Movement Trumps Mass (a bit of a rant)

Starting at the beginning of September Power and Grace will begin their weightlifting seminars across the country. Our focus and tagline for the seminars is simple, “Movement Trumps Mass.” This is the simple idea that many of you have heard preached time and time again in the CrossFit community and hopefully in the weightlifting community as well. At our seminars we are going to emphasize the perfection of movement for the long-term development of weightlifters and exercisers. Simply put: Movement Trumps MassnnIt goes without saying that just because you can move the weight doesn’t mean you should. One of my old training partners mentioned to me the other day how often we get excited about lifters who show promise and we try to accelerate the process for those lifters. His point was that even the best coaches in the world forget that it takes years upon years and likely greater than a decade to develop the consistency, the rep count, and the movement patterns required to be a high-level weightlifter. It just does not happen overnight. I don’t care how gifted you are or how many youth American records you have broken. What’s more, the weightlifters who have accelerated to the top of their respective weight class relatively quickly may have had to sacrifice technical proficiency in the process. I can name three or four of our country’s best weightlifters on the junior and even youth level that we have rallied around as the saviors for American weightlifting and yet they haven’t even spent more than a couple years in the sport. The problem is that when they get to the senior level and have the capacity to lift some real weight that will put some real stress and strain on their bone structure, those technical inefficiencies that they neglected early on in their career will cause injuries, training plateaus, and ultimately keep them from achieving the very results that we were so excited about in the beginning. Allowing big weights to be lifted early in the career of a weightlifter without the requirement for technical perfection is not only shortsighted but is the mark of a coach who wants the instant success and fame of their program and their athlete without the long-term work required for an athlete to stay active in the sport for years and years.
Just because the weight can be lifted doesn’t mean that it should. In our seminars we will be focusing on the process. The process by which weightlifters first pick up a barbell and 10 to 12 years later are masters of their sport. There’s a giant difference in a young weightlifter with promise who happens to lift a lot of weight and a master of sport in Olympic weightlifting. Giving precedent to movement over mass creates long-lasting, injury-free success in the sport. The opposite creates burnout, injury, and the exit of young weightlifters long before they reach their capability or potential.
In our seminars coming up we are going to talk about the technical aspects of the lifts that are requirements for adding weight and also what other aspects of the lifts can be developed along the way. There are some specific movements that must be mastered long before weight is added to the bar. There is also a whole different set of skills that can be developed alongside mass. Knowing the difference is the key to developing a long-standing and effective weightlifting program.