Robin Thicke and High Rep Olympic Lifting, wait…What?
A RECIPE FOR FITNESS OR A RECIPE FOR DISASTER?….HIGH REP OLYMPIC LIFTING
A RECIPE FOR FITNESS OR A RECIPE FOR DISASTER?….HIGH REP OLYMPIC LIFTING
If you are a trainer or a fitness enthusiast you might have heard of the battle going on with Olympic Lifting.
Is High Rep Olympic Lifting Good or is High rep Olympic Lifting bad?
Athletes, non athletes, beginners, sport specific, conditioning, power, strength…where if anywhere does it fit in.
It should be a simple yes or no answer right?, well unfortunately those lines are a little Robin Thicke ( see what I did there).
Now, this article was done and ready to publish until I did my weekly blog reading blitz. and came across the article by Sir. Harold Gibbons (he might have been knighted I almost positive) who “made me” re-title this post to appropriately fit one of the first lines of text that I did not even consider to be apart of the title when I wrote it. in closing…Thank you.
Back on Track here…Good or bad?
Boom, Roasted. End of post goodnight.
But seriously What is the deal? On one side of the coin you have Crossfit style workouts using high rep Olympic Lifting…a lot and getting reamed for doing so by conventional Olympic weightlifting coaches and participants who say its one of the dumbest things in the world to do. And the other side Oly lift coaches or not who are outspokenly against its implementation for a variety of reasons from injury, purpose, failure, overuse etc.
Now, unlike most of the recent posts which were conveniently cited in Harolds posts linked above(click his name), I am not going to go into detail about what makes its good or bad. I will however ask a question about high rep olympic lifting.
Can you Please define it?
Now this may sound kind of like a dumb question for me to make a whole article about, but let me explain.
Is this the High Rep Olympic Lifting you are talking about?
I did a post on the breakdown of this video awhile back and will bring it back here to round out why I have that question.
If this is what we are going to define as High rep Olympic lifting then I am not going to support its implementation into the world of fitness.
Sure he is strong and can manhandle the weight from the floor to overhead, but is this still considered Olympic lifting and within the technical failure parameters?
If his goal was just to do a similar movement to a C&J for time then sure you can say he did it, I can not take that away from him, I can not do what he did and I am fine saying that. But would he instruct me to do it like that if I were to attempt it under his guidance?
Is High rep olympic lifting as many you can muscle through the complete movement in a row until you reach your target number?
or
It is definitely still high total reps there is no doubt about that because he did 30 of them. But, why did it look so different?
Well other than the fact that he chose to use 90 more pounds than the previous video used, Mr. Rich Froning(current Crossfit Games Champion) lifted his weight in a manner that I would consider more along the lines of 30 sets of a single rep. I can be in support of this high rep Olympic lifting. Yes, the rest times are shorter than the traditional model practiced in Oly lifting but it is still 1 lift at a time.
Vastly different but still the same.
Both videos came up in my top three rankings of a simple Google search for “Crossfit Grace” which is confusing because I see them as different.
One video is in the Crossfit main page Library and the other is simply a video shot by a Crossfit Affiliate facility. Which is or should be identified as High Rep Olympic Lifting?
If the “Rich Froning Model” is the model of High rep Olympic lifting that is going to be pushed as good and acceptable then I can back it and understand the reason for its implementation. However, if the first video is the direction that this movement is going in then consider me an advocate for doing away with it all together. I would rather not have an up and coming trainer use this video for reference on high rep olympic lifting if they are looking how it should be done.
What do you think?
Originally published at fitletes.com.