Weightlifting Forums

Can you really call one bad competition for the team a "fall from grace?" As half Italian it pains me to say, is Italy as good as Seb is implying?

(edited to add complete video)

I think its interesting to note that they seem to have taken a leaf out of team Georgia's book and gone for smaller more elite teams.

At 2022 Euros they finished 5th on the medal table but outside the top 10 in both the men's and women's team points (2021 they were 8th and again ot in the top 10 on points)- they're selecting and developing a small crew of very very good lifters who are making A sessions.

Their lifters generally look very efficient, and as the video describes, their coaches are very involved in every part of the training effort. I think Worlds in Colombia was a bit of an outlier event for them. I expect to see some more cautious openers next major event.

brian.degennaro wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 2:35 pm Can you really call one bad competition for the team a "fall from grace?"

An increasing number of his statements are wrong and/or the opposite of the truth (especially on technical matters).

brian.degennaro wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 2:35 pm As half Italian it pains me to say, is Italy as good as Seb is implying?

No. Italy is Europe's South Korea or Japan. A system with good foundations of infrastructure and investment which as a result produces high level athletes and occasionally a star.

Europe's China was Bulgaria, past tense.

Hawkpeter wrote: ↑Thu Jan 12, 2023 7:30 pm I think Worlds in Colombia was a bit of an outlier event for them. I expect to see some more cautious openers next major event.

Of course you can't rely on logic to predict the past, let alone the future, but I think the Italian team is rational enough to do so. Italy doesn't have the numbers that China has which enables yeeting as a strategy at national level (rather than individual lifter qualification).

People forget that yeeting the snatch for most lifters does affect the clean and jerk both physically and mentally.

general video commentary

I think that the training prior to the event was an underdiscussed reason for poor performances. Just because you're not maxing out, doesn't mean your training isn't tiring. And if you're maxing or supra-maxing out (@hang snatch) then it... shouldn't be surprising that the fitness gained from the session doesn't outweigh the fatigue from it?

The British (along with many other nations) have a fixation with the illusion of speed under the bar. Moving fast and low is a component of technique, not its entirety. There's no one aspect of lifting that makes for good technique, the parts both make the whole and the whole emerges from the parts. Any singular metric for assessment is limited and wrong.

I don't think the Italian team is not as "technical" as people give them credit for. Don't get me wrong, as a team they have pretty good technique, especially in comparison to other countries. But like other countries and athletes, there are fundamental errors in most of the lifter's techniques because weightlifting is hard.

It's just different to the individual lifter, which is much better than whole countries doing dumb shit at once (@2015 Russia, excepting Viktor Getts).

Imperio for example, has excellent elastic squat strength and is able to move under the bar like Sanic. She also has poor pulling rhythm and no finish, causing bar crash and poor alignment of the bar over the feet in both snatches and cleans. Not a single one of those training snatches or competition snatches looked like she fixated and then locked it in the pocket to me.

She is strong and mobile enough in the legs and upper back/shoulders to muscle the bar into position overhead as she descends on light weights and wait for it to continue back on momentum with moderate-heavy weights. However, it's not a surprise to see a miss a very heavy opener when the fixation of the elbows often occurs without the vertical alignment of the bar over the shoulders, or when that alignment is lost in the descent into the squat.

Miserendino's snatching I would say was an example of a lifter with similar strengths/weaknesses to Imperio and Magistris, but with technique that better manages it. Excellent lifting in the snatch, typically an excellent jerker but couldn't put it together on the platform.

Pizzolato, like Ilyin or Meso, has good coordination of the first pull>transition>second pull in hangs/blocks and powers off the floor but squat snatches/cleans from the floor are pitched forward and the upward extension of the trunk is late - either leaving the bar forward or swinging it back in snatches. From memory/my perspective his best snatches (e.g. 175@89 '22 EWC, 170 in training before Tokyo) have slightly less of this forward pitch and delayed extension.
There is a longer delay in his clean which is typical for this type of pull, but it doesn't matter because the pull is shorter and because he's got the strength of a silverback gorilla so cleans don't matter.

An Italian lifter who doesn't get the same technical credit for the snatch as her peers is Giorgia Bordignon. She has her own technical errors as everyone does but I think her lack of credit is because she's not zoomer enough (in speed under the bar or age).

Just don't watch this garbage.

Getts was mentioned on the previous post, already retired but still got some moves:

https://instagram.com/stories/viktorget ... JmNzVkMjY=

I went to a seminar with the ex-coach of Lydia Valentin and Germany, Manuel Galvan, who runs the Regional Training Center in Tenerife. He told me Getts his one of the best Russian lifters, they even have him on a poster executin the snatch back in Houston 2015.
As for Giulia, I agree, she has this twist to the right on the receiving position of the snatch and ovepulls the clean.. Great mobility nonetheless.

Excellent Italian channel analysing lifts

https://youtu.be/ou5aHhecfGg


https://youtu.be/tSJv4SuSFPU


https://youtu.be/IhOIfKlvHm4

erpel wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 8:31 am Just don't watch this garbage.

This is the wise answer.

Guima73 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 10:34 am https://instagram.com/stories/viktorget ... JmNzVkMjY=
As for Giulia, I agree, she has this twist to the right on the receiving position of the snatch and ovepulls the clean.. Great mobility nonetheless.

I don't quite agree about those errors in the snatch or clean.
I think twisting in the snatch/clean/jerk is normal and visible with most lifters on the rare occasion that you get an overhead camera. What I think is an issue is that she doesn't move directly into her individual stablest overhead position and lock it there.

As for the clean, I'm not a fan of the idea of overpulling. If you pull the bar higher, you can meet it higher and ride it down. Diving under and not meeting the bar is the issue. Wang Zhouyu for example is forced to do this, I'm guessing because her hip strength (prior hip injury) wouldn't allow her to catch heavy weights any lower at speed.

Well, overpullin because her timing is bad meeting the barbell, most of the time it crashes on her. I think we are speaking of the same thing but you will have to excuse me , I'm not an English native speaker

strapping wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 11:44 am
I don't quite agree about those errors in the snatch or clean.
I think twisting in the snatch/clean/jerk is normal and visible with most lifters on the rare occasion that you get an overhead camera. What I think is an issue is that she doesn't move directly into her individual stablest overhead position and lock it there.

I agree about the need to move directly into the most stable individual position - its a difficult thing for many people to modulate all the way up and down the intensity range though when there is additional frontal and coronal plan movement - and therefore it can become a big variable leading to misses. It also needs to be further modulated as the impact of volume and tonnage stress comes into effect.

I would argue that there is a lack of coaching intervention in the frontal and coronal plane, this is reflected in the disinterest in accounting for the impact of the asymmetrical nature of the split jerk in programming as a whole. Every minor sagittal plane variation will be addressed, but near zero elsewhere.

Hawkpeter wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 8:22 pm I would argue that there is a lack of coaching intervention in the frontal and coronal plane, this is reflected in the disinterest in accounting for the impact of the asymmetrical nature of the split jerk in programming as a whole. Every minor sagittal plane variation will be addressed, but near zero elsewhere.

I think most coaches here would generally agree to the lack of frontal and transverse plane movement and training. But most coaches here aren't most coaches.

I personally would not frame it with the perspective of asymmetries as it were (unless the asymmetry was secondary to pain or injury), but rather a lack of physical capacity relative to task demands. If a body part is less trained, then training it as a weak-point is likely to cause faster improvement.

Most people can achieve a lot with very little in frontal/transverse plane training - it's not as if you need to do a lot of it to reap most of the benefits.

Proper split squats (i.e. long, low and loading both legs evenly) and side bends or landmine rotations once a week is often enough training to shore up a lot of weightlifters' weaknesses in the trunk/pelvis/hip.

I find this is particularly useful for the overhead position in the snatch and jerk, not just from the perspective of strengthening but also capacity to shift the athlete-barbell centre of mass and maintain balance.

I think that something else that is underdiscussed is methodology for neck and cervical spine training, injury risk reduction etc.

Cervical spinal loading can be considerable in weightlifting and it's not something that I think most coaches (myself included) prepare athletes for deliberately.