Olympic Weightlifting Workshop

Sunday 10th March saw Combat Ready host David Jenkins of Sports Therapy Scotland. The Workshop covered the Clean, Jerk and the Snatch lifts. Now I must admit a 6 hour workshop covering 3 lifts seemed very daunting to me at first, my immediate thought was "6 hours doing 3 lifts, I'm gonna be wrecked by the end of it" but the day started and we quickly got stuck into it. We worked through the lifts in a logical progression and broke them down into different stages to get the maximum amount of reps in.

I was surprised how quickly I felt confident with them. Now although I felt confident I was in no way perfect at them but that was the biggest surprise of the workshop. David didn't walk around and say you're doing this wrong or doing that right, he took time with everyone and asked them how the lift felt and if they felt they had done something wrong, he wasn't being critical he was making me criticise myself and because of that it gave me a greater understanding of my form and where to correct myself.

David is a massive advocate of form and on a few occasions he commented on how he wasn't even all that strong and it was form and technique that got the weight up to where it was meant to be, a method that's easily transferable to martial arts, I found a lot of crossover concepts that I'll be covering in another blog piece.

The 6 hours flew in, and throughout the day although I felt tired and fatigued, I was really focused on performing the best lift I could. I was genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed the workshop, not only a massive physical day but there was a whole load of information thrown at us all. A challenging and hugely informative day. Hopefully we'll have the chance to host David again and I'd without doubt recommend the course to anyone interested in weightlifting. A huge thanks to David for coming through.

Michael