Soooo I’ve been a bit slow on posting, sorry about that guys. As of now I plan to be able to hit one a week, hopefully down the road we can offer more content. But today we have a great post by one of own lifters, James M.
I’ll interject some points with an (*)
I’ve been having difficulty with proper bar placement in the rack position in preparation for the split jerk for some time now. But today, I had an eureka moment! My coach told me that the bar should always be on my shoulders, and suddenly, it clicked. It wasn’t new advice. Coach has been giving that same advice for a while—among other helpful cues of course. But, for whatever reason, it just clicked for me, today. What’s the moral of this blog post? Repetition. I’m having a feeling of déjà vu, but even so, this point is worth repeating.
*James has a tendency to rack the bar on his clavicle instead of letting it sit in the “pocket”.
The human mind and human body are impressive and mysterious things. There’s a lot that science has yet to explain, and possibly some things it will never be able to explain. For instance, as Mortimer J. Adler explains:
“At one moment in the course of his development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later—perhaps only two or three weeks later—he has discovered meaning in them; he knows that they say, ‘The cat sat on the hat.’ How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and half millennia to study the phenomenon.”
Here, why was it that in that moment, the simple statement, “The bar should always be on your shoulders,” had such a positive impact on setting up my rack position, especially in light of the fact that I’ve been told this same sort of statement numerous times?
*And have been placed in the correct position numerous times :p
While there may be several theories, I nevertheless think one lesson to be found in this experience is the utility of repetition. Sometimes it’s beneficial to be patient with your lifter and repeat the same cue over and over again. Verbal repetition is not the only method of instruction, and it is not always the appropriate method, but I think it can sometimes be useful, as it was for me today.
One moment a child sees a string of words together, and it makes no sense to her; but something mysterious happens, and at any given later moment, the child understands the sentence to say, “The cat sat on the hat.” Today, my sentence was, “The bar should always be on your shoulders.” You never know when (or at what age for that matter) you might have that eureka moment.
Thanks!
Stay strong,