Years ago, I was lucky enough to train with a lifter named Vernon Patao at a camp in Colorado Springs. Vern was one of the best US lifters of the 90s. He made two Olympic teams and won multiple national championships in the weight classes around the 60, 67.5, and 70 kilo bodyweight classes. I think his best lifts were around 286 pounds in the snatch and 360 in the clean and jerk, in the 150 pound bodyweight range. Hell of a lifter. Great guy, too.

Anybody who ever trained with Vern could tell you stories about his work capacity. In a nutshell, this guy could handle workouts that I’ve rarely seen from anybody else. When Vern was ready to lift a heavy weight in a workout, it wasn’t uncommon to see him attempt it ten or twelve times. He would miss multiple lifts with the same weight, and many times he would finally make the lift after a dozen tries. When I trained with him, he was still in the 132 bodyweight class and he had his eyes on the junior national clean and jerk record, which I think was 308 (140 kilos). I once saw a workout where Vern attempted 140 probably twelve or thirteen times. He cleaned every one, missing the jerk over and over. After each missed attempt, he just sat down on the bench and got ready to take another shot in a few minutes. He finally held on and made the jerk on his last lift, and then he went on with the rest of his pulls and squats. The next day, he would be ready to go again. There was nobody like him.

Missing lots of lifts didn’t bother Vern. Because of the physical gifts he possessed, along with his insanely competitive attitude and personality, it didn’t have much of an effect on him if he failed with the same weight over and over. But it’s obvious that this is not the case with most lifters. Missing lifts is a pretty important topic that you have to address as a coach or an athlete, and that’s what we are going to take a look at. We all know that athletes who train hard and push the envelope for greater weights are going to miss lifts in training occasionally. This is pretty clear. But the number of attempts a lifter should be allowed to miss before it’s time to call it quits and move on to something else…that’s where the big question is. How do you know when to say “that’s enough, time to stop” as an athlete or a coach? If you pull the trigger too quickly, you might be stopping an athlete from making a new personal record. But if you keep snatching or clean and jerking and the misses are starting to add up, then you’re flirting with injury and mental barriers. How are you supposed to know when enough is enough?

For crying out loud, why can’t this be easy? Why can’t somebody just come up with a rock-solid set of instructions that makes weightlifting as stress-free as hooking up your DVD player? All of these variables and grey areas, they’re enough to drive you batso! I know, I know. It’s a lot to handle. But since Performance Menu is the closest thing you’re ever going to get to a biblical list of answers to your problems, I think we should dive in and just start examining this.

Start with some common notions…

Let’s begin by setting down some basic truths and useful ideas about the big sticky issue of missing lifts. First of all, make sure you know that most of the best lifters in the world don’t miss a lot of attempts in training. I know I just started this article by talking about a guy who was a two-time Olympian and missed lifts more often than Charlie Sheen hits the pipe. Yeah, okay. But as I mentioned, Vern Patao was a very exceptional case. Throughout my career, I haven’t seen many elite lifters who pile up the misses in their workouts. Sure, it happens sometimes, but it’s pretty rare. When I first started weightlifting, a coach told me that Naim Suleymanoglu (greatest lifter of all time) had once gone an entire year without missing a lift in training. I later found out that this coach was a quack and he also believed that the government was tainting candy bars with venereal disease to enhance the pharmaceutical business through increased demand for antibiotics, so the Suleymanoglu story wasn’t true. But it is true that top weightlifters don’t litter their workouts with failed attempts.

One other thing you’ll notice is that skilled weightlifters absolutely never miss light warm-up attempts. If you have an athlete who can snatch 150 kilos, they won’t miss anything until they start getting up close to that 150 mark. The idea of seeing this lifter miss an attempt with a 100 kilo warm-up is out of the question, unless they have some kind of mental issue. I once coached a kid who could snatch around 120 kilos, and he would routinely miss 80-90 kilo snatches in the gym, even sometimes while warming up at a competition. It was aggravating. Actually, disgusting might be a better word. “Putrid” is pretty good, too. But this particular youngster had some psychological problems that bordered on clinical disturbance, so the spotty misses in his weightlifting training were part of the package with him. Tough to deal with, but he eventually pulled through.

Throughout most of my career, I’ve had a “three strikes” rule when it comes to misses in training. Here’s how it works. If I miss three lifts in a row, that means it’s time to go back down to a lighter weight and try to work back up. For example, let’s say I’m doing a workout where I’m planning to snatch around 140 kilos. On this particular day, things aren’t going too well and I’ve missed 130 twice. Now, if I miss the 130 one more time, that’s three strikes. That means that I need to take some weight off the bar and see if I can get the rhythm back. In this example, I would probably go back down to 120. If I kill the 120 and 125, then I’m back to 130. Hopefully, I’ve fixed my wagon enough to nail the 130 and possibly get to 135 and 140. If it works out like that, then life is beautiful. It’s time to do some good pulls and squats, stretch a little bit, and swing by the gas station to treat myself to a Diet Coke on the way home. But if I miss the 130 a couple more times, or if I make the 130 and then 135 feels like I’m trying to drag a battleship anchor off the floor of the ocean, then it might mean the snatches are done for the day.

This method has worked pretty well for me. However, I didn’t do it like this in my beginning years. Believe me, I had plenty of those beautifully unproductive workouts where I missed a weight over and over and over, and I just refused to stop because I was a walking boner with no brain and there was no way I was leaving the gym until I made that lift, dammit!! Yeah, that worked great. It took time and maturity before I learned to stop kicking a dead horse, and the three strikes concept was what I used for most of my best years.

No two Christmas cookies are completely alike…

Here’s another thing you have to keep in mind about this area. Missed attempts affect different people in different ways. First of all, there’s physical recovery to consider. Vernon Patao was a recuperative freak of nature. You could beat that guy with a hammer and he would be back in the gym the next day, crisp and fresh and ready to rock and roll. It was bizarre. And I’ve seen a couple of other lifters over the years that had similar constitutions. Some of the lightweight female lifters I’ve trained with were a lot like this. They could handle lots of volume on a regular basis, and multiple misses didn’t wreck their bodies. If you have athletes like this, or if you’re one of them yourself, then you don’t have to worry about being shot to hell for four days after a marathon workout that might include several missed attempts. However, there are many other athletes who don’t recover quite as quickly, and they’ll be feeling the impact of a brutal workout for the rest of the week. Generally, heavier lifters fit this description. Heavyweights take longer to recover than lighter lifters. Most of the best coaches in the world understand that you can’t train heavies with the same volume as smaller athletes. It just doesn’t work, at least not for long. If you have a big rhino who keeps missing heavy cleans over and over, you can keep pounding away at it but you need to understand that the workouts over the next few days might get ugly. The same goes double for older lifters. Be very cautious with the geezers. Their bodies are like land mines that can explode at any moment.

Second, there are psychological aspects of this thing. Some people don’t get rattled by failed attempts. That’s a great quality to have, no doubt about it. When you’ve got the mental strength and self-control to stay calm and confident in the face of repeated misses, you’re ahead of the game. Once again, I think experience and maturity have a lot to do with this. Veterans who have been around the block a few times usually have a good understanding of the training process. What I mean is that if your body feels like crap one day and you can’t lift big weights to save your life, it’s not the end of the world. With a little bit of recovery time and maybe some additional restorative measures (nutritional, massage, icing, etc.), everything will feel totally different in a few days and you’ll be ready to crush some personal records. Experienced lifters know this, but rookies don’t. Rookies, especially the ones who have enormously high expectations and goals, can get pretty screwed up in the medulla oblongata if they fail a lot. Have you ever heard of a psychological barrier? Well, this is how those barriers get formed. Inexperienced lifters, or maybe any lifters with low confidence, will often develop the idea that they simply CAN’T lift a particular weight if they miss it repeatedly. That’s why the coach is so important here. Two tips for coaches: 1) Don’t let your ego get in the way (I’m gonna make this little #@%! keep trying that lift until she gets it!) 2) Always make sure the athletes finish their workouts with some successful attempts, even if they have to use really light weights.

What do they look like?

There are two types of misses. Wanna hear what they are?

Type A: plenty of strength and power, but the technique is just slightly off.

This is a situation where the athlete looks really strong, snappy and fresh. The bar is moving fast, the lifter doesn’t look tired or sluggish, etc. But there’s something about his/her technique that’s causing the failed attempts. It’s a small problem, but they keep screwing it up. Maybe they’re not getting the snatches into the exact right spot overhead, or maybe the timing of the jerk lockout is just a little bit off. In this case, backing down to a lighter weight and fixing the glitch will likely take care of the problem. This is where you can feel like it’s safer to take multiple attempts at a weight, because you know the athlete has the strength and power to complete the lift. I wouldn’t get carried away and snatch for an hour, but you get the idea. Type A misses are caused by minor technique errors, not diminished physical condition. You can fix the errors in this case.

Type B: technique is okay, but the speed and strength just aren’t there today.

This is the opposite problem. Here, it’s fairly obvious that the athlete is shot to hell. For whatever reason, they just don’t look like they’ve got any pep in their step. They’re trying, and they’re giving it everything they’ve got, but that bar looks ten times heavier than it usually does. If this is the case, taking multiple attempts with heavy weights is like sending a personal dinner invitation to the Injury Fairy. Even if you don’t get hurt, you’re probably going to have a bummer of a workout that isn’t going to accomplish anything productive. If you’re smart, you’ll swallow some pride on these days. Either get some reps in with extremely light weights and make it a “technique day” or just bag it and do some pulls and squats. If you decide you’re still going to be a hardcore commando terminator on the days when the juice just isn’t there, fine. Just don’t come crying to me when you walk away with a tweaked elbow or back spasm.

Practicing failure…

We’re all going to have those days when we just can’t lift a damn thing. Sometimes, those days are going to happen when the stakes are pretty high. You’re training for a big competition, you’re lifting in front of somebody that you really want to impress, whatever. When you miss a lot of attempts under these circumstances, it’s infuriating. I used to joke that I’ve seen some of the best lifters in the country have complete mental meltdowns in the gym. You know the ones I’m talking about, where somebody just snaps and screams a few really good cuss words before storming out of the gym. I remember a day years ago when my coach brought some kids to our gym, ages nine or ten, to teach them about lifting. He had given all of us a stern warning to be on our best behavior and watch our language when these tykes were in the gym. So the little kids show up, our coach is teaching them the lifts with a broomstick, and one of my training partners is having a terrible snatch workout. After his sixth or seventh miss, he looks down at the bar and screams “YOU MOTHERF------ER!!!” as loud as he possibly can. Our coach looked like his head was going to explode, and I had to leave the gym because I was practically ready to start rolling on the floor laughing.

When it comes to misses, you’ve got to learn to keep your cool. As a coach, you have to learn this too. When the coach gets nervous, the athletes can see it. Coach gets nervous, athletes get nervous. Pretty soon, all you’ve got is a gym full of nervous people. Nervous people make me uncomfortable.

As we said in the beginning, there’s no set formula for how to handle failed attempts. I think the basic concept of not beating a dead horse is acceptable to everybody, but there are obviously going to be times when you’re not really sure if the horse is dead. If the horse still has some life in it, you want to give it a shot to get back on its feet and start running again. Just remember, it’s really hard to become successful if you’re practicing failure all the time. If you’re practicing failure, you’re only going to be successful when you occasionally get lucky. I don’t like relying on luck. I would much rather rely on good preparation. There are still going to be times when you need some luck, but you don’t want to make it the foundation of your training. Make yourself the type of lifter who practices perfection so frequently that it becomes second nature to your body. And when you do occasionally fail, don’t scream F-words in front of small children.