A New Year, A New You. Many of you have New Year's resolutions which you want to keep this year and some of them may be lifting related. Save yourself the disappointment of not being able to achieve them by preventing yourself from making these simple mistakes as you look towards the new year of training and practising your lifts. Stop Ripping and Start Slowing Things Down. The weightlifting movements are always perceived as movements of explosiveness and speed. Many people think that you need to be as powerful as your human potential allows you to in order for you to perform the lifts well. T ..read more

Grip is one of the things many fail to pay attention to when lifting. Issues can arise from the grip and go down the chain to the proximal joint of the shoulder. Here are 5 things to consider regarding your grip which you may not even be thinking about. Image courtesy of BarBend 1. You are using the hook grip but not really making use of it. The hook grip is a grip that should allow you to hold onto the bar with too much effort. But despite knowing that, you still gri ..read more

The shoulders are one of the most common areas for injury in the sport of weightlifting as research have shown. The reason for that is because of the movements involving the arms to go overhead and supporting heavy loads in that position. What contributes to the risk of injury for the shoulders come from many different factors and today, we are looking to explore some of them. One of the modern era’s top female lifters Deng Wei with good shoulder positioning. Image credit to hookgrip ..read more

The quintessentials of weightlifting is seldom discussed and personally I feel is related to the coaching philosophy developed by the coach imparted to the athlete. In any sport, the coach has certain ideals and thoughts that they constantly strive to bring about through their lifters and also through their coaching methodology. For example, the Russians have a certain way of teaching and programming the lifts and that's what makes them Russian. So do the Chinese. On top of that, everyone likes their lists, everyone loves their numbers, and everyone adores the alphabet. So here's my little tak ..read more

This is an update on a previously written article I wrote about the key positions in the lifts. With the internet, there is plenty of information floating around about technique and more so now that there is plenty of coverage of the world’s best lifters available to everyone on social media platforms. Moreover, every coach has his or her own views of how the weightlifter's body should be positioned at different parts of the lift. Before we start, let's clarify that positions are different from ph ..read more

Screening your movement is one of the biggest things you need to consider when starting with a programme or a coach. Even before you partake in any activity, an assessment of your background is critical to ensure that there is sufficient information provided about any underlying conditions you may have medically or physically. From a legal perspective, this is to ensure that nothing is done out of the scope of your capabilities.  Whenever I work with someone new, there are 4 main reasons why I want to assess them and I high ..read more

Squatting in a weightlifting program is a staple exercise and its uses are aplenty. It's seen as an exercise indicative of leg strength and is "somewhat related" to increasing your snatch or clean and jerk numbers. Here are 10 thoughts I feel should be made known about squatting based on my playing around with technique as well as programming and now I'm sharing with you to give you alittle more insight to how squats should be viewed in weightlifting. 1. You NEED to be able to squat consistently. Pretty straight forward right? But many don't back squat consistently to reap the full benefit o ..read more

When I first started writing about weightlifting, my goal was to make it as simple as possible so that everyone could digest the information and get something out of it. The challenge was to make the science understandable. As I started to grow as a weightlifting coach in a small club in Melbourne, this became more striking for me. To keep things simple when approaching training my guys and girls. Biomechanics provides the details and the underlying concepts needed for good technique and sound programming. But at the end of the day, the purpose behind the program is to be kept simple. And it ..read more