and look like;

And look like

Really. Why?

So in order for me to better understand the depths of explaining things, as a trainer, I went to learn something I have completely no idea about. Yoga. I figured yoga would be great. One, because it’ll increase my flexibility and the slow controlled movements, with long isometric pauses would activate parts of my muscles which are inactive. This I assumed, would then help me with my hip flexors pain (which it did, after 1 intense class, I kid you not). My second reason however, was to be a newbie again. You tell me things such as “Muscle snatch, handstands, hip bridge, hip elevated single arm lying press” and I’ll immediately know what you’re talking about. You give me “Commodities and equities”, I’ll pick it up. You tell me “Child pose, Pranayama, bird dog” I’ll start looking for the nearby police station’s number and report you for abnormal sex practices.

It made me realize, that it’s not that these people are stupid or anything. It’s just that they’re already flushed with information, and learning more stuff, really makes them flustered.

The more information that you provide someone who’s already clueless and struggling to learn, the less they’ll understand. The more examples you give however, the higher chances they’ll find a cue that’ll help them realize what they’re doing. It helped me learn, cues such as “Bring your hip to the front. Snap your hip” makes NO sense to someone who doesn’t have that motor pattern. I’ll have to say “Bang the bell with your hips” or “Use hips, throw the bell up”

And when you’ve a class with 20 people-30 people, you bloody well better hurry up and learn cues like that.

I do wish for a day, where I can say this though;

Right now, I’ll just have to be very careful with the client base I’ve got because these guys aren’t athletes, don’t aspire to be, and if I do push them like this, they’ll die. I’ve had to realize, not everyone’s attitude towards things is “If I can’t do it right today, I’ll find a bloody way to do it right tomorrow” and keep going back to it. Some people have so many things in their life, they’ll eliminate things that they can’t do right. Especially if in their eyes, it isn’t worth it. To me, physical and mental health is worth it, because it is what I’m endowed with and it’s the only one I have. But I can’t place my priorities upon everyone.

It’s all about hard work people. Really.

2. Front squats are far more important to a weightlifter than back squats are.

3. The ankle flexibility is something too many people overlook and wonder why their overhead position is shit though they stretch their shoulders daily.

4. Despite how research “proves” massage doesn’t work, I experienced an increase in my jumping distance, just 3 days of daily massage. This was during a sports massage camp in Port Dickson.

5. Everybody talks about shoulder flexibility, but nobody wants to stretch their pecs and infrasupinatus. Infarsupi….in..infrasupina…fuck this.

6. I wish I had a teacher to teach me anatomy so I wouldn’t have to stare at charts while controlling my ADD.

7. I wish that doctor from Cuba that actually found the cure for yellow fever was given the credit he deserved and not have it robbed  by the media.

8. Doing that scarecrow thing, ring rows, reverse fly, dumbbell rows and lateral raises is amazing for shoulder mobility and strength.

9. People need to start realizing that they don’t live alone in this world. And differences in opinion, means an opportunity to share, not condemn. Being proven wrong, means you’ve just learnt something new.

10. Unilateral balance is far more important, than performing well in any sport. Cuz don’t forget. Once glory is over, you’re still stuck with that body and it better damn well be balanced.

11. CrossFit isn’t as evil as many people think. Weightlifters need to see how to use CrossFit to benefit them, and shave that elitist mentality. Work within the system if you don’t have a better option yet.

12. Not everyone in Asia’s smart.

13. Chinese lifters are not coerced to train if they’ve potential. It’s something they use to better their lives.

14. The pressout rule well and truly is the silliest thing in weightlifting.

15. Two things that destroyed this world. Capitalism. Pharmaceutical industry. No wait…capitalism. Yes. Unfortunately, we don’t have a system that can work better yet.

16. Nutrition is something almost all weightlifters think they can get away with. It isn’t.

17. The squat jerk is something everybody should perform at least once in 2 weeks. It helps promote driving the bar up and back.

18. If everyone argued like a Nepali, Bhutanese, Thai or Indonesian did, they’d be no wars.

19. Pulls are demonized, because the noisiest people perform them wrongly and the quietest people, perform them correctly.

20. I will NEVER call myself “Coach” until I’ve actually had someone on a respectable competition platform.

21. Countries, should have never existed.

22. I refuse to believe 8-12 repetitions for sets once a week, is bad for weightlifters and strength athletes. How can mental toughness and hypertrophy be bad for any strength athlete?

23. Our current civilization, is at the lowest point we’ve ever been at. No homes, no food, no voice and above all, no brains.

24. 24 is my special number, since it’s my birth date. So, 24 of random things I think about, the most important thing in a snatch and clean, is the first pull and bar drop distance during catch. It’s difficult for a good lifter to exist without a solid first pull and minimal bar drop.

25. Humans need to stop thinking within their limits and go outside.

1. Increasing your heart-rate to pump blood to the muscles.
2. Loosening your muscles and joints, getting them warm, mobile, activated and stretched to better range.

Nowadays, more and more people are campaigning their advanced versions of a warm-up, from prescribing a 42KM marathon for a warm-up, to having something like a “Dumbbell complex, cortex activation, dynamic reactive yadayadablabla” warm-up.

Now… if you really break down what the fundamentals behind all these complex sounding warm-ups really is, it suddenly sounds a bit like

1. Increasing your heart-rate to pump blood to the muscles.
2. Loosening your muscles and joints, getting them warm, mobile, activated and stretched to better range.

Really half the time, people warm-up as if they’re trying to compete in the Olympics. The retard Olympics. Don’t forget, your ATP is limited. The more time you spend “warming-up”, the less ATP you have to train hard. This is how I approach warm-ups.

Decide what exercise I’m going to do that day.

Well, bloody hell I’m a weightlifter, it’s gonna be mobile shoulders, back, hip, knees and ankles every day anyway, so my warm-up’s going to be the same daily. Then I determine how flexible or inflexible I feel that day, and from there go along with the warm-ups. And honestly? Warm-ups just require you to take the barbell, do some overhead squats and see where’s the tightest spots.

Then foam roll a bit, or if you’ve a therapist, a quick activation massage. Use active movements (arm rotations, hip rotations) , “ballistic’ish” stretching , some weighted static stretches for your joints and tighter muscles, (1 minute stretches are enough) and retest on your overhead squats. Flexible enough? Good, start training. Not flexible enough? Roll and stretch a bit more. It’ll open up eventually anyway.

So seriously, if you’re young, healthy and flexible, just stretch enough before training, to keep from any injuries. It’s the post-training and pre-bedtime stretch that you should spend at least 15-20 minutes on, just holding the stretches and relaxing into it.

Now unless you’re working around an injury, that’s when we’re talking about slightly more complex stretches. But when healthy, keep warm-ups short and effective and post training stretches, long, relaxing and deep

Stable, strong, fast. That’s ALL. If they ask questions, I answer. They want to discuss, I’m like “Meh… here, call this number instead. This guy’ll suit you, since you’re a researcher”. I’m not going to discuss stuff like this. I’m more of a do’er, but it doesn’t mean I’m don’t keep up with things. But once you start discussing/arguing, people pick on every straw they can get, to hang on to their strong side of the “argument/discussion”

There’s two kinds of people that you’ll generally see when discussing training.

The overzealous, “WHAT?! You DARE disagree with me?!??”

And then you’ve the “Oh, oh….oh..hmm“, then back to back squatting a billion times a day.

People, honestly don’t give a flying fishcake about what I’ve to say, about 99% of the time. Everybody is looking for that “well-educated, well brought up, successful” coaches. It’s always about that guy that can talk about a strength curve, that guy who uses words like subscapularis impingement while, I’m just pointing “There, your muscle there, on the point where your sweating tits connect with your shoulder. Stuck, stuck” because I lack the ability to converse in a language called English, cuz apparently, I’m from a Muslim country where everybody loves to eat dog (You’d have to poison me before I do that) and wants to blow up every plane in the US airspace.

Sometimes, it almost seems, nobody listens, especially cuz they’ve their own pre-determined perception towards people of different regions. The foreignness of this region, and the reputation due to other sections of this nation’s involvement, makes people stick that pesky sticker that goes “Meh, he don’t know jack….. the results may be good, but that’s cuz they’ve a quadzillion people to choose from.

No, you wet mongrel. The reason they’ve excelled is because they’ve listened and studied further. And due to the linguistic divide, YOU can’t get a part of this data and thus choose to only validate data you can understand. Why? Familiarity. Reputation. Marketing.

Initially, when my coach said he can’t be fucked to discuss training with coaches of other nations, I thought it was cuz his English was almost as bad as my Russian. As he continued to improve in the language, and I continue to coach, I realized then, every nation is essentially doing the same thing for weightlifting and training in general. Balance, strong, power, improve. Balance, strong, power, improve.  That’s ALL training is. That’s ONE reason. The second reason, is because the more choices you have, the more retarded you’ll become.

No, but seriously, stability training, instability training? What? Deactivation of the lateral plane… and reprogramming the extension of the hamstring.WHAT???????!!??? Hold on a second. Raise your legs to it’s maximum height. Okay 90 degrees? Here’s mine at 130 degrees. I’m more flexible than you are. Now come, let’s do a deadlift. Oh you can’t, cuz your tibialis anterior is too tight? TibiaWHAT? OH dammit, just say the front bone below your knee for Virgin Mary’s sakes. How come your knees are collapsing when all you did 20 minutes ago was talking about hip torquing and adductor activation for maximal peroneal, god knows what?

Maybe that’s cuz you’re too fucking busy reading a quadbillion words and not lifting shit. Now, shut up, and go lift till you can’t lift no more. Then lift a bit more, and gobble down that chicken and go to bed. Moron.

SO yeah, discussing training, probably one of the most boring thing a human being can possibly do. I’d rather watch Bear Grylls drink elk blood or shave my armpit hair and see how long it takes before I see stubs that’ll poke my skin till I end up rubbing coconut oil around it.

1. The setup & first pull:

Is well and truly where the magic happens. It is, the most important position. I don’t know if anybody realized, but in the recent years, Chinese lifters have stopped using the dynamic start position where the butt swings up and comes down before lifting. The Chinese coaches realized that when doing that, there’s a tendency for the hips to shoot backwards and the shoulders stay low. This, along with the build of Chinese lifters (medium femur, long torso) made them realize that the technique might not be so suitable.

In the start position, the emphasis is now;

• Upper back (rhomboids, lats, traps) locked down
• Hips stay low, knees pushed apart, toes outwards naturally (forget about using this technique if you never started learning to lift this way. Stay with a butt slightly higher technique)
• Shoulders go wherever they like. The emphasis is to keep upper back locked and strong, weight in the center of the heel, where the quads feel the strongest. This distributes load between quads and lower back.

2. Second pulls, aren’t meant to bring the bar high. 

Now every time, I only hear people discussing how to smack the bar, how to pull. The idea here is simple.

Do what you need, to get the bar up in a curve, with little height, in the RIGHT position. That’s correct. We want to see that curve in the bar movement, not a straight bar path. And we want LITTLE height. A straight bar path is only going to be useful, if you’ve a teleportation device that allows you to in front about 30CM once you rip the bar.

You’ll never see an Olympian or world class lifter lift like that. This is more like what they look like.

In the Bulgarian training, one thing they say is “Your technique isn’t going to make the major difference. It’s how you train“, and I do agree. There’s a percentage that technique will help you with, so any lifter with good technique will always lift better, all things being equal. But at the end of the day, it’s how hard and often you train and know how to use THAT technique you developed. HOWEVER, I highly doubt Ivan Abadjiev will allow a straight bar path pull to any lifter.

Remember, there isn’t such a thing as a triple extension. Your ankles isn’t going to do jack shit to your bar height. It’s just a violent hip thrust that gets that S curve. However, the hell you’re going to get that hip thrust, is entirely up to you. I’ve tried a billion ways to explain the thrust, but every lifter ends up finally developing their own style of a thrust. The only thing that matters, is the bar stays close to the body, goes into that position overhead, where it can be locked out.

That means, bar is right above the lumbar, hip and ankles, nicely punched out wherever your shoulder is (depending on your psoas flexibility) and solid.

Secondly, the goal in the second pull, isn’t height. It’s position. There’s no point, having a super high bar, seriously. The bar just needs to be high ENOUGH to get under. Too much bar height, can cause you to jump which is detrimental to lifting heavy weights. That “jump” that you see, is well and truly just an almost “negative” byproduct of “excessive” thrusting/popping of the hip.

Now, start that argument where “If you have a higher bar path with lighter weights, that means with heavier weights, you’ll have a slightly lower pull as opposed to being crushed” and I’ll knock your head with a mallet. I’ve heard of that theory a thousand times and it never ever seems to work. As the weights get heavier, these guys who pull higher, do not dare or cannot understand how to reverse quick enough to get under the bar. They stay in the air for far too long.

Don’t take specific, individual, isolated anomalies like Dimas to argue that having a good power snatch/clean makes you lift more.

I’ve tested this myself. I only did power versions (No HALF catch positions) for 2 whole months and saw my power snatch shoot to 110KG and power clean to 135KG. Snatch and CNJ? Snatch dropped from 120KG to 117KG ( I tried it 8 times), cleaned slightly better, though.  However, I always have a hard time standing once I rack it.

Why? I kept bloody overpulling the bar and couldn’t get under to catch it and bounce up. I’ll end up catching it, and falling backwards or catch it, shake and lose it forward.

All you need to do is, know where you need the bar to be when catching, pop the bar till it reaches the height, and catch it there. I say yes to mixing power versions and classic versions. No to overpulling.

Google Apti Aukadov, Mete Binay, Lu Xiaojun , Hysen Pulaku training. They all pop the bar to a height which they desire, and stand up without needing to fight a backward motion due to the swinging of the bar.

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In fact….I’m going to go as far as saying, full knee”extension” is actually detrimental for lifting heavy weights. I’ve noticed, and actually even saw a chart that showed the angle of the knee and hip. The top lifters never seem to actually FULLY extend. At maximum, the knee angle is only 170 degrees.

Here’s the picture!! So yeah, don’t jump. Just extend hip.

So ladies and gentlemen. The simple guide to the pulls. Solid first pull position, bring to hip, pop just to the right height and whip self under the bar.

Now for some Jamaican spicy buns with cheese and butter.

I always believed and trusted that Ivan’s methods, were one of the best methods. To work maximally in all the competition and supplementary lifts, is something I practice too. I trust that if it wasn’t for Ivan’s methods, many of us would still be caught up in a ton of supplementary lifts while strengthening positions, but not actually practicing the actual movements enough.

Coach Ivan, without doubt, created the biggest effect in weightlifting. His work with the Bulgarian team, put the Russians to shame in the shortest period of time, shocked so many nations, went against the grain of so many training methodologies and above all, made people in the sporting industry, use their brains. To think. What he did was PHENOMENAL. Too many times, people throw the word “Periodization” like the hell, they know what it means.

In weightlifting, I strongly believe, periodization is probably the one thing that destroys progress in weightlifting more than anything else. Based on my studying of Tudor Bompa’s books (I don’t believe in reading notes of people that interpret and add their things. I want the authentic ones, to understand the creation of the idea and how people used that as a root to develop things) one comes to understand, the PURPOSE of periodization was to help athletes of sports, that do not specifically training in weightlifting, improve their performance in their given activity. The strength and power developed in the weight room was to assist in their bloody sport.

There needed to be a balance between time spent developing their own given sport and time in the gym. Now… that makes perfect sense. That’s extremely smart.

However, when you’re already in the gym and your sport, is LIFTING the barbell…in the gym. Do you think there’s any need, to “PERIODIZE?” Right so maybe you’re a swimmer, you’ve got to balance aerobic strength, anaerobic strength, technique and consuming 10,000 calories a day. Of course you’d have to back off a bit as competition closes. But your sport is weightlifting!! What the hell, are you doing, backing off for? What? You’re going to need to sacrifice your explosive power for aerobic strength because your competition is 2 hours long? Yeah, 2 hours, but you lift for maybe 30 minutes after including warm ups.

So what Ivan Abadjiev has done is, thrown that mentality out and made athletes really work, hard in the gym and behave like it’s a competition. And that’s worked fantastically.

ONE of the reasons, I don’t completely follow what he does is because my coaches have taught me, to consider other aspects such as longevity and balance. Fun? Aesthetics. But no, Ivan Abadjiev’s methods of maximal loading and max attempts is vital in our training as well. It’s only that we believe in loading in a different manner, other than just maximal weight. We can use other training protocols too such as tempo, repetitions, etc etc. We’ve tested this, and it works well. However, there are times in training that we adopt a very Ivan Abadjiev style of training.

I don’t call this Bulgarian way of training, because it was created by a Bulgarian but I respect the coach and the country he’s born in, thus I call it Ivan Abadjiev’s methods. So yes, do understand that in no way, do I think Ivan Abadjiev’s methods are silly or wrong. Only because of my diverse background in training methods, I look at things different. But yes, I do respect that man that if I see him, I’ll bow my head when shaking his hands.

Any weightlifter not giving Ivan Abadjiev respect, has got to be CRAZY!

Another reason why I have immense respect for him, is because he’s so calm about who he is, and doesn’t ask people to call him Coach Ivan Abadjiev. I really like coaches like him, who are humble and certain of who they are. In China, we call coaches “Name coach”. So for example my coach’s “Coach Wu” or in Mandarin, “Wu jiaolian” because we cannot call our coaches by name. It’s disrespectful. This for me, helps me respect a coach by another billion points when they’re so chilled about how we call them.

So no, Coach Ivan Abadjiev, I do respect him tremendously. Dr.Tamas Ajan may not agree with him, but Dr. Tamas Ajan has not removed the world records that were created by Ivan Abadjiev. So to me, people can talk all they want. But Ivan Abadjiev, is a man to be respected.