Genny was born with only one fully formed arm. This did not stop her from playing softball and other sports growing up, and she even became a certified personal trainer. Although I had zero experience working with an adaptive athlete, I have trained everyone from children to the elderly. I put it in my mind that this would be no different, that body mechanics are body mechanics, and all movements can be modified to suit everyone. I soon learned that I was at least partially mistaken.

During our evaluation session, when I finally learned Genny’s capabilities, I had her demonstrate a snatch and a clean. At the time, she was advised by her physical therapist to use what is called “one point of contact,” as opposed to using a gripping aid for the snatch. She used straps for the clean and a gripping aid for the jerk out of a rack, so she had never done a complete clean and jerk.

The first thing that became obvious was that none of our barbells had center knurling. We eyeballed the center of a training bar and marked it with KT tape as a temporary fix. This was the first of many times that I felt like the available weightlifting equipment failed to meet our needs.

My mindset when we began training together was to try to evaluate Genny’s technique based on the points of performance I use for all of my lifters. Things like hips and shoulders rising together in the first pull, keeping the bar close, and pulling under into a full squat were what I watched for when cueing and correcting her lifts. Within three or four sessions, we both became very frustrated with the clean and jerk. Trying to use different pads and straps to attach to her left side produced failure after failure, and I was very worried about injury, let alone whether USA Weightlifting would even accept these tools in competition.

We were constantly researching ways Genny could be able to clean and then transition to the jerk. I consulted other trainers, my father, who has a degree in design, combed through adaptive athlete social media profiles, looked at Home Depot’s plumbing aisle, Michael’s Crafts…you name it, we looked into it.

One design that had promise was a squat shoulder pad with holes cut to fit her left arm. We worked up to sixty-five to seventy pounds, but finding the holes was precarious, and we quit trying this method once one of the holes tore open and Genny almost lost the bar onto her head. With a literal knock on the head, we realized that the safest and most stable way for Genny to lift is with the one hand she was born with.

In the meantime, my normal coaching cues were working really well for the snatch. In fact, for a long time, her snatch was the same weight as her clean and jerk with one hand, because her PT forced us to work with one point of contact. There were a few differences, however, between Genny’s snatch and a two-handed athlete’s snatch. In my experience, lifters often have trouble finishing the second pull, or keeping the bar close during the hip extension phase of the snatch or clean. Genny appeared to be having the same issue, and I even began training protocols to correct it, like hip snatches and snatches from blocks. Through slow motion video, I noticed that Genny was reaching full extension before pulling under the bar, but because her one arm is in front of her when she lifts and not out wide to the side, it is more difficult for her to bring the bar as close as two-handed lifters, that is, to actually make contact with her hips. All of this was immensely fascinating to me.

Thus, my mindset was forever changed when training Genny. We began having success with the clean and jerk once we let go of trying to use two points of contact and we worked simply on making her one-handed clean and jerk the best it could be. Just when we were super pumped about her progress, the overuse injuries began. The main problem was with some nerve pain in her wrist. Genny is one of the toughest athletes I have met, but the numbness and shooting pain she felt when trying to clean and jerk together got to be too much to ignore.

An orthopedic doctor diagnosed her with Parsonage Turner Syndrome. This disease has very similar symptoms to Genny’s, but none of the ways to contract the illness had happened to her. We, including her PT, were very skeptical. This seemed like an impingement of sorts and was getting better when we separated clean and jerk training. Her physical therapist then discovered that there was some swelling in the joint capsule on Genny’s pinky finger. The clean was pinching the outer part of her hand and causing nerve pain.

This was the scariest period of our seven short months of training together. I began to adjust the lifting volume drastically for her, mostly working technique with the bar. When you have an athlete with one good hand, your worst nightmare is losing use of that arm. This story has a happy ending, however, because the damaged capsule is healing, and with the addition of the hook grip, Genny set a personal record of ninety-five pounds in the clean and jerk. (However, she now complains that her thumb hurts, but so does every other lifter I have).

Meanwhile, a serendipitous event arose with USA Weightlifting. They announced that for the American Open Series of competitions, adaptive athletes will now be eligible to compete with achievement of one half of the qualifying total. With around a 60-kilogram total, Genny more than qualified for the Masters 40-44, 76kg class. We were now on a mission to qualify for the American Open Series 1 at the Arnold Sports Festival. We had a few obstacles to overcome. You see, USAW instituted this new allowance, but without any guidelines. We found ourselves writing the book on adaptive competition. The first order of business was center knurling. Genny doesn’t really need grip help but finding the center of the bar is essential. With some emails to USAW and the local meet director, we got permission to measure and place a small piece of medical tape onto the center of the bar. Genny participated in the Nashville Weightlifting Club’s New Year’s Open as her first ever weightlifting competition, and her total of sixty-one kilograms more than qualified her for the American Open Series

At the time of the USAW announcement, Genny was in the midst of the nerve pain. She decided that with physical therapy targeted to her hand and wrist, she could continue to train the clean and jerk. We were still trying to hone her technique and figure out why the lift caused her pain and we had a new problem of the bar tilting out of balance when she jerked heavy. Genny has a personal best of one hundred and fifteen pounds for just the clean. This pesky combination plagued us until we analyzed some social media videos from other single-armed lifters. We found one in particular where the man, Victor Assaf, jerked with an extreme lean to the opposite side of the bar. A friend of mine likened it to a Turkish Getup. This was the light bulb moment for us. Genny’s ninety-five-pound PR came soon after instituting the hook grip and this lean in the jerk.

Our plan was for Genny to compete in the American Open Series 1 at the Arnold Sports Festival. We spent the weeks between the qualifying meet and the AOS1 nursing her hand, working on the lean in the jerk, and keeping volume in her snatch training. Since we knew that Genny would be lifting first and finishing all of her lifts following herself, her attempts went as planned, and her only misses were due to press outs as judged by the national level referees at the American Open Series. She totaled 62kg and gained the attention of several athletes in her community. Our hope is that we attract many more adaptive weightlifters to the American Open Series. I, personally, would like to see the USA Masters Weightlifting organization institute a modified qualifying total as well. We both definitely want to be a part of the conversation going forward with USAW.

As a coach, this experience has challenged and humbled me beyond imagining. Before training Genny, my method of coaching focused on breaking lifters of bad habits or just teaching athletes the proper ones. With Genny, I have had to discover completely new habits, evaluate their effectiveness, and write a new book for coaching weightlifting. The biggest lesson I learned is that, particularly with an adaptive athlete, the most basic technique possible is the one to be developed. The idea is to coach out the best in all of our athletes and be ready to adapt our standards. (By the way, if you happen to ask Genny if she needs a hand, she will say, “No thanks, I got one.”)