Other than the whole law school thing, the biggest development in my life has been entrance into the world of Olympic Weightlifting. Now this isn’t power lifting and it isn’t body-building. This is the real deal. Lifts as old as time. Technique above all. Fast twitch muscles. Don’t get it twisted, the men and women who are good at this stuff are incredibly strong, but it’s about much more than strength. The assistant coach isn’t a big guy. He’s dense. And he’s oh-so-fast.
The sport consists of two lifts: the clean and jerk and the snatch (laugh it up). I spend 6-8 hours a week working on what amounts to two motions. We do more than just competition lifts in training. We squat in various ways and do presses and push-ups and pull-ups. But it’s all in the service of the two competition lifts. I think about it the way I think about Yoga. The concentration is intense, but this isn’t a sport about thinking. It’s about moving past concepts, past strategy, past any kind of plan. It’s an attempt to get your mind and your body to act like the whole that they are. In Yoga this is done through deliberate motions and concentrating on release and body position. Olympic lifting is all about setting and then moving as fast you can in one fluid motion until you have an incredibly large amount of weight over your head. When the best lifters move you can hardly see it. There are lots of discreet motions, but when they happen together it looks effortless (contrast this to folks doing deadlifts).
I’m a big fan of sounds and this sport has two of them. First, you wear platform shoes with solid heels (to keep you straight when you are in the full squat position and to give you something push off of when you stand up). The lifts are done on wooden “platforms” (not actually raised) and when you lift you come up on your toes on the pull and slam your heals onto the wood when get under and catch the weight (it goes into free fall when you get under it). The sound is a snap of the best kind. Second, the weights covered in rubber, so you get to drop them when you complete the lift. Few things are more satisfying than tossing 180 lbs from 8 feet.
