In athletics, champions aren’t made on an assembly line. What separates the winners from the also-rans is individuality. Discus throwers Mac Wilkins and John Powell both set world records separately, but their throwing styles were distinctly different, one difference being that Powell used a narrower leg sweep compared to Wilkins. In the long jump, Carl Lewis won four Olympic gold medals and Mike Powell won two silvers; Lewis’s style emphasized his speed, and Powell’s style emphasized his jumping ability.
In my career as a strength coach, I’ve seen the technique for the Olympic lifting movements go through quite an evolution. And on that matter, I submit for your consideration “The Curious Case of Mario Martinez.”
Mario Martinez was a silver medalist in the 1984 Olympics superheavyweight division and had best lifts of 415 pound in the snatch and 513 in the clean and jerk. For most of his teenage years, Martinez had coached himself at home in Salinas, California, and had primarily used a short exercise bar for the lifts, which didn’t work well for snatches, of course. When he was able to earn enough money, he bought himself an Olympic bar – but he could only afford 220 pounds of Olympic-size plates. As such, the powerful teenager got into high-rep snatches – and his feats included 20 consecutive reps with 220 pounds, and 30 reps with a short rest after the 15th rep. Just as impressive, at this time he also could clean and jerk 295 pounds for 6 sets of 6 with his exercise bar!
The problem is that although Martinez had a powerful grip, with such high repetitions his hands would become tired, which resulted in him curling his wrists and bending his arms to compensate. By the time he moved to San Francisco to train with Olympic coach Jim Schmitz, Martinez’s bent-arm pulling style was so ingrained that it could not be fixed. As Schmitz described it, Martinez was basically pulling with shorter arms. Pulling with bent arms was considered a bad practice, as it contracts the biceps muscle too soon during the lift and thus prevents the biceps from being able to strongly finish off the pull (thus the expression “You can only flex a muscle once!”). But then again, maybe bent-arm pulling is not such a bad idea.
One current idea is that rather than having the bar brush the thighs at mid-thigh level and then follow through with the arms, you bend the arms prematurely to allow the bar to be pulled higher – specifically, to the “crease” between the upper leg and hips. The thinking is that if you can position the bar into this crease, you can get a “kick” from the legs to help increase the force applied to the bar – and this increase in power is far greater than any additional force the biceps could impart on the bar. This technique is something for elite athletes and weightlifting PhDs to sort out, but the takeaway point is that perhaps Mario Martinez’s training compromises made him a lifter ahead of his time? By pulling with bent arms, Martinez created a paradigm shift in the way we think about weightlifting technique.
Martinez’s example aside, there are some ideas lifters have tried that simply do not work and definitely qualifies for my definition of “Very Dumb Training Recommendations.” The “Boston Stomp,” for example, is a technique used to receive a barbell after the pull. Before getting into the details of this bizarre (and rather noisy) technique, let’s take a step back and look at basic pulling technique.
When you look at the classical Olympic lifts, consider that you don’t lift maximal weights with your biceps but with the beefy muscles of the lower body. How strong are the biceps? Consider that although Doug Hepburn – one of the strongest men of his era – claimed a 260-pound biceps curl, and it’s only in a real hardcore gym that you see anyone doing strict curls with 200 pounds. So when I see Behdad Salimikordasiabi snatch 471 ½ pounds at the 2011 World Weightlifting Championships, I’m pretty sure he didn’t flip it overhead with his arms.
The purpose of the arms is not to lift the barbell but to pull the body under the barbell. Again, that relates to the idea that “you can only flex a muscle once.” Think about it: If an athlete shrugs and bends their arms at the top of the pull, thus contracting the biceps, how are they going to get under the bar? The arms are already spent! You essentially have to rely on gravity. And that brings us to the Boston Stomp, a name for a lifting technique that apparently originated on the East Coast of the US and may have been inspired the 1961 dance step called the Bristol Stomp.
From Dance Floor to Lifting Platform
The Bristol Stomp was characterized by a plantar flexion to extend on the ball of the foot, followed by a rapid dorsi flexion so that the heel produces a “stomping” effect. It was popularized by the singing group The Dovells, who released a song about it by the same name that sold over one million copies. Here’s the chorus:
“The kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol,
When they do the Bristol Stomp!
Really somethin’ when the joint is jumpin’,
When they do the Bristol Stomp!
Whoa, whoa…”
When teaching the Boston Stomp, strength coaches instruct their athletes to stomp their feet during the catch phase of power snatches and power cleans. Such stomping tends to produce a lot of noise, especially if a wood platform is used and the lifter is wearing shoes with a wood sole. The technique also decreases power production. So says Dr. Klaus E. Bartonietz, who earned a PhD from the Moscow Central Institute of Physical Education and went on to become a biomechanist at the German Olympic Center. In August 2010 I had a chance to hear his colleagues Frank Mantek and Michael Vater share their training methods at a seminar held at the Olympic Training Center. Dr. Bartonietz estimates that using the technique presented in the Boston Stomp reduces the power applied to the barbell by about 10 percent, thus diminishing training gains. That explanation makes sense.
Power comes from the ground, or rather from applying force to the ground. To perform the Boston Stomp, the athlete will need to leave the ground in order to generate enough power to create a big stomping noise. The higher the elevation, the louder the stomp. Come on, you don’t see speedskaters jumping in the air with each stroke and then stomping their feet into the ice to try to increase their propulsion.
But this silly idea isn’t going down without a fight: I’ve heard of some coaches who take the Boston Stomp to a new level of ridiculousness by telling athletes to try to kick their rears during the extension of the pull! Athletes who do this not only will reduce their power production even further but also will put themselves on the fast track to knee tendinitis.
To continue the advancement of sport performance, technique will continue to evolve in all sports. Along the way there will be some methods that simply do not work. The Boston Stomp is one such technique – it’s time to move on!