Sweet Home Alabama?

Got the heck out of Dodge (St. Louis) yesterday and drove down to Birmingham, AL for the American Open Weightlifting Championships. I hope the effects of the current ice storm hitting the St. Louis area are gone by the time I have to drive back. It's in the 70s here and overcast. The temperature is supposed to drop tonight and we're supposed to get some rain, but no snow or ice is predicted.

This competition is the second largest meet on the USA Weightlifting calender. Since it is an open meet, it is open to all ages, as long as you make the qualifying total. So we'll see some good juniors and some good masters competing this weekend. Many of the 2006 World Team members will not compete here, but because this meet is a qualifier for the 2007 Pan Am Games, there will be a few athletes on the bubble looking to move up in the rankings.

I'll be recording all of the lifts and displaying replays for the crowd on a big screen. It should be fun. I hope to have a few of the more interesting lifts up for everyone to see over the weekend.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit
Read more

The 411 on Back Angles and Torque When Squatting

The angle of the torso, when squatting, is not a function of whether or not the bar is high or low on the back. The angle of the torso (and thus torque on the spine) is primarily determined by the angle of the shin, a.k.a how much the ankle dorsiflexes. AND IN MY BOOK, THIS IS THE KEY TO BEST BACK TRAINING PRACTICES. GET IT??? MAKE YOUR QUADS, HAMS AND GLUTES DO THE WORK. If your shin is perpendicular to the floor, then your torso will incline forward to keep the CoM over your BoS, regardless of how low the bar is on your back. And your back will be forced to handle higher torque. A good, general rule of thumb, IMHO, is to keep the shins and the torso parallel, from an inclination standpoint. This could change with femur/torso length issues (tight adductors and hips in general can cause issues too), but this method is pretty good to help someone figure out whether or not they have decent ankle flexibility when squatting. And this will minimize torque on the back, as we will d
Read more