I am lucky to have a personal relationship to some of the best Olympic Lifting coaches in the country. I consider Mark Cannella, Leo Totten, and Mike Gattone all friends. I have learned so much form all of these gentlemen and along with Greg Everett, Bob Takano, and Glen Pendlay, we have some great coaches here in the US (even if they don’t speak Russian).
Since I started at elitefts™ in the spring, I am proud of the fact that we have increased our resources for Olympic Lifters. This community is a tough crowd to sell to. Most take pride in making their own platforms and jerk boxes. They are lowest maintenance of the strength athletes. Maybe we should make a wooden box, put elitefts™ on them and sell them. Hmmmmm…
We have just about everything an Olympic Weightlifter needs:
- Weightlifting Bars
- Bumper Plates
- Adidas Adipower Weightlifting Shoes
- Adidas Power Perfect II Weightlifting Shoes
- Belts
- elitefts™ Knee & Wrist Wraps
- elitefts™ Wrist Straps
- elitefts™ Cresent Duffel Bag
And some of the best books on the subject:
- Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide
- Weightlifting Programming: A Winning Coaches Guide
- A Program of Multi-Year Training in Weightlifting
- Managing the Training of Weightlifters
Olympic Lifting has gained popularity through the internet and undoubtedly CrossFit. In my opinion, CrossFit did to Olympic Lifting in this country what PEDs did for baseball. You young pups may not remember opening day crowds of 10 grand before McGwire and Sosa went batshit crazy and got a different demographic to give a shit about America’s pastime.
Anyway, while being coached by Leo Totten and Mike Gattone at the NSCA National Conference, they finally got me to the point where I could actually catch a clean.
So, I decided to shoot a few videos of three drills I have done to help with my terrible flexibility and joint mobility. Theses aren’t the only ones you can use but I thought they would help some other “husky” lifters.