Ryabchenko 2 - on rack

Yesterday I turned 46. So this blog becomes more relevant to older athletes (that’s how I want to call myself). Last week I spent four days in the Blue Mountains, the area couple of hours of driving west of Sydney. Very nice. Lots of food and wine. No training except for walking in the bush. It (lots of food) culminated at Uighur restaurant and was accompanied by generous amounts of Vodka.

Today I noticed that someone posted the review of Sonnon’s DVDs on the Irongarm, and another poster questioned the correctness of the rack position on the promotional photo. As far as I know Scott Sonnon has been interested in classic GS for a while now and probably has a good idea about the rack. I am definitely not the one to question his technique. But the post reminded me of a page in Ryabchenko’s article discussing this, and I thought I should post it here. Yes, it is the same article by the Maestro with the famous training protocol. There is much more in it on various aspects of the technique and teaching GS lifts. Here is what he has to say about the rack position.

According to Ryabchenko, the rack is the foundation of GS, and there is no sense to teach complicated moves without getting the rack right first. There is simply no good girevik without good rack (as well as without correct breathing). There are two basic variants of rack position.

On the picture above is the diagram of the rack where the hands are parallel to each other and at the same time perpendicular to the body. Ryabchenko calls this rack classical. The photo that follows shows Andrey Popov, many times champion of Russia and the World, typical example of such rack position.

The next figure shows another variant: the hands are parallel to the body and at the same time are turned away from it, while the bells are sort of resting on the forearms. The photo shows Ilia Popov, also many times Junior champion of Russian Federation and the World.

First time Ryabchenko noticed this variant of rack used by Ivan Ament from Kazakhstan, and he was immediately impressed by the rationality of it. In this variant the bells travel shorter distance and therefore less energy is spent during each lift.

Obviously, there is unlimited number of intermediate positions between the two variants, the most typical shown on the next figure.

Sometimes because of the mistakes made by coaches or, more commonly, when the athletes at the beginning train without guidance, they learn incorrect habits, which are especially visible in rack position. The next picture demonstrates the extreme bad case of incorrect rack.

In such position the bells are constantly pulling out, thus wrecking the coordination of the muscles. The arms fatigue faster. There is also another danger. Because in such rack the bells are positioned further forward, the center of gravity is also shifted in the same direction. When the bells are lowered the athlete is forced to extend his back more, and this increases the risk of trauma, which increases even more as the athlete gets tired.

I tried the second variant of the rack and have to admit that it did not feel comfortable at all. It may be my anatomy or bad habits, I don’t know. Most importantly, I am paying attention to not turning my palms in and to keeping them at least parallel to each other, as in the classical variant. Feel free to experiment and let me know how it feels.