GH Reflection

My genius hour question was: how much could I increase my maximums in the Olympic lifts of the snatch and clean & jerk?  I was able to increase the snatch 10lbs from 135 lbs to 145 lbs, and I increased the clean & jerk 20 lbs from 165 lbs to 185 lbs. This is a total of 30 lbs between the two lifts which is pretty good for a time frame of approximately 1 month.

Torokthiy's training program had a lot more volume than any of the programs I was using before.  Volume is the overall amount of weight lifted, so per session I was lifting more which obviously worked out for me.  Whereas the both programs used about the same number of exercises per session, Torokthiy's program had more sets and reps per exercise, which is the factor that accounted for the increased volume. The program is actually a 12 week program and I completed the first 4 weeks for the genius hour project.  I'm thinking I will keep going with the program for the full 12 and see how far I can go with it. Given my own increases in this short time, I can see why this guy won gold in 2012. 

What was nice about the genius hour project was that I got to incorporate something I liked into our school program.  Despite the hiccups and stresses of completing the tasks associated with the project, I think the training actually helped to manage the stress.  I think genius hour is a good idea to incorporate into classrooms.  In addition to benefiting student productivity, I think it helps the relationship in general between students and teachers.  It shows that teachers are willing to give on their end of things by allowing students class time, something that is valuable to the teacher, to do something that is important to them and doesn't really have anything to do with the curriculum which the teacher is responsible for. Similar to how, for me, the training was a stress reliever, I can see how incorporating genius hour into the classroom could be a stress reliever for students.  It gives students a break from the demands of the curriculum and as a result can decrease their stress, increase their well being by letting them do something that is important to them and makes them feel good,  and help build confidence since they will be developing whatever skills are associated with their genius hour item.

I had hoped to include the videos of me completing the lifts in this post, but the files on my phone are too big to email myself so I took screen shots of the videos to show the lifts in progressive stages of completion:

185 lbs Clean & Jerk

 

145 lbs Snatch

 

And that's all, folks.

GH Reflection

Movie trailer is complete.  I used Windows Movie Maker to create a .wmv file which was embedded on the Genius Hour Trailer page without difficulty.  At one of the lifting sessions I had another lifter take a couple pictures and some video with my phone.  The videos were in .mov format so I had to use an online converter to get them into the .wmv format.

I didn't use any words for the trailer but that was on purpose because I wanted the watcher to grasp the idea without a narration. The music was used by a wrestler, Bill Goldberg, back in the late 90s/early 2000s and sounds pretty epic so I thought it would be good background music for a 'journey', which is what training for anything is.  The pictures of me lifting are representative of the progression used in completing both lifts.  I was going for a combination of a Rocky type training montage and to show the progression of the weight from the ground to the start of me trying to get it over my head without showing whether or not I could actually get it there.  Maybe it would have been a better idea to use only video and actually do a training montage but the videos at the beginning, middle and end were intended to show me getting ready to try the final lifts interspersed with pictures of the training to get there.  The trailer ends at the point of lift off and maybe there's some suspense about whether or not the lift was completed. 

I actually enjoyed completing the trailer.  I went over 30 seconds with it, but it felt kind of like I was telling a story with it so I guess that was hard to do in just 30 seconds. Anyways, on to the next...

GH Reflection

Things went pretty well from a training standpoint up to the time I attempted to record maximum lifts in both the snatch and clean & jerk.  I would say I completed 100% of the training sessions.  I did miss a couple of days in favour of watching Blue Jays playoff games but I made up for those days by doing training protocols for the session I missed plus the regularly scheduled session on the same day.

The training method I used from the 2012 Olympic gold medalist, Oleksiy Torokhtiy of Ukraine, resembles that of a Soviet style training program.  In competitive weightlifting, the Soviet Union was the dominant team pretty much from the 1950s up until the disintegration of the USSR and since then Russia and the former USSR satellite countries have remained strong.  Two main programing styles prevailed during that time, one coming from Russia and one from Bulgaria.  Here is a quick breakdown of  main differences between the two systems based on what I've learned:

Russian style

• Many support exercises used in addition to the competition lifts
• Variation in loads used.  Weights used in training are based on percentages of a lifter's 1 rep maximum. Percentages used are from 50% - 100% with the majority of loads used falling in the range of 70% - 80% of the lifter's 1 rep maximum
• Periodized training cycles. Throughout the macrocycle (eg. 1 year), there will be multiple smaller cyles (eg. 8 - 12 weeks) with their own goals and varied intensities.

Bulgarian style

• Primarily uses few lifts: the competition lifts and a squat variation (back or front squat)
• Little variation in loads.  Weights used in training are consistently at or near a lifter's 1 rep maximum. The majority of loads used are around 90% of the lifter's 1 rep maximum. 

In short, the Bulgarian style used heavier weights more often (all the time) and fewer exercises in a very linear progression.  Once you could lift 200 kg, you tried to lift 205 kg.  The Russian style used used lighter weights but weights that were heavy enough to create a training response, focused heavily on technique which was facilitated by using the lighter weights and cycled their lifting schedules in a way that promoted longevity as opposed to burn out.   To visualize it, think of the Russian style as a series of rolling hills trending upward while the Bulgarian style is more of an upward sloping linear graph.