The barbell club

Back “in the day” when I played badminton there was a weight lifting club in the building behind the courts – in summer they used to leave the big doors open and you could see in from the carpark. It was full of big men in leotards with their “special” shoes, jumping up and down and screaming a lot.

So yeah .. never really thought “hey I should take up Olympic lifting”.

That was I guess until last night when I rocked up to my first session with the barbell club at HPU.

I had never considered going before – I imagined it to be a bit of a “boys club” who all lifted heavy weights (even though it’s usually instructed by a girl) and the workouts always involve movements that I’m not confident with. However when I asked Gareth if I could “use the dowling instead of a bar” without hesitation said “yeah of course you can” so I sucked up my scaredy cat and went along.

Firstly apart from Gareth who was in charge there was one guy (and no it wasn’t J).  There were two newbies (the guy and me) so Gareth spent quite a bit of time with us going through technique *bonus* while the rest of the small class (6 in total) worked in pairs.

We did high pulls and cleans, the others did clean/jerk and Mark and I did thrusters as Gareth wanted Mark and I to clean then do a thruster rather than clean and jerk (as we didn’t work through the jerk part).

When it came to the WOD it was 5 reps of c&j on the minute @ 60% of 1 rm for 10 minutes, then 3 reps on the minute @ 70% for 7 minutes then finally 1 rep @ 80% on the 30 secs for 3 minutes so 20 minutes in total.

I have  no idea what my 1 rm is (not helpful) so we just started with 25kgs and worked up from there (technical huh!) lol

As I mentioned earlier I don’t know how to jerk since we didn’t get that far so I cleaned it then just did a push press to get it up .. thankfully I’ve got big shoulders.  Gareth said that when he taught me the jerk I’d be able to lift a tonne of weight because I’m a powerhouse (I think thats a polite way of saying “of solid build”) 😉

It’s got to be said, I like lifting. Give me a WOD with lifting over one that involves running/rowing or even box jumping any day. I’d totally be in my element .. I wouldn’t be very well rounded athlete, but I’d be a pretty happy one.

Maybe I should have joined a weight lifting club after all … 😉

Till next time