Saturday session with Paul Tucker

Last Saturday, the 21st of June, Paul Tucker came to Sydney and conducted a training session at the Crossfit Sydney venue. Paul is the President of the Australian Girevoy Sport Association and has wealth of training experience with kettlebells. His site is http://taskettlebellers.tripod.com/. He is a GS fanatic, and I couldn’t miss the chance of getting his advice on training.

One thing I can say without exaggeration: Paul is strong like a horse (I am tempted to say like Tasmanian Devil). And his knowledge of GS is very solid. As I understand it, Paul is mostly self-taught, and this brings hope for those without access to a qualified coach.

Including Paul six people took part in the session. It tells you how small GS is in Australia. We went through the technique of various lifts, starting with clean and press. In GS type of training it is done in a different way from Hardstyle. You don’t brace or tense and breathe on the way up rather than down. Actually, it is two-cycle breathing: press-breathe in, breathe out in top position, lower-breathe in, exhale in rack position. The same pattern of breathing applies to cleans, jerks and snatches. Because GS lifts are done for time it is important to find a breathing rhythm that allows maintaining work for a while. I guess this is one of the secrets behind Valeri Fedorenko’s 2006 snatches at the Arnold Classic of the same year.

Inhaling adds a little push to the jerks, and this was also mentioned by Ryabchenko in one of his articles on GS training. Paul made a very valid point that if you feel like bracing and tensing during GS lifts probably the weight is too heavy for you.

I was reasonably happy with my snatch, and it was interesting to observe that it takes time to get the corkscrew on the way down for some people. While playing with the snatch I once again realized that it can be done in three ways, just as Dmitri Sataev mentioned on his DVD. It can be done primarily by the back, by the legs or with the intermediate variant, where you move your knees backwards during the bottom phase. As the result, the body folds slightly and the biomechanics of the lift changes making it easier. As the fatigue accumulates during timed set, it also makes sense to alternate the technique as the set progresses.

The most upsetting part was double jerks. Upsetting because I though there was something seriously wrong with my technique and because of that I suck at this lift. I though Paul is going to correct me and my numbers would go right up. No luck. As it turned out, after following Sataev’s recommendations on the form, my technique is ok. It’s just that this bitch is too hard! So as they say, back to the drawing (bleeding?) board. As they say on Russian forums, you want to jerk a lot – jerk a lot. I guess…