Add 20lb to your clean/snatch INSTANTLY!!!

Editors Note: My new site is now at www.just-fly-sports.com Check it out for a wealth of information on jumping higher and running faster, all backed by research and practical experience!

I know this probably sounds like a cheap marketing tactic, but since I am not selling anything, I guess it isn't. Most athletes use olympic lifts to enhance their athletic ability. Something that I notice with many videos of athletes doing olympic lifts, however, is that they are missing one important peice of the puzzle..........lifting straps.

What are lifting straps? They happen to be handy peices of leather/nylon that allow to have a rock solid grip on the barbell while you are lifting.

Wrist Wraps

Of course you might ask, Joel, on what basis do you make the claim that wraps will help so much. Well for one thing, they are banned from olympic lifting competitions, why?, because if they were legal it would be immensely easier to maintain a good grip on the weight (This is why olympic lifters must learn the 'hook' grip in order to deal with their force output on the bar)

So why is it important to have a good grip on the bar? Well if you don't have a good grip on a bar when you are performing say, a hang clean, a few things will happen.

1. You will prolong the coupling time between the eccentric and concentric portions of the lift due to 'give' in your hands at the explosive-isometric portion of the lift. Essentially you will teach yourself to be slower in converting your eccentric force into concentric. This is not something that you want as an athlete.

2. The loss of bar speed in an olympic lift will be proportional to the give in your hands during the lift, and by the way, even with a hook grip, it is still difficult to allow no give in a bar in a high speed hang snatch/clean.

3. Wraps help especially in snatches, where your hands are placed wider on the bar, which causes your hands with an even worse mechanical advantage than normal.

4. Finally, wraps teach you to use your legs/hips more, because you no longer have to worry about your grip much, therefore you have less cues to worry about over the course of the lift.

5. I will say that wraps will have a greater effect in doing lifts from the hang than lifts from the floor, just due to the rapid reversal that happens in a lift from the hang.

So..........use wrist wraps if you are planning on creating a greater force output in the olympic lifts!!!

A Tale of Two Years

Editors Note: My new site is now at www.just-fly-sports.com Check it out for a wealth of information on jumping higher and running faster, all backed by research and practical experience!

My junior year of college could be called a breakout year for any athlete. I increased my high jump PR from 6'8.75 to 7'.25", and my triple jump improved from 42'2 to 45'11.75". All this came after 8 years of training and competition in track and field and stagnant sophmore and freshman years of training. I look over my training log from my junior year quite frequently and can pick out several key aspects that made this a successful season. Here are the ones I find most important:

• Year-long management of volume and intensity. I started the year with circuit training and ended with depth jumps. The progress between these two was not linear, but always had the end goal in mind.
  
• A focus on squats as the primary weightroom method instead of cleans...if you don't have a good squat base, your strength from your cleans and snatches are going to come from places that aren't helpful as a jumper.
  
• A focus on SPEED in the weightroom. Just about everything I did in the weightroom was pretty fast, even squats. I usually hovered in the 60-80% range for my training in the fall.
• Gradual improvement of work capacity and special strength fitness. I did a lot of tempo and general work early this training year, as well as a few longer runs a few times a week, just for the purpose of recovery and fitness.
• Concentrated Strength Block Work: I can give at least two times during the course of this training year where I hit the weights hard for three week cycles and although my performance might have decreased a little during that time, it improved a LOT afterwards and led to PR's.
  
• Focus on RECOVERY. I did a lot of hydrotherapy, foam rolling, and stretching this year and it really paid off.
  
• Focus on the primary sport movement from October on. My primary workout of each week in October and after (except for the strength blocks) was high jumping and triple jumping.
  
• Consistant recovery weeks (every 4th week)
• I had a relatively lower workload in my sophmore year season, I think this allowed me to experience greater benefits my Junior year.

• 

I would like to compare this season to my Senior year. My senior season was very disappointing to say the least, I hovered around the 6'6 mark in high jump for most of indoor, until I finally pulled out 6'8 and 6'10 at the end of indoor season. I triple jumped in the 44 range fairly consistantly, until I got 45'5 at the NCCAA indoor meet (which was really more like 45'10 but they marked off because of my shorts) Regardless, this season was very disappointing. I sprained my ankle at the national meet going for 7' and couldn't really high jump at all for outdoors. I also tore ligaments in my elbow which took away my javelin ability. Here are some reasons that I feel I did not perform quite as well my senior year.

• Too much plyometric intensity early on in the fall. I was doing a lot of plyo work and very little tempo or solid weightlifting work in the early fall. I felt that my strength levels were fine at about a 290lb backsquat (could do more last year!) and that I needed to work on speed. This may have been a good idea, but my special fitness level was terrible, and although I had some good high jump practices early in the fall, I eventually hit a big plateu and burnout mark in late October.
  
• Too little weightlifting in the early season. (I had read a book by Marv Marinovich and it was good, but kind of led me down the wrong path) I did mostly bodyweight exercises in the early season.....pistol squats and the like. Pistol squats are actually a great exercise for acute increases in vertical, but they wont really provide enough overload to the CNS because of the balance issue.
• Too little general strength/elastic work. Once I hit my wall so to speak and started really hitting the weights again, I virtually eliminated elastic work from my regime (Aside from some sprint work). Although I gained MASSIVE amounts on my 2 leg vertical (and even my single leg), I was increasing my ground contact time by training my body to rely on frictional elements for the takeoff and thus my full approach high jump was in trouble. My first high jump practice after some very well planned strength work resulted in almost scissoring 5'10 after not being able to make 5'8 for the majority of the year and at the time would have been a practice record. I couldn't really jump off a full run however, because I hadn't really been practicing it, as well as not working on elastic exercises.
  
• Loss of high jumping progression throughout the SPP period.
  
• Loss of ability to maintain strength gains (possibly because of 'erratic' training cycles)
• X-Factors, Honestly sometimes I think that I also did poorly this season because I have been training hard for so long, sometimes the wall just creeps up on you. I know legendary sprint coach Charlie Francis reccommends a year of lowered volume after so many years of consistant training (I think 7 years). I did manage to take off 2 months of training altogether last year, and it really helped for this past summer's work.
  

With all that written, I would have to say the moral of the story is this.......traditional methods are typically where it is at with training. Make sure you are doing mostly low intensity work in the earlier portion of the year, and get stronger in the weightroom while keeping the speed of your lifts up. Make sure you get to your primary movement work early in the year, and then strive to improve thoughout the fall. Work a few concentrated strength blocks in here and there, and make sure your recovery and diet are good, and you will have a great season.

Joel