Meeting A Champ: Continued.

• By vishwa on General

• December 7, 2010

Mr Ravindra did turn up in the evening.  As I had expected, the technique which we were following had certain flaws and were all addressed by him.  He made it clear that correcting the technique is a very long procedure, for each and every step has to be addressed separately.  What he meant was that after separating the lift to different components,  correcting each and every component would be the ideal procedure than trying to rectify the whole exercise.  He also suggested that he would try to obtain an Olympic weightlifting bar and a few rubber plates, as an Olympic bar is lengthier than the bar which we handle in the gym, and the Olympic plates diameter when compared to the plates which we have at the gym is more.  Moreover, the rubber plates if the need arises can be bumped to the ground, but that cannot be done with the plates which we possess at gym.  He was in fact suggesting an ideal environment to learn these lifts, which would all matter in the long run.

I suggested to him that it would be better on our part to stop practicing the Olympic lifts, as continuing  to practice the lifts in the wrong way would worsen the situation.  Tommy Kono, Olympic gold medalist in weightlifting, had said, “Practice makes permanent.”  Going by the above statement, practicing wrong would also force us to permanently learn the wrong method.  Allow me to state what Brooks Kubik had said in his book Grey Hair and Black Iron on practicing the lifts with a faulty technique.  He rightly says, “Meaning that if you perform a sloppy rep, you teach your body to perform sloppy reps – and if you do enough sloppy reps, you end up with a deeply ingrained sloppy pattern that will be difficult or impossible to correct.”

The Olympic lifts  seems to be the pinnacle and the the principal form of exercise, which one can learn and adopt in his training regime. Practicing a few sets of snatch, for example, would be equal to perform normal weight training for two hours, as practicing the Olympic lifts will exhaust your system to a higher level. But learning to execute them properly would take a great deal of practice, which we should try to do.

He is coming on Thursday evening, which encourages our quest in learning the lifts.