Weightlifting is one of my many passions in life and recently I participated in a CrossFit Weightlifting Trainer Course. It was a brilliant weekend of weightlifting and meeting like minded people and learning the finer points of weightlifting.
The course was held at CrossFit 3D, a brilliant facility in the heart of Manchester where we were met by the very friendly and professional coaching staff. Once everyone had settled in we were up and moving before we knew it.
CrossFit 3D in Manchester, England.
We were introduced to the infamous “Bergener Warm Up”, a sport specific warm up consisting of five elements to get the body primed and ready for weightlifting with many skills and drills incorporated within it to help improve your lifts. I can tell you right now that it is something that I will be doing before every lifting session. We broke off into small groups once we were we familiar with the warm up and worked on coaching other members of the group through the warm up.
Burgener Warm Up and Skill Transfer Movements
Once we were all fully warmed up and moving proficiently we were introduced to a set of five skill transfer movements. As the name suggests these movements were designed specifically to help develop skills that will transfer over to improve your lifts. Again something I will be incorporating into my training from now on and like with the warm up we broke off into small groups to coach each other through the skill transfer movements.
Before we knew it, it was time for lunch and we were told upon our return that we would break out into groups and work on full snatches. I really wanted to get a new personal best but I had injured my hand in the weeks prior to the course so I stuck to a safe weight of 60 kilograms but I saw some big lifts over 100kg and some scary near misses. But hey, that’s weightlifting! I also got to work on my coaching skills coaching some of the other athletes through their lifts as well as receiving some great coaching points on my own lifts from the coaches.
That was it for day one, a full day of snatch fun! We were debriefed and given the opportunity to ask any questions we might have had and told that the next day we would be working on the clean and jerk and to be ready to go heavy.
Day two was much shorter than day one. Logic being if you can snatch then you can clean and jerk a piece of cake, after all it is a much simpler lift.
We kicked off as you would expect with the “Burgener Warm Up” and the skill transfer movements. This was followed by a demonstration of how to clean and its finer coaching points. We then broke off into groups again where we would work on our technique and coach each other. Which was followed by a break out session where we would work on our cleans with actually weight. I did not go heavy again because of my hand injury.
This was then followed by how to split jerk, specifically foot positioning and the importance of how to establish the correct foot position, skills that will really enable you to coach.
We finished for lunch and were told that we would be doing full clean and jerks upon our return and then we would be finished for the day. I saw some massive lifts from some very talented athletes although because I was carrying an injury I could not go heavy but it was very fun coaching the other athletes which really was the point of this course.
All in all I had an amazing fun weekend of weightlifting and would recommend it to anyone who wanted to broaden their knowledge about weightlifting. I got my trainer certificate and will now begin my journey as a weightlifting coach.
Train Smart Not Hard!
