensome.

Yeah. And Doug was talking about this earlier is finding a coach that's like experienced. So like a lot of times people are, you know, they don't know if their coach really is teaching them the best way to learn weightlifting. And I think more often than not, I mean, I've watched the CrossFit thing happen. You know, we became an affiliate in 2007 with CrossFit Memphis. And so we had weightlifting under our belts affiliate in 2007 with CrossFit Memphis and so we had weight lifting under our belts before we started doing CrossFit and for a long time it was kind of weird

to watch like how some of the things are being coached and then over time the average CrossFit coach got really good at coaching weight lifting so like the standards for the average is definitely improved tremendously that still doesn't mean they're advanced. It sounds intuitive what I'm about to say, and there will definitely be exceptions to this rule, but a good CrossFit coach that probably is good at weightlifting has competed in weightlifting also. If they haven't competed in weightlifting,

they've been doing CrossFit for five or seven or ten years, and they haven't actually competed as a competitive weightlifter specifically it doesn't mean that they're not going to be good at weightlifting guaranteed but the crossfitters that have taken some time away from just crossfit and competed in just weightlifting they just seem to be better at weightlifting it probably means your awareness goes up right you're aware of all these other considerations your awareness your expectations you're just the amount of time that you focused on those lifts themselves and kind of got away from the massive variety of movements that CrossFit offers.

It's hard to get good at a thousand things all at the same time. And with weightlifting, with snatch, clean and jerk, those are the most probably complicated movements that you would typically find in a CrossFit gym. So taking a little time away and specializing on those and competing and weightlifting and hanging out with other people that are just weightlifters for at least some period of time, maybe a year, maybe two, maybe three months here, six months there, that type of thing. The people that do that just seem to be better at weightlifting overall. And I don't think that's a, I do think that that rather is a, an intuitive thing, but people don't consider it for some reason. Yeah. All right. Uh, let's take

a break real quick. When we come back, we're going to talk about how to actually go about starting, getting into a great weightlifting program. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I know we've got some sexy and provocative voices here on barbell shrugs, but you haven't seen anything yet. Just head on over to barbell shrged.com and check out the full exclusive video version of this show to find out just what you've been missing. Try to type that in your fucking search bar. Three, two, one. And we're back.

We're going to talk about how you can actually get started as a beginner in weightlifting and not screw it up. Jesus Christ. I mean, it was early on. You might as well start again. What is going on? Three, two, one. And we're back.

We're going to be talking about how to get started in weightlifting as a beginner. So, as we had stated before, if you haven't been doing weightlifting specific training for two, three years, this might be you. So check it out. Uh, Chris. Hi, Michael. What, what are, uh, as a beginner weightlifter, what exactly do they need to be looking for in regard to like the best program, like finding the best program? There's so many out there. There's a little bit of confusion. Uh, how do I identify that? Well, I mean, everybody knows how it feels to see all the options for things you could do. Everybody offers a blog, a program, things to jump into. I'd say the number one thing you should consider is, apart from is the program actually for somebody like you,

are you an Olympic caliber athlete, been training for 10 years, or are you a beginner? So start there. But also, is that program truly comprehensive? Because just a list of workouts and maybe some recommended mobility exercises, not what I would call a program. That's components of what should be a bigger vision of a grander plan and more long-term commitment that you're going to work towards. So not just a list of work of workouts. That's what a lot of times people, people kind of think about, Oh, I need to do a program. And all they think about is the list of workouts. So Monday I do this. And they're only think about what happens with the barbell.

You're saying a comprehensive program is more than just that. Yeah, it's like you found a treasure map with no additional guidance on what you should do first, how you should keep that up, how you should feel for this mission. It's only one part of the necessary information that you're going to need to actually arrive at success, in this case being competitive or at least being able to snatch your body weight or what have you we kind of hit on that a little bit earlier we talked about uh mobility technique and uh and strength and so like a lot of times the strength and even some technique are kind of addressed in a program but you know uh in addition to something like mobility specific to weight

lifting you also have like recovery and things like that, that, that could be addressed. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Really you're looking for a comprehensive training plan that is in line with your one very particular goal. So if you're looking to be good at weightlifting specifically, then obviously you should get a weightlifting program. And to your point, that doesn't just mean the workouts. If you look at, again, most blog programming just says, okay, you're going to do snatches, then cleans, then squats, and then pull-ups, and then you're done, or whatever. It's just the core part of the workout. The mobility work isn't there.

The warm-ups aren't there. The cool-down stuff isn't there. There's no prehab rehab stuff there. There's no nutrition there. There's no amount of periodization, and there's many types of periodization. It's not looked at in the context of a four-week block block and eight week block or even a year, um, uh, macro cycle. It's really just, you know, the workout of the day and there's value in having a workout to do,

but once you are consistent and you have done some workouts and you, you know, you can follow something like block programming, then it's time to think, okay, well now what's the next level that I could go to and that is going to work better than just simply following random workouts day to day to day. Nothing wrong with those resources. Just making a few assumptions. Like you already know some of these things. And if you're a beginner, then it's okay if you don't, but you need to know that going into that. You can't assume that that's already baked in, that they're considering that. I'd say another thing I think about in terms of what is a complete program is like the most necessary part, the programming and the recommendations,

what to do are great, but everybody who's ever trained in a training hall with other lifters who have your same goal in mind, they are dedicated. Their lifestyle is maybe they work, they come here. And then while they're in that room, they're dedicated to the craft, the weightlifting. They aren't going to do this for eight weeks and move on. This is their life. They're going to live it, breathe it. That's a really rich environment to immerse yourself in. There's a lot of other data that you pick up on that you can't get on a blog, let's say.

To experience what it is to be a weightlifter, to see what speed is, to see what a good snatch looks like live, just to witness it is a whole different story i remember when uh i started first weightlifting uh there was a training session just wasn't a time to go work with the barbell it was uh in between sets it was discussing ideas of strength training and and why we were doing the things we were doing and then we were talking about what we were going to do to recover afterwards comprehensive allprehensive seminar. These were all discussions that were happening. There were coaches in the room. There were other athletes in the room.

And we were all working really hard. And the conversations weren't just about like, oh, is this how my technique should look? It went far beyond that. You talked history and context. After you get through training, you go get a meal and talk about just how you're going to then go into the next thing. So you put a rhythm and a whole lifestyle around it, which is really amazing. That's really what it takes if you're going to really accelerate your progress,

I'd say. Yeah. And again, we talk about this all the time with respect to many different topics, but it certainly holds true in weightlifting as well, that you're kind of the average of the five people you hang out with the most. So if you're around other people that have either been doing weightlifting longer than you, or, or just simply better at it than you, which in order to do that, you got to be around some type of community that that community prides themselves on their weightlifting technique, on doing the right things right, on doing their mobility when they're supposed to, on warming up the right way, on doing a good comprehensive weightlifting plan that becomes the standard. And then you will just grow into that, that model, so to speak almost automatically. And then you will just grow into that model,

so to speak, almost automatically. So if you can get around people that are just like you and have the same goal that you have, then you'll kind of just fall in line and it'll happen automatically. And you won't have to kind of go through this uphill battle of trying to convince yourself to do it. Yeah, you can feel it. If you're either static, you're being drawn down by the vibe in the gym, or everything around you is actually drawing you up and encouraging you and making you see how you could be better. That's a huge difference. Like, same workout could be on the board, but what is the vibe?

Are you being pulled up or down? Yeah, additionally, I think if you're the best in your gym, if you're training and you're the best one, then you're not getting outside and you're not, you know, maybe you're the best in your gym if you're training and and you're the best one then you're not getting outside and you're not you know maybe you're the best in your town well maybe you need to take a trip every once in a while to a place where you're not the best and really get challenged you can be a college student that might be what people would say good object like well i don't have the money to train well dude all of us here like what do we do we wanted to go learn do we have a lot of money to travel when we were in college to do it? No, but you pack some beef jerky.

You take two clean pairs of underwear, which maybe you're lucky if you have that in college. I don't know. I mean, we were. You make like 800 bucks a month, and you find a way to go out and travel to go to a place like Westside, if that was me, or to go train at a Weyelton gym, which back then was really rare. But now there's no excuse. In your state, at least, there's no excuse in your state at least

there's somebody there's somebody who knows a lot more than you and you can benefit by going so just do it man

I remember we were I think the three of us we all made around or less than thousand

dollars a month for a long time when we were in college for longer than I want to admit so it's like

but we all did figure out I mean we would how many people we cram in a hotel room like eight people fuck oh yeah maybe more like people were sleeping on the floor people were eating cans So it's like, but we all did figure out, I mean, we would, how many people we cram in a hotel room? Like eight people. Oh yeah.

Maybe more. Like people were sleeping on the floor. People were eating cans of tuna. One time I made the mistake, like calculating my hourly wage and I was like trembling to my core. I'm like, Oh God, luckily I'm going to go on to conquer the world with this degree, which I guess I kind of did. Yeah.

So my own unique little tiny way. I guess that's a little tangent about like, if you have an excuse, really we don't believe that you have that excuse. You can use it all you want, but- But you can do it. It's not like- You can't get us to believe that that's valid.

Get past that. Get past the excuse. If you do travel, say you went to Westside Barbell, and how many people go to Westside and they want Louie's attention, right? Louie gets thousands upon thousands of people to go to that gym and they want his advice and his attention, whether it's in person or over the phone after the fact.

Well, maybe that's not the easiest route. Maybe you just find one of the top lifters in the gym who doesn't have near the amount of people that are vying for his attention, asking for his training advice compared to Louie, and you can just get that guy's phone number. And then when you go back to town, you can just call that guy. That guy will probably take your call every single time, whereas Louie's probably way too busy. And he'll help you actually kind of, a lifter who's involved,

kind of maybe from a practical perspective, maybe from a, like, here's exactly what to do perspective, can lead you through it quickly. And a good coach. There are a lot of great, great, knowledgeable lifters in these gyms because what are they doing? Some of them might just be walking through the motions, but in the barbell sports, people at that level have learned

and accumulated a lot of information. The top layers of that gym are just a goldmine for you. A good coach is going to also say with a good plan. So I think a lot of, you know, we're talking about getting around people who are better or getting around coaches who are experienced, but having a discussion with a coach or, or just finding a coach who's interested in developing a long-term plan for you, uh, doing two months of, of, of a beginner program, like we said earlier, and then hopping into something advanced is just not what you want

to do. Like every, every month should build on the previous month and taking into consideration what the athlete's done before. Do you have any specific advice? Because right there you're touching on that trust issue, right? Like people might know what the right thing is to do and they get into a program and what they're going to feel is maybe the real life setting in of like, man, I really want to get better quick. Or it's been eight weeks.

How much more of this before I get progress? And this guy's telling me advice. Like, how do you know that you can stay to it? I think it's having a discussion with the coach and asking them why. You know, you don't want to be, I mean, an athlete that asks why for every single thing ever all the time. That makes you a douchebag. As a coach, you're like, just do what I say. And there is something to doing just what the coach says. And after they have your trust,

a lot of times that is the best thing to do is just say, yes, sir, yes, ma'am, I'm going to go take care of this. I'm going to do it. But I do think that like you should go, hey, why are we doing this for the next 12 weeks? And they should be able to say, well, during this phase of training, you know, this is all about, you all about more of the general physical preparedness, getting the body condition to train.

And then you have this part, which is our big transition period. And then we have this period, which is where we really get to see your one rep maxes go up. So it might be a 12-week program. It might be 16, 20 weeks. Uh, I like to take beginners through, you know, the first 20 weeks is like, you're not maxing out on a lot of stuff for a long time. And there's a reason for that. And if someone came and asked me, I could explain it to them. So I think sitting down with the coach and saying like, what are your goals in the next year are kind of the way to go. And, and if nobody, you need to find someone who's interested in planning something

that builds month over month for as long as a year. And if you're not looking further out than three or four months for, you know, if you're trying to develop as a weightlifter, you know, I'm not talking about somebody who just maybe wants to get a little bit better and so they can do other stuff better. But like, if you really wants to get a little bit better and so they can do other stuff better. But like if you really want to be a weightlifter and that's something you really want to master, you need to be looking at it a year at a time and looking at the next 12 weeks only. You know, it's like, all right, we're going to do three months and we're going to max out. And after that, you're going to go, well, what's next? So let's look at this from this from an annual perspective, in my

opinion. If a coach can't demonstrate that this leads to that, and here's why, then that's why maybe your trust is maybe founded. If you've got this big urge to do something else, it could be that you're right, or it could be that maybe you haven't done enough to reach out and get the answers to those questions.

We actually do this at Faction Strength and Conditioning. Our coach, Coach David, he actually makes a little video and explains why we're doing this this week for our general fitness classes, for the CrossFit classes, for the weightlifting. It works great. We don't wait for the athlete to come to us

to ask. We know that athletes need to have that trust. And so we just kind of preemptively go, okay, we know exactly how to keep your trust over a long period of time. So a great coach is going to take the time to be proactive and do something like that for you. If they're doing that, they're really thinking carefully.

I think there's some good coaches that aren't as proactive and all you have to do is ask. So sometimes all you have to do is say, hey, why are we doing this? And if they go, oh, I got so busy, I forgot to explain why. They'll appreciate the question if it's a good question. They go, good question. I'll be back in 15. They're scratching their head in the corner.

It's like, Oh fuck. Well, I mean, you want to be awesome now, right? Right now, then do this now. Yeah. Just to reiterate your point, the best coaches in the world, they always have a very particular reason why they're doing every single thing they're doing in their programs or and or how their programs from one week fits into the next week or one month fits into the next month or even one year fits into the next year you're talking about annual plans right now but if you think about like athletes at the very very top as in people that are going to the olympics yeah they're really thinking about it in you know from a four-year perspective and then they're breaking it back down from there so there are people in the world that train their that plan

their training out in four-year blocks and then beginning with the end in mind regress back down all the way eventually to a single day and but they know this day is going to build towards this four-year goal so one year isn't that crazy it's actually not as long as some people go yeah I think I think one year is pretty much the minimum. If you're an athlete, you need to be – because there's seasons. Even in weightlifting, there's seasons. You have nationals. You have American Open.

These are big meets. Even if you're not competing at them, you should be competing at them eventually. And so being in the habit of creating annual plans is a great thing to do wait once you've been lifting for a while too you realize that's really like the basic fundamental block really of the planning because like i don't know when i was competing it'd be one event a year that you would kind of focus on and everything else would kind of build to that that's like the smallest unit and of course as you get in your 30s you realize just how short a year can be so a year is not as long as you would think, for sure.

One of the last things I want to talk about is just progression. Have a program that is progressing your strength. And that, again, like we said before, that doesn't exactly mean that you're getting your strength work when you do snatch and clean and jerk practice. Think about that as practicing a movement and a skill. And then strength work should know should be you know squats presses pulls uh and a lot of work uh kind of you alluded to before doug is something rehab prehab

identifying where uh there might be some weaknesses and a good coach is actually going to be able to anticipate weaknesses um i know that when we look at uh developing a program for athletes it's one of those things where we've coached, I don't know how many people I've coached, probably over a thousand athletes in weightlifting. And it's like, we know the common things. We know that it's very common for this to be weak or very common for this mobility restriction to exist. So a good coach is going to anticipate that and then the program is going to reflect that. A lot of times you can just watch somebody move and then be like, okay, well, you're likely moving incorrectly, or you have compensation because of this weakness, this lack of mobility here.

And then you can start working through the process of figuring out exactly what's causing that movement inefficiency, is what a lot of people call it. So what you can do in that case is run someone through a series of tests, figure out where they're weak, and then you can program that in intentionally to shore up those weaknesses before they actually become a problem, which means they would get injured. Get injured, yeah. You mentioned before, Mike, a very curious thing about your former self

when you got into the training hall for the first time. The former self. Your former self. Maybe you've visited him since in a dream state. Who knows? Maybe. But in this case, you're in this environment with a lot of great old school way with the minds who had a lot

more knowledge under the belt than you. And you felt a little, the waves of self-doubt. And that's interesting because just about everybody who takes on this challenge, and this is a big call to adventure. Come on, jump in. Try to be well, not try, but this is how you're going to do it. If you could go back as an expert to yourself,

what would you say to sort of soothe those self-doubts and give you the kick in the ass you needed to stick to this? There you go. Hey, Mike. Man up? Yeah. You know what, though? Because I make-

You pull out brass balls and lay them on the table, right? My whole life, I think there's a certain personality types of there. I've been pretty comfortable being uncomfortable. And I think something that I guess I could pass on to you at home is that you should be get, you should get comfortable being, get comfortable being uncomfortable, but also know that if you're if you are comfortable you're probably not growing the most uncomfortable circumstances cause the the most amount of growth so um if you're not uncomfortable on a fairly regular basis then you know that you're

not you're probably not growing and so that a lot of i think a lot of people think about getting good at weightlifting i'm gonna get good at at snatch and I'm going to get clean and jerk and I'm going to wait until I'm good to show up to a weightlifting meet no such thing because a weightlifting meet is uncomfortable and I promise you going to a weightlifting meet is going to make you better at your snatch and your clean and jerk

and if you wait until you're really good at snatch and clean and jerk and then you show up to your first meet guess what? you're not going to hit the numbers you think you're going to hit. Things are going to throw you off. You have to start practicing competing when you start practicing weightlifting. And so once you're able to do a full snatch, full clean and jerk, maybe all you can do is a power snatch and a power clean and jerk. Maybe you can't even do the full movement but you can do the movement well enough to where you kind of fit inside the rules you know you can lock it out

appropriately and you can pull from the floor without potentially injuring your back or something like that once you've reached that that point um start start practicing competing go to competitions keep the expectations as this is practice for competing. And a mistake that people make, they may take that advice and they go, oh, I got to prep for this competition. My program has to like revolve around this competition. No, no, that is definitely don't do that.

You should peak like going back to program design and why you need to look at it for an entire year. You should be peaking no more than three times a year. You know, you should be hitting, uh, really going for big lifts and hitting PRs. The more advanced you become, uh, your PR is going to become less and less frequent probably once every, you know, or, uh, three times a year. So like if you're competing and you need to practice competing and you need to get your first five weightlifting meets under your belt and you're only tapering three times a year, you're going to have to do some competitions where you're not at your best.

It's just a way of getting experience. The point is not to PR at your meet. Macklin just jumped into the meets and that's kind of what started him off, right? Yeah. That's when he started taking off. Highly motivating. There's programming, there's technique,

and everything we talked about. Like I said, what is a complete program? It sounds like it includes this component of being uncomfortable and exploring and taking chances and getting out and getting these experiences. Absolutely. Once you start competing, though,

your training at that point actually matters. That's true. You come back from your first meet, and you're like, man, I got to fucking step up my game. Yeah. It actually matters for real now. It's not just like something you're doing for fun. It's like, okay, now I'm taking the serious. Yeah. And that's a massive shift in mindset is huge. Absolutely. And you know what, all this stuff we just talked about, we, this is exactly why we created the program flight,

the flight weightlifting program. We, we saw that there wasn't like a comprehensive thing, or maybe there is somewhere, but we, we've been doing this for a while and we kind of figured out this is exactly how we would want. This is how I would have wanted to be introduced to weightlifting. I mean, how I was introduced to weightlifting was fantastic. But now when we take people through, it's like, ideally it's like, okay, in the next year, we're going to like, we're going to taper down three different times. Uh, the first five months we're going to build up for that first time. We're going to actually max out. Uh, and it is going to taper down three different times. The first five months, we're going to build up for that first time. We're going to actually max out.

And it is going to be comprehensive. We're going to talk about nutrition, mobility, technique. We're going to separate these things out in the program. We're going to assume that you don't know anything. We're going to assume that your weightlifting training has not been, you haven't been like focused on just weightlifting for years and years and years. We make the assumption that you're a beginner and so that's we saw that there was a lack of that and so that's where like all right we're going to create something that is for beginners it's going to take you back to the basics because I've trained for since 2006 and I've gone back to the basics

number of times I'll run into a coach who's like's like, and I find out that I have this flaw, which means that I have to start practicing like a beginner again. So even if you have been doing it for a while and you recognize I have some big gaps in my game, that's also a really big opportunity to go, okay, I'm going to hit the reset button. There's nothing wrong with going back and being a beginner again. So I've gone back. and you go, okay, I'm going to hit the reset button. There's nothing wrong with going back and being a beginner again. So I've gone back. When I met Thacker, I kind of had a reset button moment.

And I'd been lifting, so we met him in like 2012. So I'd been lifting for six years and I hit the reset button. It's a natural component of just, it's a good sign that you're still learning and growing. If you have those moments. If you don't have those moments, well, guess what, man? Go find those moments. Yeah, so we've spent, you know, our lifetimes figuring this out,

and that's kind of why we developed that the way we have. Yeah, there's no such thing as actual mastery. There's only, like, approaching mastery. I like the expression mastery is an asthmatote. Like, if you're a math dork, an asthmatote is something that you get really, really close to,

but you never actually ever get there. So if there's a line here, you get closer and closer and closer and closer and closer. I have no idea what he's talking about. You never actually get there, though. That's mastery. Mastery is an asthmatoid. It means something that you can always get closer to, but you can never actually ever achieve it. You just get like half closer, half closer, half closer, half closer, half closer, but you'll never actually touch it.

And now that Doug has bummed you out, we're going to close it down. Math talk. Oh, shit. Yeah, make sure you go to barbellstrug.com, sign up for the newsletter. If you want a free weightlifting guide, and we'll kind of spell out exactly. It's a legit book, son.

The guide is not a good word for it. Yeah, that's a terrible word. It's home. It's like 55 pages where we map out, and you can kind of sit down and really soak in uh as a beginner weightlifter what what you need to be considering so you can link to a bunch of videos too tons of videos like our whole series on how to do snatch clean jerk with you and alex yeah six part series on on clean jerk six part series on snatches we had a three-part series on squats which i'm not

sure if that's in there or not it might be be in there. Might not be. And then we had, I don't remember. And then, uh, then we had workouts in there as well. He had some, some, some of the, uh, weeks workouts from flight. Is that right? Yeah. We did a week's three and 33. Uh, that way you can kind of see the difference in, of different phases of training. And then also, you know, someone who's three weeks into a beginner program and 33 weeks in, kind of see, like, what that progression might look like. For people listening now, the coolest part might be there's, like, tons of frequently asked questions. Like, the most common things that we always got sent in, you know,

a message, like, about weightlifting. The FAQ alone is going to be worth going over and checking out. So even do us a favor and read that section. That'd be great. That way we can all move on. That's right. All right, guys. Thanks for for joining us did you tell them where they could get that thing flightweightlifting.com that's right yeah later