Part 1 was about general Chinese Weightlifting philosophy, now it's time for other important details.
Control of small muscles
This was another revelation. We used lots and lots of slow movements, often with long isometric holds. When asked why, the coaches would respond with:
“Your large muscles are strong enough. Your small muscles are too weak.””
I’d only heard this distinction between large and small muscles a few times before in passing. They didn’t point out any muscles in particular to show us, but “small muscles” generally seemed to refer to our ability to control weights through our entire range of motion.
These are the muscles, they said, that allow Chinese lifters to look smoother than non-Chinese lifters at the same weight, which in turn allows them to reach those weights more consistently in training and therefore in competition. There’s obviously some nationalistic bias there, but I think we can notice a big difference in control between, say, Andrei Rybakou vs. Lu Yong despite the same total.
Pull training for usable strength
Common to all the lifters was slow and positionally accurate lowering of every pull, except on maybe the last rep if it was close to max. The coach’s favorite for developing stable, usable strength was a snatch deadlift + slow negative for 2-3 reps. On the last rep, lower to the knee and hold for 5 seconds minimum, then pull to a high target as high as you can.
“For people who train with me, or use any of my programs, I call it ThreeAndAHalf (3.5) Deadlift. You are supposed to gently kiss the floor with the plates between reps to show superior control. Bumpers should make no sound. ”
Something prescribed to everyone were these slow weighted pulls standing from a block. Think of this as a slow deadlift, but performed with a large kettlebell or other weighted implements while straddling two tall blocks to create deficit. You sit back and sit way low, keeping the chest open and back arched. Your grip is narrow--thumbs touching--which makes opening the chest very difficult.
I don’t have the mobility for this yet at all, even without weight, so it mostly felt like my shoulder blades were being ripped apart. It was awesome. But the coach took one look at me and said, direct translation:
“If I was one of his lifters performing it like I was, he’d have beaten me half to death with a stick (he cues everyone physically with a tiny little metal baton, so it was kind of cute.)”
Leg training beyond regular squats
Another movement prescribed to me was front squat eccentrics. Most of you have decent rack positions, but all of you know how badly your back sucks and rounds in a gentle breeze. Basically, start from the bottom position off the blocks with two people helping with the concentric. Lower the bar as slowly as you can under control all the way into the bottom. There should be no barbell/plates sound when you reach the bottom.
This sounds easy, but the coach said it’s hardly even effective until you’re doing it with 110-120% of max. My front squat max is 160 and I could barely get it right with 120.
“Side squats” or “rope squats” are killer. These are good for pumping blood into the relatively avascular connective tissue of the knee and amassing a nasty quad pump - meaning it’s a very good preventative for knee pain, a very good exercise for knee repair, and very good for getting that sick teardrop, bro. Also very good for developing strength at the weakest joint angles with the highest amounts of shear. They’re a bit complicated to describe, so just imagine yourself tethered to a wall roughly 8 feet away, leaning back into a harness and squatting up and down extremely slowly (15sec down, 15sec up) with your knees behind your toes for 10-20 reps.
Sounds simple but this was easily the hardest thing I did in Shandong.
special split jerk exercise
One of the exercises prescribed specifically to me was the overhead jerk lunge, done in a very specific way, to teach the legs how to receive weight in the split and overall positioning of the feet. You split a little longer than usual and lunge all the day down, not letting your front knee travel past midfoot while making sure that your hips, centered under your shoulders, travel straight down with the bar. This is extremely difficult.
Chinese Weightlifting Technique philosophy
It’s hard to explain everything here, but I have a much better sense of how the movements are performed and the why-s behind certain details.
The general idea is that the bar is extremely close to you, that you find a high target while your body is crouched low (as opposed to reaching a high target but your extension is almost over), that your back is arched as MUCH AS YOU CAN (emphasis on lower back and lats), and that you’re very stable with good rhythm.
“Rhythm was emphasized: any yanking off the floor warranted an immediate “start over” from the coach. Same with banging the bar into the hip.”
As for how strict coaching is over there, the coach could often be seen whacking his lifters with the aforementioned metal baton after maybe every other lift (although they all looked perfect, of course). No technical flaw would go unaddressed.
There is no such thing as someone special who gets away with something of their own (but my arm bend is fine, lol; he says everyone does that). He left us all with a guiding principle to follow:
“If your technique blows today, stop chasing weights. ”
Brutal assessment of adult Weightlifting enthusiasts
All of our techniques fucking suck (based on cellphone videos showed to coach). Some of us basically need to relearn the lifts, is what the coach said. Some of us shouldn’t even be weightlifting. They said I should just be a bodybuilder (caveat: coach said that by the end of my two week mini-camp that my pulling and jerking looked all right; I just have no back strength and my hips are so inflexible they asked me if I’ve ever broken my pelvis).
Quick look at the place where it all happened.
Mobility and recovery
The coach was extremely adamant that we mobilized every joint and muscle group before training. Group warm-ups were a pretty serious affair, starting at 3:00 sharp with someone counting off every movement, roughly 24 of them in all. Some days we’d do more specific movements, i.e more shoulder stretches before a very overhead-dominant day or to address a specific weakness.
He was equally serious about mobilizing after training. Everyone had a partner to stretch with every day. We’d step on each other for about 10 minutes and switch to partner stretches for another 10. Overall, mobilizing/stretching took about 30 minutes of every session, and I’m going to start accounting for that in my own training.
Sample practice session duration
Every day will look roughly like this for me:
6:30-6:45: warming up
6:45-7:30: primary movement
7:30-8:00: secondary movement
8:00:8:30: tertiary and bodybuilding
8:30: 8:50: stretching