First PR of the year!

Well today I had my first real PR of the year. Hopefully there will be some more, but for now I figure I might as well document the first one! Well, really there were two! Today we wanted to hit a PR in the clean, and we ended up succeeding twice. The idea was to do some triples, a moderately heavy double and then hit singles. My PR in the clean leading up to today was 112.5kg. Truth be told I cleaned 110kg sometime during my Sophomore year of college and have always been upset that I haven't cleaned more. My 112.5kg PR came from about a year and a half ago at IU, and since I know I'm stronger now than I have been before, I pretty much knew a PR was going down today. Well I did my double at 100kg and then moved to singles at 105kg and 110kg. I then moved to 115kg, which was a new PR, and made it way easier than I had expected. We looked at the video and debated skipping to 125kg because 115kg looked so fast, but decided to stick to the plan of trying to make 120kg. And it's a good thing we did. I ended up missing three times at 120kg from the floor, leaving me pretty tired. I told Wil I wanted one more try at it, and he was stoked that I still wanted to go for it. On my fourth attempt I finally made it, and it was pretty sweet. I was feeling pretty happy about it, since all of our training focuses really heavily on the olympic lifting and a PR there means that the work that we have been putting in is showing results.

Here is a link to the video, which includes my makes at 110kg, 115kg and 120kg:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3olJ6Jd_v58

Stay tuned!

Jeff

Bloomington Training Rolls On

Hey all,

So to give an update, not a whole lot has changed since the last time I posted. I have been training hard 6 days a week keeping the focus on power and speed development. I feel like I have made some huge gains and am more explosive and powerful on the track and in the weight room every week.

Today, for example, I went into the weight room for a nice snatch day with 2x3, 2x2 and 2x1. My triples were 70 and 75, my doubles were both at 80 and my singles were 85 and 92. Those are some pretty solid numbers for me in training, especially since I was coming straight off of the track where I had run 10x200m. Next week I get to go for a max in the clean and the week after that I max in the snatch. Pretty exciting stuff!

My track workouts have also been really good lately, and I have sticking to the plan of acceleration development backed by speed development and speed endurance. I have been doing a lot of acceleration ladders (sets of 10m, 20m 30m), hills, sled pulls, pole runs, elastic runs and speed endurance runs (120m-200m repeats), and I am feeling really good on the track right now.

I have been sticking to the straight pole drills once a week, and have started doing 6-8 fiberglass vaults at the end of each straight pole session from 2 lefts on tiny poles. The focus is the exact same thing as the straight pole work, and things have been going pretty well with it. Here's a video of me from 2 lefts on a small 15' pole from last week.

Tomorrow is my drills/jump/acceleration dev day, and I might just move to 3 lefts and see if I can get on some sort of decent pole from there. If so, I'll post video!

Until next time, Thanks for following!

Jeff

San Diego/The Real Work Begins

I just got finished with almost 2 weeks of really awesome training in San Diego. I got the opportunity to train at the Olympic Training Center with my good friend Yoo Kim while I was out there, which was absolutely amazing. I learned a lot training with him. I spent some time doing some really short run jumping in flats and worked a lot with him on my running, plant motion and takeoff. We also did a bunch of work off of the runway on my running form. We were working on trying to keep my hips up and run tall and elastically by finicking a little bit with my run timing and foot strike. All in all I was working on a lot of new ideas, but felt like I picked up a lot of cues and am already working toward getting better in those areas. I also did some really solid workouts in the weight room, including 6x2 in the snatch at 75kg, 4x5 in the clean at 90kg and some good running workouts like 2x4x120m at 85% with Recovery of 2' and 4'. Of course I got to spend a bunch of quality time with my family, but I was glad it also ended up being a really good training trip.

On Thursday I got back to Bloomington and went to Force on Friday to test in the clean. My PR in the clean is 112.5kg, which is fairly low, and I set a year goal of cleaning 120kg. First we started with some heavy doubles from the blocks, and I made it all the way up to 105kg for 2 without missing at all. We moved to singles off of the floor at that point and I easily made 90kg, 100kg and 110kg. I was pretty happy with 110kg and how easy it felt considering I haven't yet done a ton of heavy cleaning. I felt so good at 110kg we decided to skip straight to 120kg, and I barely missed. I pulled it high and racked it, but was barely forward and missed it. I was super happy with that effort though, and will hopefully be able to make that weight in a few weeks when we test again.

Now onto the real deal. While all of my posts so far have been fine and dandy, tomorrow is when the real work begins. Tomorrow is the first day that my coach, Jake Wiseman and I will meet for training at the track. From this point forward until January I will be going to the track 6 days per week with Coach Wiseman and lifting 3-4 times per week with Wil Fleming. This is when the real work begins, and we are going to focus hard on building raw blow and power on the track just like we are in the weight room. Needless to say, I'm excited. Check back soon!

Jeff