Evidence Strong
How to teach Olympic weightlifting - with Steph Morris
you've got an athlete that you want to start exposing them to some weightlifting movements, but they can't get in a front squat position. It doesn't mean you can't teach them weightlifting. It means, okay, we'll just work around that. Alongside, we'll be working on the front squat, and then we'll add it back in. So maybe they're working on some jump shrugs, for example, or some high pulls, and maybe even some first pulls in isolation. They're doing those movements to then add in anything with the catch to progress it on. So I think in weightlifting, it's really useful to use the derivatives. So we can break the movement down and teach it as part practice. But what we also want to make sure is that we're not breaking it down too much, because then we end up with all of these isolated movement skills that actually when you put it together, they're not performing at anything like they would in the full movement. It's important to break it down, but use common derivatives rather than just saying to an athlete, okay, I want you to do a first pull, then pause, then do a transition, then pause, then do a second pull, then pause, because then we end up with something that looks nothing like the real movement. All right. So welcome to evidence strong. My pleasure to have you tonight. I contacted you because you are the paper taking a long term approach to the development of weightlifting ability in young athletes. So I'm super excited to talk to you about this big part before that. I would ask you to introduce yourself a little bit. Yeah, thanks, Alex. And thanks for asking me to talk about the paper. It's always good to disseminate our research and introduction to myself. So my main role at the moment is lecture and strength and conditioning at Cardiff Metropolitan University. So I've been in that role kind of a couple of years now. And then alongside that, I'm doing a PhD via publication and this review paper, so taking a long term approach to develop and weightlifting was the first review paper, which will hopefully make up my PhD thesis. Oh, let's start from the beginning, maybe. So at what age and what scale should be developed, and how it relates to weightlifting? Kind of one thing I don't like to do too much is like give a specific age of like, okay, when they get to this age, cool, we're good to go. Because we all know that growth and maturation can affect how athletes respond to training and what training is most suitable to them. So I think I kind of mentioned in the paper, it was researched by Greg and Avery, so Maya and Fakenbahn, where they suggest that when an athlete's old enough to follow instructions, that's kind of a good time point to introduce them to strength and conditioning or physical development. So I quite like that because it's then varied and we're not saying, yeah, that this kind of time point. When they're old enough to kind of follow instructions, I think it's it's a good time frame to introduce them to fundamental movements or athletic mode skill competencies that underpin more sport specific tasks. So it's not a case of saying, yeah, when they're at this point, like, yeah, great, get them in doing cleans and snatches. It's a case of, well, this is a good time to introduce them to these fundamental movements to then build a good foundation of movement competency and strength, to them build on those to kind of participate in sport, but then also maybe go on to introduce them to more technical movements that might include weightlifting, whether it's they're using weightlifting as a training method later on in S&C or whether they're actually participating in weightlifting kind of as a sport. So yeah, I think that's one of the key things in terms of when are they old enough? And then I think another important thing to consider is having those key foundations. So we're not just introducing athletes to weight lifting as their first movement that they do in the gym, but we're making sure that they've got a good solid foundation of strength and movement competency. So it's making sure they can kind of squat, they can hinge, they can push and pull, they can core brace, they can kind of do those movements well, then we can start to load them and then we can start to do some of the weightlifting derivatives, or like I always find it quite frustrating when coaches say it takes a long time to teach weightlifting, because I mean you could get somebody in and say jump with a bar on your hand, which is an effectively a jump shrug and really doesn't take that long to coach. And yes, it's not like a clean or a snatch, but it's a weightlifting derivative, which we can kind of then build upon if we do want to go into the full lifts or more complex derivatives from that. So yeah, I think that's the important thing is having a good foundation to build your weightlifting skills upon and then also making sure that they're at the right age or I guess kind of maturity to be able to follow instructions within a gym environment or training environment. Okay, so I will ask you why young is better than waiting for them to get all the fundamental skills from other sports to weightlifting later. So I guess I kind of always come back to like strength and conditioning and then on to weightlifting, but I think like any movements within a gym environment can teach them the fundamental movement skills. Like it always baffles me when parents are like, oh no, they can't do S&C until they're, I don't know, 14 or they can't left wait until they're this age, but they're out playing rugby football, whatnot, and being exposed to all of these high forces in being expected to tolerate all of this, which is sometimes a lot more than what we're expecting them in quite a controlled environment. So I think exposing young athletes to these movements at a really young age can actually improve their performance within those sports later on, but I'd say maybe more importantly is it can really help to reduce their injury risk as well. If we get them moving well, kind of develop good movement competency in a closed environment, like in a squat for example, when they then have to develop that and get into a squat position in their sport, they're a lot like less likely to get injured or when they're landing, for example. So I guess it's about reducing their injury risk when they're participating in sport and also just daily life, getting good movement competencies really important. We know that athletes that do better enjoy sport more, so you enjoy what you've got out obviously. So I think if you can get athletes moving well and enjoying being in the gym and doing any kind of form of strengthening conditioning or physical activity from a young age, we're much more likely to get them kind of adhering to it when they get older. We know that then that has a positive effect on their kind of health and lifestyle. So I think that's really important to instill from a young age is not using kind of strengthening conditioning as like a bit of a punishment or anything is getting that enjoyment and getting that competency from a young age to then it kind of does like a bit of a full cycle if they enjoy it. They adhere to it and we get this kind of like lifelong participation in sport off the back of that ideally and weightlifting if they do kind of get hopefully introduced to the weightlifting movement. I think like a lot of athletes have weightlifting in their programs as they maybe progress in a sport. So they might not be doing weightlifting when they start but they get to a kind of senior level or elite level and maybe weightlifting is introduced at this point because they're kind of as you know looking for new exercises, their training ages increased and then it's like okay well now you're introducing somebody who's a lot older, maybe not got this high neural plasticity that we think kind of might be there at a lower age. So you haven't taken advantage of that at a young age and now you're expecting them to pick up a movement skill a lot later on. So if we can kind of expose athletes to weightlifting at a young age around like pre-puberto it means that we can take advantage of this like heightened neural plasticity, they can pick up the movement skills quite easily and then it means when they then get to learn it later on or it's they're kind of continuing it later on. It's already there and they're already competent at the movement. Can I stop for a minute and ask you what neural plasticity is and how you would explain it? So I guess it's this idea that we can pick up new movements or kind of learn how to perform new movements a lot more easily at this stage. So later on if we're not taking advantage of this it would be harder to perform the movements, it would take a longer time to do it and once you've kind of got that might call it like schema or like movement pathway it's then retained within the system. So if we can learn it from a young age it's then in your system if you like to then recall upon it later on when you're asked to do that movement. We establish that it's good to have this private thing and then something about it. How will we go about it? Most important thing again I'm already sounding like a broken record is this idea of teaching athletic motor skill competencies first. So it's making sure that athletes can go on. You give some examples what they are so we are very... Yeah. What do we need? Yeah so some of the work by Rodry Lloyd and John Oliver so they're my supervisors as well so kind of a lot of their stuff I rely on. So some of their work suggests that these athletic motor skill competencies, the movements that underpin kind of more sport specific skills. So squatting, hinge in, core bracing and kind of anti-rotation, pushing and pulling upper body, horizontal and vertical, jumping and landing and I guess kind of less relevant to weightlifting but still an underpinning like kind of movement would be like sprinting, deceleration, acceleration and then we've got kind of our fundamental movement skills that also come into that as well so the idea of kind of like stabilization, throwing, catching, grasping as well. So it's making sure we've kind of built a good foundation of all of those before we're then narrowing into more like sport specific skills which kind of weightlifting would fall under or actually just more technical skills which again weightlifting would fall under. We kind of can't expect somebody to catch a clean in a front squat position if they can't do a prerequisite to that which would be a front squat and then likewise we maybe wouldn't expect somebody to come in and do a front squat straighter we're making sure they can do some of the prerequisites to that so can they actually do a bodyweight squat can they do kind of a counterbalance squat which might be a little bit easier to coach first. So it's looking at your end goal with it is weightlifting it's looking at well what are kind of the fundamental movements that they need to get in to do that first and then working back from there so definitely the ability to hip hinge is really important we kind of get or perform that RDL movement when we go from that hang position or as we kind of move through second pull in the weightlifting squatting is going to be really important for the catch position so front squat for your clean and then obviously overhead squat for your snatch so it's making sure that athletes have got those abilities in terms of like teaching snatch or clean first I'm probably not too set on on which way and I think it very much does depend on the athlete that you're working with. Some athletes find front squat really challenging for example likewise a lot of athletes might find overhead squat more challenging because of those overhead demands on mobility and stability so I think ideally having a combination of a bit of both making sure that you're kind of working on the limiting factor if you like and progressing through so maybe if you've got an athlete that you want to start exposing them to some weightlifting movements but they can't get in a front squat position it doesn't mean you can't teach them weightlifting it means okay well we'll just work around that alongside we'll be working on the front squat and then we'll add it back in so maybe they're working on like some jump shrugs for example or some high pulls and maybe even some first pulls in isolation they're doing those movements to then add in anything with the catch to progress it on so I think in weightlifting it's really useful to use the derivatives so we can break the movement down and kind of teach it as part practice but what we also want to make sure is that we're not breaking it down too much because then we end up with like all of these isolated movement skills that actually when you put it together they're not performing at anything like they would in the full movement it's important to break it down but use like your common derivatives rather than just saying to an athlete okay I want you to do a first pull then pause then do a transition then pause then do a second pull then pause because then we end up with something that looks nothing like the real movement so it's making sure part practice but not breaking it down excessively I think how how the concept of chunking where will relate to what you said I guess this idea of movement chunking is is kind of grouping movements together so if we look at like the hang clean for example you know if you broke it down in isolation they'd be performing kind of that transition movement a second pull movement and the catch but rather than getting them to perform those all in isolation we're kind of chunking that together and they just perform the hang clean and then that gets an outcome that looks more like when we put it together as a full lift and more like what they would do in like a full clean all right so my understanding is you chunk the phases the small steps together in part of the full weighted movement to hopefully get as close in this range as close to the actual movement again yeah you know we talked a little bit about movement development of movement and development of physical capabilities in your paper you discuss a little bit how they relate to each other so why physical capabilities and movement skills should be developed because you could you could develop the fundamental physical skills first and then wait with technical but anyway it's better to do it at the same time yeah let's start with why for me it just seems like a more time efficient approach to be developing I guess like capacities alongside the movement skill and it's quite or it's sometimes easier for athletes to associate with capacity than with the movement skill ish if they're performed like within the same session so in weightlifting quite often we'll use complexes for example so you might do a hang clean followed by a front squat and that might reinforce the idea of okay when you get in your catch position it should look like your front squat and you might do it in that order you might switch up and do the front squat first and then the hang clean and I think doing them together kind of takes advantage of your your body's really clever in terms of it often will autocorrect and put you into the correct movement pattern that you need to be in because it knows that it's learned the front squat already and then it knows that actually when it's in that catch position that's maybe not efficient and if you kind of ask them to pause they probably wouldn't be able to pause because they're maybe on their toes or the bars further forward whereas if you then reinforce that with a pause or repeating a front squat you kind of get in this like autocorrect kind of thing so I think doing them together can help take advantage of that so yeah from a time efficiency point of view in terms of learning movement skills and then also just from injury prevention point of view in terms of if we can make sure that athletes can get in the correct positions first that then reduces their risk of getting injured but also helps them to be most effective at that movement so they're kind of using the correct muscles therefore producing as much force as they can in that position you mentioned that complexes would be a one way to bring their two together other any other ways to do it I guess kind of using a bit of like a constraint-based approach can help to do it as well I'm quite a fan of this idea of like constraints-based coaching or queuing within weightlifting and strength conditioning in general so this idea of setting up a constraint predominantly on the environment is the ones that we kind of use to get desired outcome that you want so to I guess encourage or force an athlete to perform a movement within a certain way within the constraints that you've set up so as a weightlifting specific example if you've got an athlete who's maybe doing a clean or hang clean and the bars coming away from them this idea of setting up an obstruction so maybe a dowel in front of them and they actually then get that feedback of if the bars come too far away from them they'll contact that bar they get that knowledge of performance then and they will correct it hopefully on the next rep to make sure that they're then performing it within that constraint yeah setting that up another example this idea of like off the cliff we call it so um standing on kind of like the edge of a low platform and it's a similar idea so it likewise rather than looking at bar path it looks at their weight distribution which is maybe taking it back a step and looking at the key contributor that we maybe want to look at so I'd I'd use this one preferentially if possible so if they then let their weight shift too far forward as a knock-on effect they then might fall forward but actually the body kind of corrects to make sure that they stay on that platform when they're doing it I've never never seen anybody fall off the front of the platform so yeah I guess kind of using constraints within coaching is a really good way and similar to this idea of like similes and metaphors an advantage of a constraint is that it also promotes this external focus of attention we know that there's been a lot of research around the benefits of external cue and an external focus of attention we know that the athlete will be better performing the skill kind of then and there within that coaching session but also the explicit or kind of external cues can hopefully help with skill retention as well so maybe when they're out doing weightlifting in their own sessions and their coaches in there or they come back next week in their coaching session you then just reinforce that constraint or external cue in theory or based on the research they'll then be more effective at performing that movement skill you're having your paper weightlifting development progression scheme which I really feel like would be able to explain and use this and I'll be using the progression scheme is this idea that if we start and develop the foundations good foundations of physical capacities skill development if we've got those good foundations then we can kind of progress and build upon those so in terms of like physical capacity it's this idea that initially we want to start and we want to teach athletes general kind of motor control and body weight management so learning how to move in and out of these athletic mode skill competencies kind of repeatedly and able to get into good positions so can they squat can they firstly find a good position of a squat and can they then repeatedly move in and out of this consistently kind of across sessions then from that it's this idea of building basic strength and then building on that to develop maximum strength so can we actually get them squatting with some load can we then increase that load or can we kind of manipulate the training prescription to shift it a little bit more to this idea of maximum strength development so we know that in terms of training prescription initially this kind of high volume or high number of repetitions is good for repetition and learning new movement skills so we might start off and they might be doing a squat for I don't know like eight to twelve repetitions body weight and we're just reinforcing getting in a good position then from there we might reduce the number of repetition so we're dropping down to kind of eight repetitions and we might start to load the movement to then really start to work on some underpinning kind of maximum strength and looking at five repetitions at then this high intensity so can they do front squats or even back squats because we know that we can reach higher intensities with a back squat if we're looking at purely lower body strength so can they do back squat at kind of like 85% of their 1RM five repetitions and that would be the prescription then that's within their program then if we want to kind of make it even more sport specific to weightlifting this idea of explosive strength so focus in then on this idea of intent and kind of moving as fast as they can within the movements and maybe even shifting over to like slightly ballistic exercises so looking at loaded jumps for example as well so that's kind of like the physical capacity side of things and then in terms of like the skill development it's this idea of getting like good movement competencies first so that relates to the athletic movement skills getting competent at those getting competent at squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, core bracing then it's actually looking a little bit more at kind of technical competency so actually we've maybe started to introduce some of the weightlifting derivatives so we've upped the complexity of the movements now can they demonstrate a good technical competency at those and then next stage of that kind of based on some of the models of skill development is this idea that actually then we want them to develop this idea of technical autonomy so they're able to perform the movements in kind of a bit more of an autonomous state so they don't have to think about performing the movements as well it kind of just becomes there's a lot less movement error a lot less need for you to kind of intervene as a coach and again they're just more consistent at the movement and then the last kind of stage is this idea of like technical refinement so we've kind of got really infrequent errors in their weightlifting movement and as a coach I guess you're kind of looking to develop this idea of like a bit of a autonomous athlete in terms of there may be showing an ability to correct their own movement errors at this point or at least an awareness of those errors for you to kind of then intervene as a coach and then in terms of exercise selection side of things as well so I've mentioned it throughout so this idea of starting with the athletic mode skill competencies first then kind of starting to build foundation strengths so we might there be picking movements that we can actually load a little bit more so we're still doing these fundamental movements we're still maybe squatting pushing hinging but we might change the exercise selection so we might look at a back squat for example to build strength to load it up a little bit more we might then look at overhead squat for example so we know that in the snatch position an athlete definitely needs to be able to get in that overhead squat position in the catch so we're making sure that they've got these foundational movements for weightlifting like an RDL like an overhead squat let's go through peanut jerk and snatch progressions and how to layer them for athlete development in terms of like progressing clean jerk and snatch just this idea of again athletic mode skill competencies kind of underpinning the full movement in this idea that we kind of build like body weight movements first then we progress onto foundation strength where we can start to add some load to these movements and then we can start to progress onto the weightlifting derivatives and before we then perform the movement kind of in full so this idea that there's some I guess more specific athletic mode skill competencies that can link to the weightlifting movement so for example squatting is obviously really important for the catch positions in weightlifting so a foundation movement or an athletic mode skill competency might be a body weight squat that we need to master likewise jumping and landing is really important so in the catch position we know that there's kind of quite high eccentric demand for athletes so this idea of jumping and landing and getting in a proficient landing position so maybe starting off with some box jumps where we've got kind of that lower eccentric load and then progressing onto a counter movement jump for example and checking that athletes get in a good landing position because in theory that might mirror the position that they might get in at the end of their clean or at the end of their snatch or at the end of their jerk. Likewise upper body pushing and pulling is going to be really important so if we think about the jerk specifically that overhead press is really important but before we get an athlete overhead pressing we might actually want to make sure that they can perform a horizontal press because the demands of a horizontal press are kind of a little bit easier in terms of there's less stability needed so making sure an athlete can perform a body weight press up for example before we're then asking them to perform an overhead press and we might start an overhead press with a dowel to then progress onto a loaded overhead press to then make it a little bit more dynamic and start performing one of the weightlifting derivatives like a push press for example and then from there if we were looking at a split jerk we might progress onto actually getting them to catch in a split position so can they perform a behind the neck push jerk which they some athletes might find a little bit easier without the bar passing in front of their face to then progress onto a full split jerk and then we've kind of got stages in between that as well so we would check that athletes can master that split position and actually check that they've got strength in that split position so again we're not just overhead pressing one of our other fundamental movements that might underpin it might be that split squat and check in that kind of unilateral single leg strength as well so working with young athletes is sitting away because normally they have to learn all the movements and competencies and capabilities at the same time but they both will also change they will go to puberty so what are the things the coaches and maybe parents should be aware of it's definitely really important and really useful to for coaches to have an understanding of growth and maturation when they're working with young athletes to kind of factor that into their prescription and also bear in mind in terms of what they're like seeing in front of them as well so we know for example that around puberty athletes might experience a phase that we might call like a bit of awkward adolescence for example so they've got longer limb lengths and changes in kind of their mass which might change their center of mass displacement which kind of will have a really big impact on their weightlifting performance specifically so as coaches we need to be mindful that they might come in for their training session when they're at this stage and they might show I guess what you might think is a bit of a deterioration in their performance in terms of last week they could do it really well and this week they're kind of getting in some funky positions so it's as a coach having an awareness that actually that's okay and it might even be or it is also really beneficial to communicate that to the athletes as well it can be really frustrating as an athlete to be doing something perfectly the week before maybe with load and then come in the next week and you're telling them they've got to take the weight off and go right back to body weight for example so I'm communicating with athletes that it's not more and completely natural for this to happen and the importance of why we're taking things back from an injury prevention point of view and a performance point of view to then hopefully build back on it later on when we have then kind of re-established this foundation that we can build on so in terms of monitoring it as coaches there's a couple of different methods out there so it's quite easy to do nowadays as well like even if you jump online there's some calculators that you can just input the information in you can take the athletes standing high and seated height and body mass and then yeah what might be referred to as kind of a maturity offset value and then there's equations that you can use so more commonly kind of the mid-world equation that then predicts the maturity offset and you can just be mindful of then what stage they're kind of at alternatively there's some other methods Kami and Roach their method looks at working out the predicted adult height and then from that we can get a percentage of predicted adult height so workout actually will kind of how much growing has this athlete got left to do and then those percentages also then correspond to maturity status as well so if they're kind of around this like 85, 86% of predicted adult height up to kind of 90% that might then correspond with being in this like circuit pivotal stage where we might see some of that kind of awkward adolescents or the athlete might be experiencing some of these kind of growth spurts or this like rapid inclining kind of growth rates in terms of kind of like monitoring it ideally the best way to monitor it is longer tunally so we can calculate it from kind of like cross-sectional data but ideally if you're working with a group of athletes and you're seeing them regularly the research suggests kind of monitoring it around every three months to actually track it and maybe calculate growth curves and then predict maturity from there as well so one is good to know for performance and how for training planning and progress the second reason could be to be aware in terms of injury prevention from I don't know they got about weightlifting specifically but from other other sports we know that within the six months from big growth spurts and the athletes is more susceptible to injury so it's good to know when this time comes would you have any advice how to deal apart from to go back to regress a little bit either load or technical demand on the other thing any other pointers you would have how to in general I would say fix the error so yeah I guess I kind of come back to this idea of adding in some constraints as well to give the athlete that feedback of when that error is taking place just again constraining the movement having them perform easier tasks but then also introducing a constraint as well can be quite beneficial I was going to say kind of mention around this idea of so we want to make sure we're addressing kind of the technical error but also make sure the athletes got the physical qualities to them perform the movement so for example if an athlete struggling to get in like an overhead squat position it might be that actually they've got poor I know like overhead strength to get in that position so it's making sure you're thinking about what is maybe the cause of that error as well and making sure that you've addressed maybe some of the technical but also some of the like physical limitations that the athlete might have okay the next question is what is your favorite color oh my favorite color um probably like a turquoisey color okay so I will make an infographic from the paper we discussed today and that will definitely be it so that's a prompt turquoise nice it's almost from evidence strong last question where people can find you a confession I'm I'm pretty enough at social media so I wouldn't say I'm worth a follow if you're looking for me to kind of give out anything useful but by all means I'd welcome kind of any follows on um probably twitter or likewise email my twitter handle this shows you how poor I am even using it because I am going to double check that I'm giving over the right one my twitter handle is um @stephemorris979 but by all means um like I'd welcome questions about any of the paper um and I like to chat about it all and it gives me practice talking about it all as well so okay step it was pleasure to talk to you thank you so much thank you Alex yeah it's a pleasure to talk to you and a pleasure to meet you virtually as well thanks yeah thank you [BLANK_AUDIO]