Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches

Part of the coach’s responsibility is to create and enforce high standards and provide all athletes with clear expectations regarding behavior, effort and performance.

It’s the experience of the life and the culture that matters, not the competitive results. There are too many subtleties and intangibles that can only be learned through this experience that build the foundation for the understanding and communication required of a successful coach.

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being a technician is very different from being a coach, which is a teacher in all the best senses of the word, and one who understands the whys and hows in a way that allows them to truly coach—not just run people through the motions.

conscious effort must be made to execute each repetition as precisely as possible for the given stage of development. In other words, sloppiness, laziness, inattentiveness and impatience need to be avoided as much as possible.

It needs to be understood very clearly that there is a simple order of priorities throughout the learning process: Position, movement, speed, load.

The greater the athlete’s understanding of the guiding principles of the movement’s technique, the better a framework he or she will have within which to make sense of what he or she feels.

Described in the simplest possible terms, all three lifts employ the generation of force against the ground to first elevate and accelerate the barbell upward, then use force against the inertia of the elevated barbell to accelerate the athlete downward and into position to receive the bar.

in order to move into position under the barbell to receive it, the lifter must actively and aggressively continue pulling against the barbell with the pressure of the feet against the platform eliminated or reduced; and the transition between these phases of the lift must be as rapid as possible—in