Liftin':08/05/09

I went to the Lost Battalion Lifting Hall yesterday thinking it would be my gym for the rest of the year. It was pretty cool, but the only thing the dudes do are olympic lifts and a few, very few, supplemental exercises that improve olympic lifts. I was there for 2 hours and did nothing but clean and jerks and snatches. At the last minute I hopped in with some guys doing front squats as a supplemental exercise. I was kind of disappointed that they took such a narrow view on lifting. Just mentioning a deadlift drew some pointed remarks about fast twitch exercises vs body builder exercises. I can't understand why being able to move a shit ton of weight at a slower speed is bad for trying to move a shit ton of weight fast. You can't build fast twitch muscle. You can get better at your fast twitch movements, but either you have a lot of fast twitch muscle or you don't. Anyways it turns out that this hall is part of the NYC parks and rec that has gyms all over the city, apprently in various points of disrepair, but it is cheap, cheap, cheap. Only 50 bucks for the year.

I tried to tell the dude helping me that I have lifted before and yet he was continuously shocked that I was decent at it. I'm sure he gets a lot of guys in there talking about how much they can bench, but I was trying to tell him that I've done most of this stuff just not the right way so it was amusing (and I admit a pretty good ego boost) to see his chest swell as he told the other coaches, "under an hour, and look at him". The kilo's fuck me up, but he was adding some decent weight.

snatch
This is an awesome video. See how the bar follows the contour of her body? Mine was more coming straight up from the knees towards the chest instead of taking a detour to the waist. We didn't get the weight up to high with this one. Actually I have no idea how high we got.

clean and jerk
This is where the weight started getting up, but again I wasn't keeping track.

front squats: a couple at 255

Not sure how I will proceed with this place.