Monday's manoeuvrability

For some reason Blogger will not let me put up videos that are internally hosted anymore which is a shame because for the last week I have wanted to post a brief interview with Rob Adell and some extra footage of California Strength I never put up. When I try to add a video, it uploads and then says it is unavailable. This has only been happening over the last two weeks and it is rather annoying, so if anyone knows how to sort this out, let me know and I will fix it.

I started my new 12 week program today and it is amazingly simple. It has lots of the lifts. Then more and these are followed by lots of squats. Simple, isn't it? I have two months to get in as much volume as I can stand without burning myself out nd the biggest key is to make small and incremental progress. The goal is to keep the goal the goal as Dan John is want to say. My goal is to qualify for the European Championships before the end of the year and I will need a 272 total. I am five kilos away from this and I know I can do it. Right now, I am building a base and on top of the countless doubles I shall execute, I am also improving my flexibility slowly but surely and getting myself into better positions; the soft tissue work is keeping me healthy and injury free.

The competition I am targeting is the London Open in Decemeber and all the other competitions will be a build up to this. The idea is to use July, August and September to build as wide a base as I can and then in October and November I will drop the doubles and up the intensity. This morning, Byrdie was training alongside myself and Coach Lee and we got some really good work in. Since I got back from holiday--which was fun, but in the short term, detrimental to weightlifting!--I am gradually getting back to hitting normal positions and I know I will improve on where I left off. Broz kept hammering away to me how the flexibility training I do needs to be specific to weightlifting and I have been doing a lot of it. I need to learn to open up my hips and vastly improve their mobility; I also need to improve my hamstring flexibility and back strength but I think the hip mobility is the key.

This is a bit of a rambling post, but essentially, I am trying to do things differently in this training cycle. I feel like I have not been improving as much as I would have liked and for the next four weeks, I will make gradual and steady progress rather than doing as much as I possibly can and being burnt out towards the end of the second week. This goes with all my lifts and squats as well as the extra stuff that I do which I mentioned above. I have a very simple goal: I need to hit 272kg and I have the training plan and the motivation to get me there. Now I need to go and do it and follow my own wildly plagurised advice.

Here are two impossibly cool videos to inspire and motivate:



Click here to see what is possibilty the greatest weightlifting video ever.