Happy birthday to 2x Olympian and 9x National Champion, Chad Vaughn! 

Wes Kitts (105) is training for the upcoming Pan Am Championships. This past Friday, Kitts snatched 175kg/385lb (1kg over his American Record) and clean and jerked 216kg/475lb (1kg over his current lifetime PR) to total 391kg.  

CJ Cummings earned his fourth world title with an incredible 10kg jump to 183kg/403lb on his second clean and jerk attempt at the 2017 IWF Junior World Championships on Sunday in Tokyo. Competing in the 69kg A session, Cummings compiled a 321kg total after trailing Japan's Masanori Miyamoto by 9kg heading into the clean and jerk. In the snatch, Cummings hit a 138kg/304lb lift on his second attempt and was called for a slight press out on his final attempt at 141kg.

Team USA's Jacob Horst closed the second day of competition at the 2017 IWF Junior World Championship by posting a PR clean and jerk to finish 14th overall in the B section in Tokyo on Saturday. Horst (62kg) tallied a 110kg/242lb snatch and a 138kg/303lb clean and jerk, giving him a 248kg total.

Just a reminder Ilya Ilyin is still here and still killing weights. Here he is snatching 175kg/385lb from the blocks.

Jordan Cantrell (85kg) represented Team USA at last year's Junior Worlds in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he ended with a 145kg/319 snatch and 173kg/380lb clean and jerk for a 318kg total. Since then, Cantrell has been training like a savage!

Adding to his world record total and his Olympic Gold Medal, Georgia's Lasha Talakhadze has now done what no other human has done before: snatched 217kg in competition. Witness greatness:

American Record holder Colin Burns is looking fresh, prepped, and strong for the Arnold Weightlifting Championships. Check out these insane training lifts he's had in the past week:

44 world records. 33 athletes. 24 hours.

Sara Sigmundsdottir ended up on top of a podium this week, but not for CrossFit. The reigning third-fittest woman on earth won the -69kg class at the WOW Reykjavik Games Olympic Weight Lifting Championships on Sunday and took down some Icelandic records in the process.

Just a few minutes ago, Jenny Arthur set a new American Record snatch at 107kg during the snatch session in Rio. She's still got her clean & jerks coming up, follow along with our live blog!

If you watched the 2015 IWF Masters World Cup, you probably witnessed Aimee Everett setting a new Master's World Record in the Snatch. Except, here's the thing: you didn't. Yes, the IWF Masters website says the current WR in the 69kg weight class for W35 division is 75kg. Yes, Aimee Everett successfully hit 78 and 81kg in her first two snatch attempts. And yes, the event organizers also thought those were WR snatches and treated them as such (including extra doping testing to insure the legality of the lifts).  But none of that matters because the actual W35 World Record snatch in the 69kg weight class is 85kg, and happened at the Pan Am Masters Championships in early June by Rachel York. And apparently that lift never made it into the IWF's Records webpage. So IWF drops the ball, doesn't know its own records, and falsely leads two female lifters (Jodi Vaughn also mistakenly thought she broke World Records in the 58kg weightclass for the same reason) to think they'd set new World Records, but there's no recourse for the lifters other than to politely suggest that "hopefully next time before a huge international meet the record can be updated so the athletes can be prepared." That quote is from Aimee Everett's instagram, where she speaks out about this "terrible, unfair, heartbreaking" mistake on IWF's part and I can only think that she's handling this way WAY better than I would have.  IWF is a big deal, an important organization that is generally pretty good at its job. Unfortunately they really screwed the pooch in this situation. While they haven't really responded to this, hopefully they'll apologize and strive to improve this system. 

Yea, sure there was some small event over this past weekend with a bunch of professional exercisers but other stuff happened too! Check it out: Ilya is back on his major training cycle leading into the 2016 Olympics and here's his snatch from his first Big Friday. In case you don't know, Ilya maxes out every Friday and calls it Big Friday. He then uses those numbers to help decide what his training will look like the following week. Since this is the first Big Friday of his training season we can't expect too much out of him which is why he only snatched 171kg (376 pounds). Pssshhh, weak sauce. Big Friday also includes maxing out on the clean & jerk, so here's Ilya's 222kg (488lb) single from the first Big Friday of 2015. To put that in perspective, these numbers are just about 90% of what he hit at the 2014 World Championships in Almaty and would also give him the American Record for clean & jerk and total.  Jon Pera finished 18th at this years CrossFit Games after taking a couple seasons off of individual competition. He also discovered a secret 13th event that Dave Castro apparently announced and never followed through on. Check it out. And in case you've missed a whole lot of stuff, be sure to check out the rest of the series: In Case You Missed It

Greg Everett is the coach of the Catalyst Athletics weightlifting team and author of the most popular book on weightlifting, Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches. In this week's technique focus, Everett emphasizes the importance of the first pull in a lift. Having trouble elevating the bar? Everett suggests variations and strength improvements to ensure an athlete practices the best technique possible.  I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen a relatively new lifter unable to elevate the bar adequately with the exception of occasional errors. It’s typical for these individuals to be snatching and cleaning fractions of their basic strength numbers, and their pulling strength usually far exceeds their classic lift numbers.    If for some reason you genuinely are unable to elevate the bar sufficiently, then pull variations and strength improvement in general is what you need. High-pulls are not intended to get you pulling the bar higher in the snatch and clean—bar height is not achieved by pulling with the arms. They’re intended to do things like train proper bar/body proximity and strengthen the third pull. You can do high-pulls in addition to heavier pulls, but understand that you’re not trying to high-pull the bar when doing the actual lifts.    Add more pulls to your program and more variations like pulls from high blocks to emphasize the final explosion. You can also try a complex of a pull + lift, e.g. snatch pull + snatch to both strengthen the pull and also encourage a complete pull when actually lifting. Power snatches and cleans and work from the hang or blocks will also help you develop more force at the top of the pull and consequently more bar height.   If bar height isn’t really the problem as I suspect, I would guess the issue is more related to your change of direction after the pull and your pull under the bar not being fast enough. The height of the bar doesn’t matter if you can’t get under it in time. Hang and block lifts are great for improving this. Related Articles: The First Pull: Make Or Break The Lift Control Dip For Max Power Output  Executing The Proper Overhead Snatch  Correcting Overextension Of The Hips In Your Snatch  Fixing A Slow Turnover In The Snatch And Clean 

Technique Tuesday With Greg Everett. Greg Everett is the coach of the Catalyst Athletics weightlifting team and author of the most popular book on weightlifting, Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches. In this week's technique focus, Everett discusses the importance of strategizing a training plan designed for the specific individual athlete.  I wouldn’t say that weightlifting requires high-volume and frequency training, but certainly it’s a common approach. It’s also important to acknowledge that volume and frequency are relative, and what’s high to one athlete may be moderate or even low for another. Within my own gym I have some lifters who thrive on 400-500 reps per week, while others can handle only 200 or fewer, and this doesn’t always align with age.    The snatch, clean and jerk are more complex than the powerlifting squat, bench and deadlift by orders of magnitude; the degrees of technical skill involved in the two pursuits are not even comparable. I don’t say this to disparage powerlifting or powerlifters in any way, but it’s an unavoidable truth, and it plays a role in training differences. This being the case, it’s obvious that in order to master the competitive lifts, far more time and far more quality reps in the competition lifts must be performed by the weightlifter than the powerlifter. Weightlifting is a unique sport in that the lifts inextricably link the motor qualities of precise movement and timing with strength and speed. Powerlifting has a huge strength component, but minimal skill; something like pitching a baseball has a huge skill component, but minimal strength. People are not usually resistant to the idea of a baseball pitcher throwing a lot of balls in a day, week, month or year, because the need to practice the skill is obvious. The skill of weightlifting is not as obvious because most people are viewing it from a perspective largely shaped by history with bodybuilding and powerlifting training.    Next, there is an issue of adaptation. Anything you do that is a sudden and significant increase in volume, intensity or frequency is going to hurt. The key is that elite weightlifters didn’t begin training 6 days a week with 600 reps; the best of the best spend years developing in well-designed programs that allowed them to build the conditioning for this volume of work. Do drugs play a role in many cases? It’s inarguable that drug use will allow you to train heavier with more volume and frequency, but being drug free does not mean you can’t adapt to high volume and frequency (just not as high and not as quickly). You’re able to walk every day without a problem. That’s leg training seven days a week; but you’re adapted to that particular intensity and volume level. The same thing can be accomplished with lifting to a great extent.    The snatch and clean & jerk are less systemically taxing than squats and deadlifts because they’re smaller percentages of a true total body maximal effort, although in many cases, not that much smaller. This alone means they can be done more frequently by anyone. The classic lifts also overwhelmingly train neurological adaptations rather than morphological ones, which also means you’re not waiting around for tissue remodeling between workouts like a bodybuilder. Also, complete recovery between training sessions is not something that the weightlifter is necessary striving for; instead, you’re looking at blocks of training sessions to create a cumulative effect.    Training multiple consecutive days also doesn’t mean that every day is maximal intensity and volume. Day to day volume and intensity should fluctuate to allow some degree of restoration. Even Bulgarian-style purists—including the originator of the system Ivan Abadjiev—use such modulation day to day. Related Articles: The First Pull: Make Or Break The Lift Control Dip For Max Power Output  Executing The Proper Overhead Snatch  Correcting Overextension Of The Hips In Your Snatch  Fixing A Slow Turnover In The Snatch And Clean