Takano Weightlifting

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COMPETITION CUES

As I observe coaches at competition it is sometimes obvious that some of them have never been weightlifters who were properly coached in a competition. There are some former good athletes who competed in sports where the rules specifically forbade input by the coach during competitions so they may not be aware of the competition coaching dynamic in weightlifting.
The situation is this. If you are a weightlifter in the altered state on the competition platform, the visuals beyond the platform are fuzzy and unfocused. Sounds are muted or unclear. The only voice that can be heard clearly is that of the coach. I’ve personally experienced this multiple times and hundreds of athletes I’ve coached have recounted the same. At this point the only meaningful cues are very specific ones related to the lifting of the barbell.
Novice coaches need to realize that their lifters have made a commitment by training for the competition and have further committed by entering and showing up. This is not the time for encouragement. It is the time for ex*****on.
What do coaches mean by saying, “Easy lift”? Anyone who has done the training knows that the lift is challenging. Competitors are looking for a challenge. They want to do something that is difficult that is beyond the capacity of most. Other coaches might say, “You got this”. There are better things to say if you are talking to a competitor. By the way, confidence is built during training because the training is demanding and challenging.
The best cue is the one that addresses the factor that is most likely to fail. It should be short and direct. It should be one that has been employed during training. When I say “hips through!” my athletes know that they should fully extend the knees and hips. Usually only one factor can be addressed as the lifter approaches the bar. More than one can be confusing.
The focus and hence the cue may change from one attempt to another. The hips may have fully extend but the elbow extension might have been the weakest aspect of the attempt. In that case, the elbow extension should be addressed prior to the next attempt.
Cues should be in the form of a specific command. There should be no ambiguity. Furthermore the coach should not coach avoidance. If a lifter is dipping too fast in the jerk drive and losing contact with the bar, the cue should not be “Don’t dip so fast!’, but rather something like “Control the dip.” Drawing undue attention to an avoidance can actually increase focus on it and leave it as the last thing in the mind of the lifter.
Moreover the focus of the coach and the athlete should always be on the next attempt. High fives and congratulatory gestures are directed toward the completed attempt. Immediately after an attempt, good or bad, the coach should focus on calling the next attempt, psychologically sequestering the athlete, and directing the focus of the athlete on the most critical factor to enable success on the ensuing attempt.

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THE DOGGED NATURE OF WEIGHTLIFTING COACHES

Most of the readers of this page are members of the weightlifting community and are probably well aware that the overriding goal of weightlifting is to lift the most weight possible. Individuals who are initially attracted to weightlifting undoubtedly do so because of the fascination of conquering weights that were previously unliftable. Most will soon discover that the pursuit of this goal on a prolonged basis can be daunting and that only the most determined and stubborn individuals can prevail
Furthermore weightlifters also realize that time waits for no one. Save for the youngest competitors, most weightlifters quickly realize that the diminishment of one’s recovery capacity is an ongoing process.
The majority of weightlifting coaches were formerly weightlifters and as such are individuals that are stubborn and extremely goal oriented. The best ones are stubborn but not close minded. These characteristics enable them to stay the course which is a long and challenging one. And this brings me to the main point of this piece—becoming a proficient weightlifting coach is a long and challenging process.
We are currently at a point in history where a large percentage of the population is constantly bombarded with the offers of mastery in a very compressed time period. Certificates, certifications, degrees, diplomas and other various affirmations of mastery are constantly being offered online for varying sums. The advent of AI has further fueled this rush toward instant mastery. Consequently we are surrounded by a generation that believes that the mastery of just about everything is possible through a very abbreviated process.
Weightlifting coaching is not such a proposition. The pathway to mastery is a long one that requires an inquiring mind, the development of many athletes and a process of consistent self evaluation. Furthermore there is an element of luck involved in that you can’t learn to coach elite level athletes if you don’t happen upon one in your coaching journey.
The one big problem that stands in the way of developing elite coaches is that there is no formal program in place to provide the necessary education. Oddly for a nation that is so fanatical about sports, there is no way to earn a coaching degree for any sport in America. The U.S.A. Weightlifting courses are only a rudimentary first step in the process of coaching development. Furthermore they’ve eliminated the previously conducted coaching camps that offered opportunities for a great deal of good information to be shared among veteran and journeyman coaches.
Am I writing this piece to be discouraging? Not at all. I am merely laying out a daunting but rewarding pathway that will be attractive to those aspiring coaches who are looking for a truly challenging venture. Coaching weightlifting is for those who are addicted to the process of athlete development and who are stubborn autodidacts.
I’ll conclude with a brief Abadjiev story. When I visited the Bulgarian training center in 1989, he brought out a well-used notebook of which he was obviously proud. He explained that he had written down the best lifts of each lifter in each training session over the previous twenty years of his tenure. He further informed us that he had not missed a single training session over that span save for the times when he had to present lectures at coaching seminars. He was stubborn. He was an autodidact and he was addicted. His parting comment to us was that if he could say anything to then U.S. President George H.W. Bush, he would ask why he did not do more to support weightlifting in America.

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23Jun25 The Scientific Mind of Ivan Abadjiev

We are always looking to find the G.O.A.T. in whatever field of endeavor we are involved. For weightlifting coaching, I think the strongest argument for the title goes to Ivan Abadjiev of Bulgaria. Of course, the immediate retort by many weightlifting fans is that his athletes were taking performance enhanging drugs. The testing substantiates this, but so were all his rival coaches administering them to their athletes in the various Eastern bloc nations.
With a population of slightly over 8 million people in Bulgaria, Abadjiev was able to repeatedly defeat the Soviets who had a population of over 287 million. Both nations used the same talent identification process, the same sport school program, the same coaching education program and yet the Bulgars came out on top the majority of the times that the two nations met in the most prestigious lifting events of their day.
I believe a big reason for his success was his unquenchable intellectual curiosity. An experience in 1989 convinced me of this.
I was part of a study tour of the Soviet and Bulgarian lifting programs organized by the National Strength and Conditioning Association. We were a combination of weightlifting and strength and conditioning coaches anxious to find out more about the methodologies being employed by these two nations. One of the highlights that we looked forward to was a presentation by Ivan Abadjiev in Sofia, Bulgaria. The topic would turn out to be a surprise for the group.
Ivan opened up the lecture by introducing the term histone to the group. He asked how many of us were familiar with the term. My hand was the only one raised. As a biology and physiology teacher I was required to teach about histones to my students. From that point forward he referred to me as “Mr. Biochemist”.
Histones are globular proteins that DNA strands are wrapped around. Histones are normally aggregated into groupings of 8 that are collectively called nucleosomes. During mitosis and meiosis the nucleosomes are attracted to each other and the DNA strands form loops that make up the structure of chromosomes. When they are in this state they cannot transcribe nucleotide sequences in order to synthesize proteins.
Abadjiev believed that there might be a way to program lifting training so that the nucleosomes could be manipulated in such a way as to synthesize more proteins which for a weightlifter would mean more muscle, as well as more enzymes. We couldn’t quite figure out whatever details he was proposing partly because our interpreter, Megi, didn’t have the biochemical background to translate his thoughts accurately.
What I came away from this presentation was an impression of Abadjiev as a coach of great intellectual curiosity. He was a man who was willing to explore overlooked possibilities for improving athletic performance and he was not afraid to go deep in his explorations. How many of us know of great coaches who are willing to explore the biochemical aspects of their sport in order to improve performance? He was certainly a rare individual.

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WHY THIS EXERCISE?

It’s not unusual to see videos of new lifters online performing specialty exercises that are programmed in many cases to solve a specific weightlifting problem. I’d like to at this point differentiate between fundamental exercises and specialty exercises. Fundamental exercises are those that all weightlifters should be programming into their training. On the other hand specialty exercises should only be programmed to solve specific weaknesses, whether strength or technical.
Since most beginners have both technical difficulties and strength challenges, the training must include fundamental exercises and a fairly large variety of specialty exercises. As athletes become more advanced and more specialized the variety of fundamental exercises begins to shrink. Noted weightlifting training scholar Robert Roman has proposed that lifters at the highest levels will eventually only perform snatches, cleans & jerks and squats.
I am currently in the process of organizing around 100 exercises that I’ve used to train athletes over a 50 year span. The plan is to eventually provide videos of them along with information to answer the following issues:
• Do they actually solve your problem(s)
• What is the best rep/set/intensity scheme
• How often should they be programmed in the weekly cycle.
• When should they be discontinued from the training program
The initial impetus for this undertaking was born during a conversation that I had with Harvey Newton many years ago. We talked about the need for an exercise glossary. At that point it would have had to be developed with written descriptions and photos. The current availability of video will enable this project to be even more descriptive and available.
While watching lifting queries that pop up online, I often wonder why any given exercise is programmed. I understand that with self coached athletes, the variety of exercises to which they may be exposed is probably limited. For those with online or less experienced coaches, the same may be true. Some coaches prescribe a given specialty exercise because it has always worked well for them, even though it did not always address a situation in need of a remedy.
In a few cases, a certain coach may have tied his or her identity to a specific exercise e.g. power clean from blocks, pause squats. An athlete coached by this individual may or may not benefit from the exercise in question, but it is programmed anyway. This can lead to a waste of time and energy.
In some cases, a particular exercise or variation of a common exercise is viewed in the training of a popular world champion. The reaction may be, “So this is what’s missing from my training.” Shortly thereafter legions of underinformed lifters are adding the exercise to their training programs.
All lifters must realize that their training programs must change over the course of a career. My attempt to provide some enlightenment about the functions of various specialty exercises should provide some assistance with making the best modifications.

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TALENT ID AND COACH MATCHING

For decades USA Weightlifting and its previous incarnation, AAU Weightlifting, have conducted the program in a rather haphazard manner with varying degrees of success. We were once regarded as a world power in weightlifting because the U.S. won the team titles at the World Championships and Olympics from 1946 until 1955. Even the most casual observer of history must realize that this span coincided with the global recovery from World War II. From that point forward our appearances on the medal stand began to dwindle. Save for a few historical happenstances like our introduction of women’s weightlifting to the world stage or the boycott of the 1984 Olympics by the Eastern bloc, our international medal count has been dismal. Even our recent slight upswing in the medal count has largely been the result of more stringent enforcement of the anti-doping code, and not because of any improvements in our strategic approach to the development of weightlifting talent.
If we were to be considered strategic, we would currently be seeking out talent for the 2032 Games. Although we’ve dabbled in talent identification it is time that we were thinking about developing a system for removing some of the randomness from our development program.
Although there is great potential talent scattered randomly throughout our very large nation, it would be best to consider holding talent identification events in close proximity to the coaches with a long history of training athletes for international competitions.
An organizing committee might quibble over the details, but tests such as short sprints from a supine position, pullups per 30 seconds and medicine ball wrestling could be implemented with the results being evaluated by a panel of expert coaches.
After testing takes place, the athletes and their parents can be assembled for an orientation with the local coaches in attendance. A long term pathway for the aspiring Olympians could be laid out along with whatever perks or swag that USAW might make available. At the conclusion of this orientation, a short list and a long list of athletes might be revealed and arrangements made for the initial training.
Of course USAW would be responsible for providing oversight for both athletes and coaches.
This need not take place initially on a grand scale. It can be started as a pilot program which would then be evaluated and the details ironed out. It should be viewed as an addition to the current non-system that is currently in place. If it succeeds, it can then be replicated and expanded.
Just a thought regarding an effort to make our development process a little less random and more strategic.

HOW ABOUT A TRAINING CAMP?
For all too many of us we’ve come to believe that online training or coaching is a sufficient substitute for live in-person training. This belief does apply to some disciplines. In those areas where a lesson can be taught virtually and then practiced without supervision or oversight, online training can be quite effective. In many disciplines, however, nothing is nearly as effective as live in-person coaching and training.
I was therefore heartened the other day when I received a communication on Messenger from one of the very first interns at the Takano Weightlifting gym. Clancy Benton, a Louisiana native, was one of a trio of interns when I opened the program in 2014. Clancy returned to his home state and opened his own facility and began coaching weightlifters and athletes interested in improving their performances. He later sent one of his coaches, Jade Hernandez, to my intern program and they both helped out at a course I taught at Redline Athletics near New Orleans in 2016. Our contact since then had been sporadic, but then came the communique.
The light bulb that had been lit in Clancy’s mind was the prospect of putting together a training camp for weightlifters and their coaches. Although fairly young in the sport, Clancy had come to the realization that nothing could beat the human experiences that take place in a training camp environment. His proposal was to have coaches and athletes gather for a four day camp where athletes could be coached by different coaches, and where coaches could interchange experiences and presentations by veteran coaches could be made available.
I think that this venture could be of tremendous value for the participants and Clancy and his organizational staff. As coaches and athletes we do too much of our work in our own silos and aside from competitions and the occasional clinic, we never get the chance to interact and exchange information. At clinics and camps this type of wisdom often gets passed around at meals and late night gab sessions.
A training camp would also enable athletes to be scrutinized by different coaches and in this way, some seemingly impossible training issues can be solved by a wider
panorama of coaching experience.
Another proposal that Clancy is considering is bringing in some of the older members of the coaching fraternity to widen the experience and to enable networking between some of the newer coaches and the veterans before their coaching knowledge is lost. Apparently Clancy has been paying attention to my periodic admonitions that the greybeards are dropping and some effort must be made to harvest their wisdom before it is eternally lost. I’ll be helping out on this aspect.
Anyway I’m heartened to see this step being taken by one of the younger members of the coaching fraternity, as we need to start considering some pathways to develop and enhance the body of knowledge available for the sport moving forward. Thank you, Clancy for taking this step!

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