Perfecting your technique is an endless quest in Olympic weightlifting. You might not know this if you’re in the new/intermediate stages, but it’s true. I’m sorry if this rains on the parade for some of you newbies who might have been thinking you’ll eventually reach a point of experience and expertise in this sport where your movements become developed like clockwork and you don’t have to struggle to make proper lifts anymore. Yeah, sure…it kinda works like that. After 10 years, you definitely reach a point where technique becomes easier than it was in your first eight months. However, as a 30-year veteran of the O-lifts, I can positively guarantee you one thing: the battle never completely ends.
 
This is because technique gremlins continue to attack you throughout the duration of your weightlifting life. Even after you’ve put in years of practice and you’ve attained a solid level of technical mastery, those pesky little gremlins will constantly try to weasel their way into your nervous system and cause you to loop the bar forward, cut your pull, slow down your turnover, or any number of rookie mistakes that can still pop back up in your snatch, clean, and jerk…even after you’ve fought hard to make it all flawless.
 
Here’s the best way to say it in a nutshell: when you’re new, you have to fight to BUILD perfect technique. But when you’re experienced, you have to fight to KEEP perfect technique. Because I’ll promise you this, your movements can still get twanky and flawed even after decades of practice if you’re not constantly focused and attentive.
 
So, let’s talk about the place of coaching in all of this. Coaches are supposed to watch for bad technique and fix it when they see it. That’s one of their many jobs. However, this is where we run into a tricky predicament that’s going to be the subject of this article. When it comes to technical development and mastery, how much of it comes from the input of the coach, and how much comes from the instincts and intuition of the athlete?
 
When you’re a coach, you think everything happens because of you. If the athlete succeeds, you think it’s because you did a good coaching job. If the athlete fails, you think it’s because you did a lousy coaching job. I think this is the right mindset for a coach, by the way. When you personalize everything and think of yourself as the ultimate determinant of success or failure, you’re going to be a better coach. It’s a rough way to make a living because you often drive yourself to the brink of madness, but it’s still the best way to do the job.
 
If you’re an athlete, you should look at things the same way. When you fail, it’s your fault. You didn’t get the job done. I’ve never met a quality athlete who blames their coach when they blow it. You must have an internal locus of control if you’re ever going to become great.
 
Therefore, we have to go back to our original question. When a lifter is trying to learn perfect technique, does it come more from the instruction of the coach, or the talent and ability of the athlete? Every one of you is either a coach or athlete (or both), so it’s helpful to have the right perspective about this question. You’ll be better at your job if you have a clear understanding of how the whole technical process works, and how it’s supposed to work. Let’s take a look at some nuts and bolts.
 
“Seeing” vs. “Feeling”
 
As with many things in the world, technology has thrown some changes into the mix over the years. Nowadays, lifters can SEE what their technique looks like much easier than they could when I was coming up in the sport. Almost everybody has a phone with a camera in it these days, and it’s extremely easy and convenient to take video of your lifts. You can just set up your phone next to your platform (or get somebody to hold it for you), record video of your lift, and watch it immediately with the click of a button. For Olympic lifters, this seems like a godsend because it gives you the ability to study and analyze your technique quickly and regularly.
 
Back when I started lifting in the 80s and early 90s, phones with cameras didn’t exist. If you wanted to see video of your technique, you had to bring a VHS camera to the gym. These things were expensive, huge, and cumbersome. The tripods you set them on took up a whole platform. And you couldn’t get an immediate look at the video after you recorded it. You had to take the tape out of the camera, find a TV with a VCR, and use fast forward/rewind to painstakingly sift through the tape while you struggled to get a decent look at your lifts. Most lifters rarely bothered with this whole mess because it was such an enormous pain in the ass. In the first 10 years I competed, I probably saw videos of my own lifting maybe seven or eight times. And I was living in America, so I probably had better access to technology than most other places in the world. What do you think the video capability was like in the Soviet Union or Bulgaria during the Communist era? Most of those guys didn’t have enough money to buy new clothes, for God’s sake. This sounds like complete insanity to the technology generation, but that’s the way we had to roll back in the old days.
 
However, this presents us with an important point about technique development. You should get on YouTube and study the elite lifters of my generation, at all levels. Their technique was flawless. They rarely got to see what their lifts looked like, but that didn’t stop them from developing perfect movements. I think we can learn something here.
 
Technical mastery doesn’t (and shouldn’t) rely on constant visual input. Most lifters these days have easy access to constant visual input through their camera phones, and they use it as a standard component in their training. But I’m not convinced this is a best-case scenario because weightlifters need to develop the ability to FEEL perfect movement without seeing it. This is a bedrock fundamental requirement for successful Olympic lifting. If the athlete becomes dependent on visually analyzing every one of their lifts throughout training, the camera phone becomes a crutch. I’ve seen this happen. Athletes get flustered and say, “I can’t tell what I’m doing wrong!” when you take their phones away from them. They’ve never developed the physical ability to blindly feel what proper technique is like. This isn’t exactly the recipe for Olympic gold medals.
 
I’m not universally condemning the use of camera phones in weightlifting, or saying we should all throw them off a cliff. They’re valuable and useful, for sure. I’m saying they should be used on a limited basis, especially in the early stages. There’s nothing wrong with taking video of a lift and watching it to see what your technique looks like, but you should put limitations on it. Whether you’re the coach or the lifter, try to keep the phones out of the equation as much as possible. You can use them, but don’t RELY on them. Rely on your body and your mind, and the guidance of the coach. The all-time greats did it this way, so you need to follow their example.
 
Input vs. Instinct…
 
Let me give you a personal story to illustrate this next point. I started lifting for my coach, John Thrush, when I was 20 years old. At that point, I had been training and competing for three years, but it was mostly on my own. I had developed some pretty bad technical habits, and one of them was starting my pull from the floor with my feet way too wide. I was setting up like a sumo wrestler instead of a weightlifter.
 
When I came to John, he obviously told me to move my feet in closer to start my pull from the floor. As with many technical changes, it felt weird and uncomfortable at first. My feet felt like I was standing on a telephone pole. I was obedient and patient, and I tried my best to move exactly the way he was telling me to. But even after a considerable amount of practice, I still didn’t feel like I could move correctly or generate any power with my feet as close as he was telling me to put them.
 
So, I moved them back out…but just a little bit. I knew he was giving me the right guidance, that my feet needed to be closer than I had been previously putting them when I pulled from the floor. But the exact closeness he wanted me to use was just a little too much. I adjusted by moving them back out around an inch on each side, and guess what? That was perfect. John let me move them back out just a smidge because he was a great coach and he understood what was going on. We were working together and combining his coaching input with my athletic instincts. He knew I needed to change something, so he walked me through the adjustment. I went with what he was telling me to do, but it didn’t feel exactly right for me. I needed to tweak it just a little bit to make it feel natural and effective.
 
This is how perfect technique development works. If you’re a coach, you need to give input and guidance and teach the lifter how to move correctly, but you also need to let the lifter develop his/her own FEEL for the movement. If you’re a lifter, you need to listen to your coaches and do what they’re telling you to do, but you also need to learn a movement that works perfectly for YOU.
 
These things can’t happen if the coach is too much of a control freak, or if the lifter is too much of a mindless robot. Both parties need to understand the process, and neither one can become too dominant. An athlete who disregards all coaching instruction and does his own thing will fail just as much as a coach who completely refuses to let athletes learn on their own. It’s a complex relationship, but you’ll get phenomenal results if you use the right perspective on it.
 
Avoid the Pitfalls
 
I once trained in a gym where there was a coach who worked full-time with only one athlete. I swear, this coach would talk nonstop to this lifter for an entire two-hour workout. Every time the kid did a rep, the coach would say five things about it. And it was always five new things on each rep. It was amazing to watch, actually. We’re talking about a continuous barrage of coaching input for the entire duration of the workout. I couldn’t believe this guy could talk that much. Needless to say, this is an example of what NOT to do. This coach was a moron. And as you might have guessed, the athlete was a terrible lifter because the poor guy just couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do. I felt sorry for him.
 
So that’s one extreme. On the other end of the spectrum, I once worked with a lifter who wanted to tell ME five things about every rep he did. He would complete a lift, and then walk over to me to deliver a lecture about how it felt, what he felt like he needed to fix, what he thought he was doing wrong, etc. My coaching tenure with this guy lasted a whole two workouts, believe it or not. The first time I worked with him, I let him do his talking thing for the first half of the workout before I basically told him to keep his piehole shut and listen, which he did. The second time I coached him, he reverted back to his motormouth habit, so I stopped paying attention to what he was doing and started working with somebody else. He never came back to the gym after that, which I was thankful for.
 
These are rare screwball situations that won’t pop up much. Most of the lifters and coaches I’ve been in close contact with throughout my career have been pretty successful ones, mainly because they understand the nuances we’ve looked at here. At the end of the day, this sport is all about the lifters. Coaches are valuable, but their value never overrides the talent and ability of the weightlifter. Take a look at some of the current elite US lifters who are being coached by people with no weightlifting background of any major importance. They’re not at the top because their coaches are teaching them every minuscule movement. They’re at the top because they’re better than everybody they compete against, and their coaches are making smart decisions about not over-coaching them. As one of the greatest lifters in US history once told me, “Coaching is a little overrated.” The athlete’s talent, ability, work ethic, and mental strength are always going to be the biggest pieces of the puzzle. I’ve coached athletes who won national championships, and I’ve also coached athletes who couldn’t snatch 35 kg. I was the same coach in both of those situations. The difference was the lifter’s level of aptitude.
 
However, we can’t take that idea too far. We have to remember that there are also plenty of highly talented athletes floating around out there who never become champions because they don’t have the right guidance. I know I just said coaching is overrated, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. To build successful weightlifters, coaches must do their jobs right. One of their main jobs is providing the right instruction and then letting the athlete figure out what to do with that instruction. It’s a two-way street with plenty of curveballs, but it can be magical if it’s handled right.