Introduction

Coach Eddie Zhang reports on his Chinese weightlifting trip. Listen to his words, as he tries to describe and simplify what coaches told him (Eddie speaks Mandarin). Lots of information here are just coaches' opinions, not an uniform training systems for a 1.5 billion China. Some side comments from Coach PapaYats will be delivered when necessary.

Lower back strength and mobility are key

This was huge for me. The coach took one look at me and said “his back might look well-developed to all of you, but he has useless bodybuilder muscles. His back is thick through the upper and mid-sections but where is his lower back? No meat here. And no meat here, either (points to my lower lats).”

He could also see my underdeveloped back producing odd movement patterns in my lifting. Lots of upper-back dominant lifting, he said. It’s hard to describe what this looks like, but I’m more or less able to identify it when I see it. Off the floor, my upper back rounds to take the majority of the load and my lower back doesn’t contribute during the second pull.

As a result, I get too upright before my pull to exclude my weak lower back from the pull, meaning I can’t effectively utilize my glutes. Other times, I get more than upright: I lean back and push my hips forward to hump the bar, meaning I only use my glutes and upper back, without my lower back and also without my quads.

To the coach, it looked like I was just trying to heave the bar. Most "Western" people trying out Chinese weightlifting have this pattern.

The above was drilled into us with every rep, as the coach didn’t find any of our positions acceptable--and probably none of yours. It was only toward the end that it got okay enough that he didn’t feel like it was worth it to swear at us anymore.

High volume/low rest

It’s okay to do a million reps at low weight before moving up to higher reps, and it’s okay to drill technique for many days at a time. Especially for us, who in their eyes are still all beginners who fucked up and didn’t start weightlifting in China at 8 years old, we need to devote a lot of time to light work.

It doesn’t have to be a whole day on its own; paying extreme attention to detail while warming up will suffice. Even these lifters took a long time warming up--maybe 15 minutes with just the bar consisting of 6+ sets of looking for minute technical flaws and ensuring that they were really warm. It was pretty common to then watch them play with 40 or 50 kg for another fifteen minutes, before piling on weights.

That was roughly the amount of time every lifter took between sets and a central factor behind how they could accumulate so much volume.

Inclusion of pulling

We should definitely drive our squats, he said, but our pulls have to go up too. Our programming is imbalanced otherwise. He didn’t offer a ratio for squatting:pulling, as that’s individual, but we should be pulling at least as often as we squat.

Squatting takes place within a greater programming context, and other things can affect squatting performance.

I’ll go into the context later, but for all strength exercises, he suggests this rep scheme:

The triples and doubles are to get used to heavy weight. They load the nervous system. The last 2-3 sets of 5-8s are there for hypertrophy, you can skip these backoff sets if you follow with another squat exercise. Depending on the time of year, you adjust intensity/volume and can limit the back-off sets/accessory work.

We continue Coach Zhang's experience with Chinese Weightlifting soon... in Part 2 and  Part 3.