American Weightlifting: The Documentary (2013)

[Music] i don't know why we do it it's brutal it's exhausting there's no money there's no recognition you just have to love it even when it doesn't love you back [Music] weightlifting to me is such a pure expression of athleticism you just have your body your mind and this one simple tool to express your will and to measure your success the snatch is there is the finesse lift and the cleaning jerk is the pure power lift you've got to be strong you got to be powerful and you've got to be tough i've i've always been sort of struck by the way that people once they see it they really understand that that's a different thing we're doing that they're always uh kind of amazed and impressed and and suddenly it has a a different cachet about it you know it's not just some lumbering brute you know just picking something heavy up i would describe it as an opportunity to demonstrate great power and explosiveness in a very precise manner it's highly technical and that is the thing that people don't understand it's like gymnastics with heavy implements added into it total athleticism and power and strength and coordination and balance and mental toughness and it's everything when it's done right it's much more graceful than people would imagine it's not all about always about being the strongest person it's about the most uh competitively strong in terms of your mind the most technically proficient person and in the same way gymnastics is all about confidence and hitting correct positions and timing and all that weight lifting's the same way with the added problem if you will of doing it with a massive weight i've been you know five feet away from somebody when they stash 200 kilos and i've been doing this all my life and i still don't know how that's possible [Music] like boxing like wrestling it's an individual sport you don't need teammates on the field of play to help you win a competition it's you and only you exceptional athletes are people that get off on that altered state they love to be in that state they love to be in that position where everything works really well and that's why you have people that'll beat themselves death train as hard as they can for months just to have those few seconds on the platform where everything works well i think it's it's an addiction to that altered state that weightlifting is really about thank i ended up after i got out of the marine corps i ended up getting a teaching job at fallbrook high school and i coached the sports of football and i coached the sport of track and field and of course we did the weightlifting we did the olympic list to get our athletes better in football and better in track and field during that time that was in 1975 at that time we uh we hadn't taken up the sport of weightlifting as far as competition was concerned yet this gym was actually developed because of rancho buena vista high school my first year at rancho we developed a weight room that was about 2 200 square feet and had three platforms and it was a at that time it was an olympic weightlifting paradise and i found myself you know spending all the time at school so mrs bergner didn't like that and so she said well why don't you just build a gym in the garage mike's gym started out with one platform i had went out and bought some bars and bumpers and put them in here and i found initially that you know i'd go to school and we'd coach at school and then i'd come home and half the student body in the weight room uh that was at at rancho buena vista would come to mike's gym and train after school so initially i didn't have enough equipment but i was fortunate enough to be known in the in the sport of weightlifting and and was asked to speak at clinics and uh any amount of money that i made through coaching or made through speaking i put back in the gym and so uh you know the initial aspect of not having enough equipment was taken care of within a within a year's time you know now we have you know i have four platforms and you know we have everything we need to run a great a great gym well my first exposure to weightlifting was probably when i was a young lad i go down to the corner grocery store and they had strengthened health magazine in the in the section and i would kind of look at the bodybuilders and and weight lifters and look at their physiques and i really uh wanted to be like them and you know so i presented that information to my father and and uh he thought that at the time that you know weightlifting like that would shorten the muscle groups and make you muscle bound and you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to utilize your athletic performance move on about 10 years after that or so and i can remember being a football player at marion illinois and got recruited by the university of notre dame and invited to come up to to the uh university for a visit and i met a freshman at notre dame at the time was a guy by the name of kent durso and going in his room and looking at his mirror he had 200 pasted on his mirror in big letters and he told me that tomorrow which was going to be that saturday he was going to clean and jerk 200 pounds notre dame was really the only school that had a an organized weight program at that time now this was back in the 60s so you know it was the only one that had a program and because i saw kent durso do that clean and jerk and i got an opportunity to meet the you know the legendary father lange uh i knew this is what i wanted to do to make me a better athlete father lange was an outstanding mentor of us he was 78 when i had the opportunity to go to notre dame and uh father lang would demonstrate his strength prowess at that age and he would dumbbell bench press a hundred pounds in one arm and 70 in the other because he had a torn tricep i believe it was and he would periodically throughout the day would come up from his seat and and asked his boys as he called us to spot him in the dumbbell bench press and he led by example he was a you know outstanding student of the game and he'd pass on his pearls of wisdom to us to make us better father lang was philosophy was to snatch to clean and jerk and to clean and press at that time there were three lifts the cleaning press the snatch and the cleaning jerk and father lang really believed in in doing those olympic lifts and in fact notre dame had won two or three national championships in olympic style weightlifting back in the 50s there were several classmates of mine that were a couple years older and we formed uh you know the notre dame uh weightlifting team and we competed uh all over the state of indiana and ohio and michigan and so the off season is and during the off-season that's what i did i i cleaned and pressed gnashed and cleaned and jerked i did clean and press uh 400 pounds uh and also clean and jerk 400 pounds which whatever i could press i could clean and jerk 400 pound press was a record at notre dame and uh you know they actually thought i could do something and father lang had these goals and the goals are you know if you could press your body weight 10 times he'd give you 50 bucks 50 bucks at that time was a lot of what a lot of money so i kept trying to gain weight and and press more so that every time i did it give me 50 bucks and i did a pretty good job of it i learned real quick how to press most of my lifters came from the high school initially you know they being a high school teacher and finding them in pe classes i could walk around campus and look for that four foot nine young lady that didn't weigh very much and and try to convince them to come into the weight room so most of my lifters came from came from my school and then you know then as you become better known as a coach people will you know they'll come down and want to be trained by you and uh several of them will come down from la or pasadena on the weekends and be trained by me and compete for team southern california you know that's uh when they find out you have a gym and your gym is you know full of weightlifting that goes on and they get some good coaching then you know they all want to be part of that environment i think the atmosphere in any gym is based on the members within the gym i believe in competition i like competitions uh daily competitions even even though they're not they're not structured as that you know who's going to win the snatch today but the daily competition of having a good day and hooting and hollering and yelling for each other and being supportive with each other and and and believing the old mike van yolo axiom that everybody deserves a yahoo day that is the the cultivating energy that i would like to have in a in in the gym and some days are better than others saturdays at mike's gym because we always snatch clean and jerk on saturdays are freaking rocking those days are the funnest days because everybody's trying to get that record i would like to be on the back burner back in the back behind closed doors pushing athletes pushing coaches to go out and try different ways of preparing their athletes so i think the future of coach b and in the sport of weightlifting will be won as a role of support and and hopefully teaching and education of those coaches that i can help so the biggest problem in this country is numbers uh you know i mean everybody knows that uh you know china has i think somewhere around a million registered weightlifters in their country we have a a fraction of that i think you know total usaw enrollment is somewhere maybe around five thousand uh you know people and that's everybody total athletes contributors coaches everything like that i mean there just aren't enough weight lifters in this country to uh you know to build up a you know a sustainable international effort we're not very good in the us you know and everyone's very very critical of it but we're number one in the world in basketball we're number one in the world in track and field and lots of other swimming and lots of other sports but every single high school in the country has a basketball team i wouldn't even know what the stat is on how many kids wake up on saturday morning and go play basketball personally i think the most important ingredient we're missing in this country is coaching the number of coaches we have is way under what we need for instance i always make the example of uh kendrick ferris you know great lifter well what if uh 40 kendrick ferris has walked through my door tomorrow you know i can only work with so many people at a time there ought to be places where somebody like that could go multiple numbers of places and expect to be developed completely one of the the biggest issues is simply a lack of money and a lack of not so much even spectator support but almost social and cultural support you know in a lot of these more dominant countries weight lifting is comparable in popularity to football or baseball or basketball here in the u.s and so when you have that kind of disparity in in kind of the cultural support and the familiarity among spectators among media among organizations who are willing to invest money into sponsoring athletes you're playing a very different game i think we need to value uh weightlifting enough to support it and this is one of the areas where the united states is not very good we are not very good in activities that do not generate revenue we don't support things for culture sake we support them for money's sake so until we can figure out that we need to support some things that are not necessarily going to generate revenue then we're probably not going to be able to do it we need to have professional weightlifting coaches and speaking to that issue you're not going to get professional weightlifting coaches unless you have a training program an educational program for them now in eastern europe you can get a phd as a weightlifting coach no such place exists in this country on the other hand if you say you have to take this many courses and then you're qualified to be a weightlifting coach there needs to be a job for them at least a part-time job so we're talking about educating them and then paying them and then there needs to be a way to pay the athlete to be a performer i mean all we're asking for is what the professional sports do we have professional coaches coaching professional athletes and then we can beat the rest of the world we can't compete and it's hard to because there's not enough money keeping our best lifters in the sport there's not enough funding and support to keep athletic or to at least broaden our our pool of athletes we have no scholarships everybody's a walk-on they got to walk on and play on their own dime probably the number one thing that's holding us back is the ability to support financially weight lifters from a young age to the age of their competitive peak which would allow them to dedicate to training full-time right now so many of our top lifters they're either working full-time they're working part-time you know we have a handful of people at the olympic training center who are essentially doing nothing but training but you know this is a tiny fraction of our lifters and much of the time we end up not being able to keep them long enough to actually get them to the level that they need to be at in order to compete with you know the the weightlifters and the countries that are dominating the sport internationally so much of it in this country is just dumb luck you know about who walks in your door who has the ability if there's a kid that could be a world champion wait up there and you see him how am i going to help him be awaiting he said you know i can go play division two football and get a full scholarship you know get all these pretty girls and all that stuff you know what can you do can you match that you know i'll get more recognition being a football player humble state university than being an olympic champion weightlifter in the u.s you know drugs have have a lot to do with it uh you know i think that you know it's it's it's hard to talk about and i'm not even sure how much everybody likes to talk about it but drugs are a pretty deep part of the weightlifting culture in a lot of other countries and i'm not you know assuming things are telling tales out of school by saying that a lot of the lifters and former lifters from different countries have been fairly open about that when speaking about it random drug testing in this country is uh is a big thing it really gets done there's no way around it if you're going to be a national team member in the united states and weightlifting then you're going to get drug tested year round and that doesn't happen in a lot of other countries my argument is that we don't have a bunch of good coaches in the country but we have some good ones and if you remove the the drug issue from the whole equation then i know some of our coaches can touch with anybody i think of course if if the drugs are in there then somebody can be a pretty poor coach and even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while you know obviously the the numbers the gains are enormous i mean if steroids didn't work nobody would be taking them if you take an athlete like kendrick ferris who you know is our our top american 85 kilo lifter and snatches 160 kilos and cleaning jerks uh 202 right around there that's around a 360 kilo total if he were to start taking drugs and you know improve let's say 10 percent on his total which most drug users will tell you that's a pretty reasonable number to assume all of a sudden kendrick has a 395 total somewhere around there and he's an olympic gold medalist now obviously the the asterisk next to that is that in our country we tend to get one or two kendrick ferrisses every 25 years as opposed to if you go to a country like china or russia they're going to have about a dozen guys who are all capable of totaling that 395 kilos at any given time pretty cool i started training uh at a gym called alex's gym in 1964. when i found out they had a platform they had some guys that did some weightlifting so i went to alex's gym in 64. so and this is a pretty rough and tough gym down in the excelsior district so i started there in 64 training and then in 1968 i went into business partners with alex and alex's sports palace at 24th and mission and we're upstairs and of course i was you know by then i'm full gunk hole into the weight of it and says well we got adequate platform so we put in two platforms but they were still steel weight so you couldn't drop them when that setup brought dan cantori uh well walter stephanie was training and he was good friends of dan cantori dan cantori was moving to san francisco to go to uc berkeley and so dan cantori started training with me and then i started building up a little weightlifting program there at the 24th and mission so bob kemper and bill stripling the guys from san jose would come up we started these communal workouts ken patera was looking for a competition in 1971 and so bruce wilhelm called uh who would live in this area knew ken patera called dick not meyer and then dick nutmeyer said well yeah come on we're having a contest and you can train you can stay with me and train at jim's place and so that's why i met so then so that's uh this whole thing started just by a little by little because because i had two platforms no other no other place had platforms because the ymca they're starting to close down their programs around that time my days were numbered at this gym upstairs because the dropping of the weights we knocked all the lights down from downstairs we knocked all the plaster but the good thing was the landlord was had died so the people who were handling the the building they didn't want they couldn't kick me out so they just put in a false ceiling down below you know but but anyway so i had then i'm in 1972 i moved to 828 valencia and i set up a bigger place where i had four platforms and i was 1972 to 1998 i was at 828 valencia and it was a that was a place where we could have competitions and that was where i had my greatest success because in the night in the 80s was when i had you know when the sports palace won seven national championships and mario won a silver medal and had we have you know the they had so many really good lifters and they were all local lifters all from the bay area the old sports palace was kind of like wrigley field or like a it was a it was a classic gym it had all these pictures and posters and uh the the walls were that dancing where weights had crashed through and uh it was a real rough and tumble place but we had great equipment and we had good platforms and we had good camaraderie but then the landlord died there and we had to had to move because the kids were going to sell the building so then i moved to 333 valencia which was 14th in valencia i set up a real nice facility there and it was going real well but i had partners and the partners wanted to be like gold's gym and world gym we don't want weightlifting anymore and so i kind of got booted out of there when i first started off on the bot and the way that we had the weightlifting show and then we had a bodybuilding show after it and so jimmy wilson had competed in one of my bodybuilding shows when he was an 18 year old kid so i met him and then when i saw his gym and i saw that he had a space that might work for me i cut a deal with jimmy wilson to be here i said i'm going to be here for a few months though i want you to know because i'm i'm going to find another place real soon well that was seven years ago and i still haven't found another place i wanted to lift weights because i wanted to build myself up to be better in sports but my folks wouldn't let me left way so i know i can't lift weights so i kept pushing and pushing and finally when i was in the summer that i was going to turn 15 they said okay you can now if you want you can lift waste but you got to get a job to earn the money to buy the equipment and so i bought a joe bonimo course and 50 pounds worth of weights and a barbell and a dumbbell and that was in june of 1960 and and i used weightlifting weight training throughout high school and college to uh participate in sport but i was getting more and more liking the snatching and the clean and jerking you know i thought i'd like to try competing in weightlifting and so there wasn't much weight living competition to do but then i had it in the ymcas in the bay area at the time and i saw that in the strength in elf magazine so i came down took a greyhound bus from ukiah where i grew up to the san francisco to watch the weightlifting competition at the san francisco ymca in the spring of 1963 i saw my first weightlifting contest and i thought wow this looks really fun i would like to do this i was a pretty good high school football player so that was being recruited to play football in those colleges it was division two i was going so that's why i came to san francisco to go to san francisco state and there was ymca wait wait wait was the ymca and i met a guy by the name of walt joseph at san francisco state he was a student there as well and so walter cephei got me uh talked me into competing my first weightlifting competition at the oakland ymca personal training hours i make most of my money then i write for milo magazine i got a few little side things going on i now have to charge people for weightlifting because i don't have my own gym so i tell people i'm i'm not my coaching is still free but i have to charge you to lift my weights and uh and until you can clean a jerk 500 pounds i got to charge you it just sort of happened like i say that i met walt joseph he knew dan cantori dank and tori trained with me he became an olympian champion record hold all this stuff then i'd be like oh i'm going to dance oh yeah come train with us you know and and uh and also because of ken patera and i started hooked up together in 1971 and he did really well and then then bruce wilhelm came in so i'm going to when bruce william decided to switch over from shot putting to weight lifting he came at the train with me and then he did well and so that brought tom stock and he did well but but then that well these guys were all kind of outsiders that came to me ken clark was a kid that just came off came off the street to build himself up to be a football player but they like weighed everything better and he became was a six time national championship all the american records at one time but you know ken came off the street and and mario martinez he read about us in the paper when ken pater was competing at a contest mario and his dad drove up from salinas and watched him lift and uh you know one year he's watching him lived eight years later he's breaking his record so it was luck with the having you know having a good facility and i wasn't good enough to be a real serious weight lifter but so i've all become involved to be becoming a coach and then because i had success and it's international and so just it just snowballed it wasn't a plan it just happened well some of the greatest things i've enjoyed i like to take pride in the fact that i coach ken patera the first american to press 500 pounds and clean a jerk 500 pounds as i coached bruce wilhelm first american to snatch over 400 pounds and fifth place at the olympics and mario martinez three-time olympian silver medalist at the olympics uh those are big thrills and there's been so many others like i said i get emotional on this because uh you really get into a person's life when you take them from the sidewalk to the olympics and i did that with a tan new union he roller skated in my gym one day and 12 years later he's on the olympic team i've been involved at the national level for 40 years been the 49 40 national championships in the road we contribute a lot of weight lifters i've made possible a sport of weightlifting for a lot of people i've been at the national level as a referee as a coach and official and and so i've i've done everything you can do in the sport of weightlifting except lift the big weights i mean i've been olympic coach i've been president of the federation i've been on committees and i've organized national championships i've been the competition director at the olympic games and i've done you know and now i'm writing for uh covering the the weightlifting support weightlifting for milo magazine so i mean i've done everything you can i've been involved in every aspect of the sport of weightlifting so i like to think that my biggest contribution is i've introduced it and made it possible for a lot of people to participate in the sport of weightlifting and i've helped some people achieve their goal of being an olympian [Music] um the biggest problem is most of the public has no perception of the sport they don't know anything about it they barely even know what it is most of the people who start looking at weightlifting immediately think that it's extraordinarily dangerous everybody sees an athlete doing a deep squat or catching a snatch at the bottom position and they say oh that's got to be so bad for your knees when you take a look at the statistics the olympic-style weightlifting is one of those sports that very rarely causes an acute injury of all the sports in the olympic games it's towards the bottom when it comes to you know acute injury happening the public perception of weightlifting is that it is dangerous that it is i don't want to call it aggressive but barbaric almost and that is only for big hairy strong men i think we went through a period where there was there was too much stuff going around that confused people if you talked to people back in the back in the 50s and 60s everybody knew what the press was because everybody that ever lifted weights one of the first exercises you did was the press and that was a competitive lift people could relate to that and then people found out that there was such a thing as bodybuilding that there was such a thing as power lifting and then we got machines to train on and then the gym business expanded out into the many subunits that it has and so people didn't have a good clear idea of what weight lifting was and they kind of tended to lump it together with all the other activities that involve some sort of resistance exercise [Applause] the first question i usually get is how much can you bench that's always the first question also a lot of people mix up the sport of olympic weightlifting with bodybuilding power lifting and that sort of thing i mean people ask me if i lather up in oil and you know go on stage and do some poses which is really funny to me because i can never pitch myself to something like that even if you just say i'm a weightlifter they automatically assume that you're taking some sort of steroids and they assume that you you do bench press or that you do curls or strongman trainer or anything other than what you do just because nobody really knows about olympic style weightlifting people believe that weight lifters are all going to be big muscle heads and that's why i think they're whenever they tell me you don't look like a weightlifter is because my upper body is smaller they don't see that it's mainly legs low back but and you know they want to see how much i can bench press and curl instead of you know how much i can actually throw over my head uh actually one time i went and got my nails done and the lady was asking me where i was getting my nails done i said oh i have a competition and she said is that because you're going to be in the sand flexing your muscles that doesn't make any sense [Music] you know it's not that the sport is unattractive to athletes it's that they there simply isn't enough exposure of the sport to potential athletes and you know when you when you grow up playing and seeing nothing but baseball football basketball soccer you know there's all these different things that really dominate people's childhoods and that becomes the norm that becomes the expected thing and that that is kind of your frame of reference as a burgeoning athlete and so until weightlifting is not even on the same level of those sports because it's never going to gain the amount of popularity that football has in the u.s but until it gains enough exposure and enough of a regular presence in children's lives you know whether it's seeing their parents or their siblings practice the sport compete in the sport whether it's uh you know seeing competitions on video on the internet but you know who knows maybe even television again until that happens you simply are not going to have a large enough pool of athletes to draw from and without that large pool of athletes you simply can't find that top tier talent that you need it's there's way too much left to chance and without the large numbers the probability is way too low generally athletes in this country go to play other sports you know every kid in this country has grown up watching football basketball and baseball and you know you know maybe a couple of other sports and when they're young they're taught that if they're good enough in those sports they can get a free education they can get a college education paid for and eventually they might be able to make it to a professional level where they're going to make millions of dollars and as a weight lifter you tell a kid you know if you're if you're really good at this if you really work hard for a long time eventually you can take a trip to merrillville indiana and pay your own way to get there and uh you know compete and win a national championship at which point you will be awarded a medal that's the size of a quarter and then you'll have to go home and start training again and figure out a way to get yourself out of debt because you just paid all the expenses to go to that trip i think there's a lot of people out there who could be really good at weightlifting and they just don't get the chance to do it for long enough or even see it there's videos out there of nfl guys or college football guys who clean power clean 170 you know easily and if they actually spent some time working on technique and and getting good at the sport and not being pulled away by other sports where they're you know paid a lot of money then we could possibly raise a a team of really competitive international weightlifters you turn on espn and you see football and basketball and baseball so all the kids and wake up on saturday morning they want to go play football basketball or baseball and when you can make 100 million dollars a year being a quarterback in the nfl that's a whole lot more appealing than making 250 a month as one of the top five weight losses in the united states if you look at somewhere like armenia let's say who have quite good weight lifters well they don't have professional football they don't have all these professional avenues for all these athletes so the competition for a quality athlete is not there like it is in this country and then and who's like i have kids coming here to train with me there could be fairly good weight lifters but they're going to go to college and get an education on football and they're not particularly good football players but they're good enough to get a scholarship they're never going to go beyond that well who am i to say you know well hey johnny give up that scholarship be a weightlifter and get no money and no education you have to be able to offer someone to someone something you have to be able to give them something get that mail and take it away when they stop performing and they say like what happened at the olympic training center we bring in all these lifters but we don't have that many kids that want to go out there so therefore you got this guy that's not performing you should you're out of here and but we can't we don't have money to take his place now in in china boy you you you mess up you're gone there's there's 10 kids that want that spot that you got and and in those countries weightlifting is a meal ticket we give up what they gain in other words we give up a good job a good education to be a weightlifter where they can get that by being a weightlifter a lot of the athletes who do end up getting involved in weightlifting find it an incredible sport they become infatuated with it the problem is that it happens far too late it happens after these people have been athletes in other sports and have retired or have been injured too many times to continue with that sport so we end up essentially with leftover athletes so much of the time athletes that are really too old to you know achieve that level of competitiveness internationally that we need in order to elevate our game if you talk to the average person and showed them a weightlifting mate on tv and then if you took the same person and showed them a football game on tv i think most people would probably say that the football game was more exciting and interesting for them to watch and so i think that because weightlifting is a is a sport where you just see the same person do the same thing every time there's no allure i've ever seen any kind of a trick play you know and the entertainment value in weightlifting is probably lower than a lot of other sports americans they they like to see guys dance they like to see guys score touchdowns and dunk the football over the over the uprights they like to see people slam dunk the ball and you know perform all kinds of you know theatrics i mean it's there's a huge entertainment value to it and in weightlifting that just doesn't doesn't come across just like the the problem with attracting athletes is you can't attract spectators to a sport that they don't know exists we don't have to change the sport to make it interesting enough for spectators or for tv you have people watching golf and fishing and poker on tv in this country and you can't tell me those things are more exciting or more interesting than weightlifting the issue is that there are a lot more people who participate in those things and consequently understand them can appreciate the difficulty of them and who are consequently interested in watching them [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the first time i realized that there was weight lifting was when i was 14. i was living in a little town in illinois and we i went into the drug store to get a milkshake while i was waiting i looked to my left and i saw a strengths and health magazine which i'd never seen before and there was somebody i didn't know what it was at the time but somebody was clean and jerky on the cover and i can remember thinking distinctly to this day i want to do that not knowing what it was or anything and it was probably a year and a half after that to when we moved out here to washington that i hooked up with some guys that were already lifting weights not olympic lifting but lifting and i remember that and i started hyping it up to them and saying let's let's try some of that then of course was the whole thing about how do you do this especially when you're trying to do it on your own but the real eye opener was when we went to the first meet that we knew about and was up in a town called everett and i was just stunned i mean i thought these people were the strongest people on the face of the earth and but i right from the beginning i knew i wanted to do it three of us started out doing it together and uh i don't know that we had any goals at that point we were just lifting because we enjoyed the feel of working out and uh i started playing football the other two didn't didn't do any sports at that point and i could just instantly see that you know it was going to be a big advantage to me if i was much stronger but the problem for us was that we you know we didn't have any guidance we'd have any coaching we didn't know you know how often do you work out what do you put together what's good technique what isn't good technique but we fumbled along and i think through the the three of us coordinating our small brains together we were able you know figure some of it out and i trained that way from for about three years until i really found some other people that knew a little more than i did but my real introduction to real weightlifting is when i got selected for the air force weightlifting team 1967 i went to norton air force base in california at that point i've been lifting about seven years and i it was it was incredible because i had people like peter rolick bob gargano roger siddecki roger quinn homer branham enrique fernandez who was a world record holder in the press at that point so i got to be around these people and really started to figure out what was going on i would say that was one of these lifters that never really truly got the most out of himself and here again i think that's just a lack of coaching and lack of real knowledge about what i was doing until it was too late in my career i did my best lifting when i was 37 so it's not not exactly ideal but i had a lot of great experiences i mean i would i would do it all over in a second but i never really achieved any of the goals i had three goals i wanted to snatch 150 never even tried it in training the most or intermediate most i ever tried was 147. i went to clean and jerk 200 i tried that in one of the olympic trials didn't make it and i wanted to make some kind of international team it could have been the canadian barbecue of meat i don't know but i never made any of those so i've always used that as a fuel to to get myself pushing my athletes to achieve some of those goals i tell them all the time i want all you guys to do more than i ever did if i if i don't do that if i don't get you to do that then i haven't done my job i i never thought initially in the beginning about being a coach i just kind of gravitated that way because i'll be training with people who had less experience of me and they'd ask questions and for suggestions of what to do and that sort of thing so i i never really was planning to be a coach per se and uh so consequently i had you know jobs i had to work so time was always a factor money in the beginning was a factor of you know getting people to big meets uh we're ready to go and initially i had to send sometimes people that meets and i couldn't go financially so and that was always it seems like it was always a disaster i think it was just life in general things like that it took me a long time to kind of work things into a situation where i could do what i wanted to do yet you know not desert my family or move into a van down by the river i'm hoping that when i'm done that there'll still be a calpian weightlifting club it'll still go on i'll still be successful like it is that i produce some coaches that are capable of doing what i do and and some of the methodology that i use hopefully to be passed on through them and to me that that's the ultimate validation of what you're doing is if other people observe that and want to use your methods or they want to continue what you're doing i i just want you know to to train superlative athletes people that are very confident very skillful very competitive on a national and international level plus i want them to be decent people you know i mean it's not that i preach any sort of morality but i do have expectations about behavior and stuff that i think maybe i can express non-verbally sometimes as well as verbally and you know i want them to be people that somehow give back to the sport whether they're you know they become coaches whether they just you know their children may be eventually interested or they'll be you know donors that donate money to the sport or however it is i just want them to love what we do to the degree i do so that they remain part of the sport and make it grow and go on i think it's just to perfect what i do as much as possible and to keep developing quality athletes you know as long as i'm healthy i tend to do that and i think that's a worthwhile thing your body really takes a beating and i think that in weight lifting you just kind of get used to the fact that every day you're going to wake up to something whether it's an achy wrist or an achy knee or your hip hurts or your traps hurt i think any sport at once you hit elite level i think that everybody is just going to hurt that's just part of it you're always going to have aches and pains your body's never really going to feel great and that's kind of how it is probably with any sport but especially with weightlifting we're never going to feel 100 so all we try to do is minimize the amount of pain that we're in so we'll have the normal aches and pains mainly in our knees and we'll do different things like cold plunging contrast ice any sort of methods that the the trainers will use with us that'll that'll minimize that pain or keep us from getting injured athletes at this level pains and injuries are inevitable it's just part of the game and you know preventing the chronic condition is really an important part and that's that requires athletes to continually have rehab in their program not only rehab on their own but then they also need a team of providers physical therapists chiropractors massage therapists if it's accessible to them so having access to sports med i think is incredibly important if any weight lifter knows that recovery is almost just as important as training is if you're not recovered if you're not feeling 100 your training is going to suffer because of it so being able to use sports med in the recovery center to use any methods possible to make sure that we're as close to 100 as possible for our next workout is really beneficial to us olympic lifting in general really impacts certain parts of the human frame for the most part the back is pretty strong and it's the extremities that really suffer the brunt because of the asymmetries in most lifters and then so the repetitive activity then creates um an imbalance and then the push and pull creates the pain that becomes one of the most difficult parts of weightlifting in this country in order for a weight lifter to train at this very high level they need the support of medical practitioners of some type whether it be chiropractors physical therapists massage therapists they need access to different recovery methods such as hot tubs cold plunges you know these things that end up costing a lot of money particularly when they really need to happen regularly and frequently and so one of the biggest issues is that as an athlete if you don't have access to those methods of recovery you quite simply cannot train as hard or as much as you need to to be competitive at the highest level they need three times a week intervention with sports medicine as far as restoration goes they need massage therapy they need chiropractic adjustments they need bowel neology which is the use of showers and baths to restore the body so all of those sorts of things are necessary and we just don't have them you know obviously there there's a lot that an athlete can do on his or her own in order to kind of help withstand and help endure the physical demands of the sport and of training but that only goes so far you know eventually you need additional help to allow you to progress the the frequency the volume the intensity of your training to reach these these higher levels and if you don't have money or you don't have you know some kind of sponsorship or help from practitioners you simply are going to be stalled in your potential progress [Music] i talked my parents into getting me a barbell set in 1962 and i started fooling around and in those days a barbell set always came with four courses and the first two courses were bodybuilding courses the third and fourth ones were more complicated lifts and i think in the fourth course there was the snatch and clean and jerk and at that time it was split snatch and split clean as well so i decided to try those out so i was i kind of taught myself how to do the lifts in my backyard just training on my own and reading strength and health magazine so when you're in that kind of situation if you are a naturally curious person you keep trying to find out everything you can to keep improving so that's what i did i think i probably screwed up my gpa in college but whenever i went the library to study i ended up looking up weightlifting stuff or things that were related to muscle physiology and so while i was in college i started lifting competitively and at the same time because it seemed like i was the only one in the weight room that knew what i was doing other people would come and ask me how to how to do lifts or how to train so i actually started doing strength and conditioning work before there was there was such a thing in existence i think the high point was i won the state championships one year because a lot of people didn't show up so i was i think i was always the best of the not so talented weightlifters but my technique was pretty good and i was always looking for different ways to improve either technique or how to get stronger or different ways to train so it's been very much of an intellectual exercise for me as well as a sport i think i had a multitude of problems that needed solving and so i had to figure out solutions for as many of those as i could so after a while i've accumulated quite a bag of tricks that that i pull out whenever i start working with a new lifter right now i'm retired so this is kind of just a little part-time income and something to do on the side and it's keeping me in touch with uh with weightlifting so this is actually the the second edition of the fat elvis weightlifting club the first edition took place at van nuys high school when i was a teacher there and i taught there for 32 years and during that almost the entire time i had a weightlifting program going at the school so i have the the school district to thank for providing me with the facility although they probably don't know they did it i got one of the one of the board members who at the time she was very much interested in in physical fitness to kind of get on my side and i also got the booster club so you know i i worked the political angles i told them i would help out with strength and conditioning for the other teams if i could have the facility and train weight lifters there after school so they said yeah that that would work out so even though we were we were located on different parts of the campus from time to time we were we were somewhat nomadic i was able to keep the program going from 1978 until 2003. it was not wonderful but it was very functional and it had a very very urban jungle type of atmosphere to it the one that i that i finished off in there it was a it was a reconfigured electric shop and the district was closing down industrial arts programs so they and the enrollment of the district was shrinking so they had rooms they didn't need i was the kind of teacher that would probably get involved in school politics so they wanted to find a way to keep me busy and they figured if i was coaching weightlifting i would stay out of school politics so that was that was probably their easiest way of keeping me out of that mix my team has had different names it was the van nuys lift weightlifting club it was a van nuys weightlifting tribe then we became fat elvis and i always thought that even if our name was kind of silly as long as the lifting was good that was all that mattered because i i see these teams that have these wonderful names and the lifting isn't very good it came from sean getting a job or he was applying for a job at a novelty shop and they wanted him to dress up like elvis presley and stand out in the street and chill to get people to come in and i remember at the time they were talking about putting out the elvis presley postage stamp and one of the questions were were they going to put out this step depicting him in the 50s or one depicting him in the 70s so it was a question of where we're going to have the thin elvis or the fat elvis so that the thought of fat elvis kind of stuck in my mind so when sean said he was going to get that job i said oh you're going to be the fat elvis on he kind of laughed because he was a super at the time so we said okay we'll just stick with the name fat elvis i got a phone call from a guy named mike arsenault and he said i wouldn't want to learn the olympic list so i started coaching mike and james and then mike dropped out and james stayed and then james said i'm going to open a gym he said if you ever want to coach olympic lifting i'd love to have you do it so we're here and it's uh the facility is is very functional and i get to have it all to myself so that's pretty good it could be shall we say a little bit more atmospheric for weightlifting but it's okay it'll it'll suffice it needs a little eye of the tiger i don't i don't consciously do it but i think i end up uh convincing people that this is what they need to do and this is really important and again this is where the psychic ambiance is important if everybody that you're you coming to train with every day is telling you what you need to do and how great it is to lift and meets and how you have to take care of yourself and if you're looking for something like that and you've got some talent you're probably going to stay i think my my ultimate goal might be just to inform the public more about weightlifting and weightlifting methodologies and for those people that would like to get more involved i think there's a body of knowledge that has not been made available to them so right now a lot of my time is being spent trying to develop instructional materials for weightlifting coaches i realize it's a small market but i'd like to get it out there so that the next generation coming along can build on that if they choose to you know weightlifting is interesting in that it is an individual sport but as an individual you often have the opportunity to train as part of a team and i think that that team environment and that team atmosphere can really make the difference in a weightlifter's success you know having that that collective drive towards a common goal having that daily support and really accountability of a team i think can really help keep a lifter engaged with the sport more productively and more successfully over a longer period of time knowing that you're you're not alone in dedicating yourself to the sport i think really goes a long way in ensuring that a weightlifter is able to stick with the sport long enough to actually achieve the level of success that he or she is capable of it's not until now that we that greg and i have built our own team that i actually understand what it's like to be a part of a team when you're having a bad day you can live vicariously through your teammate and that's something that i am so thankful to have now at a later time in my life and it's really taught me a lot that you know you you don't always have to be the one making the amazing lifts and you don't always have to be the one that is is on all the time and when you're when you're training as an individual and you're alone when you miss or when you have a bad workout it can be incredibly devastating for a lot of athletes the mental game is probably the hardest thing to tackle i feel like i have been around or seen so many athletes who have so much potential and are so amazing but mentally they just are not there and and i was one of those athletes and i think that sometimes i still am and and it's very easy mentally to get discouraged in the sports sport and to beat yourself up and to think to yourself that you can't do it and you're gonna fail and you're gonna miss and i think that you have to train your mental game just as hard if not harder as you train every day in the gym you have to be positive if you keep thinking you're going to miss the snatch right before you go up to it you're going to miss it if you're afraid of a new pr cleaning jerk you're going to get crushed it's not necessarily the physical part so much as the people that you get the term that i like to use that i stole from a friend of mine is the psychic ambiance if you have the right people in a place and they're focused on doing the things that they need to do to become weight lifters so if they have that that warrior mentality then that's really what you need it's really not about the facility of the equipment it's about the atmosphere and it's about the spirit if you have that atmosphere and you have that attitude collectively with the team you know it's it's largely irrelevant what equipment you have or the facility you train in because you will find a way to make it work after college i went to go back and coach my brother's team my brother's football team we did cleans and stuff and squats but it wasn't it wasn't great it was more like the bigger faster stronger type of program and then i went to a clinic over christmas for football and i ended up going to a strength and conditioning portion with coach torelli from newport harbor high school and he was really really instrumental in like motivating me to go and get some extra help because i saw his kids that looked just like my kids that were lifting monster weights and playing really good football so he sent me to jim schmitz and jim did a really good job with me and my brother it was mostly for my brother but i i wanted to train as well just so i could learn how to do the lifts and after about six months we already had a weight room at school after six months i just kind of started coaching the kids and we started our a weightlifting team i spent four years at that high school we went to junior nationals in 2002 which was a great experience because it was all the 16 and under and 20 and under lifters there were 500 lifters i was like blown away and then we went again to the national championships later on that year in uh for the for the youth i think they were in st louis the next year i switched schools ended up at lincoln high school and uh we had a really good crew right at the beginning so it took a couple years to get going but by the time those kids were sophomores or juniors i think it was the summer of 2005 we went to our first school age again and the kids did really well i teach french pe and health and avid i coach football in the fall and track in the spring and then weightlifting all year round we have a after school program for weightlifting all our track kids and football kids lift i'm in the weight room the the biggest chunk of time are the the 10 12 weeks in the summer and the 10 and 12 weeks between football season and track season i think since i'm a teacher there it really helps and then we did most of our stuff in the summer outside so it was unused space we started underneath the bleachers they did a huge school remodel four years ago so we moved up to the parking lot which was great the parking lot is directly adjacent to our weight room that is in the rotc classroom so we have a classroom inside for the weightlifters and then outside is for everybody else and we're using space that nobody uses we're using a parking lot the pe department's been instrumental in getting equipment they bought us a storage bin you know the big industrial ones we have 10 squat racks in there 20 bars enough weights for 20 platforms and then they they bought some nice stuff for the inside weight room if we had the bigger room i wouldn't have to have anybody lift outside during the school year the one good thing about having kids left outside during the school year is it really puts a premium on the five platforms inside and those platforms are safe for the weightlifting team we chose hassle free because it was a cool it was a cool name and um we have uh some eccentric personality so we just you know our kids are a little different and uh they kind of rub people the wrong way sometimes we have a big summer camp kind of based on what coach torelli did with his freshman football players all on the blacktop starting with the 15 kilo bar and there's 200 kids every summer they come in in three waves uh the new kids come at like 2 30 and every day we do a dynamic warm-up we do uh progression into either the clean or the snatch and then we run so it's like a strength and conditioning camp from there you find out who your your good kids are going to be and who you know you obviously extend an invitation to anybody who wants to come and lift weights during the school year at first we had a lot of football players now we have mostly girls it's all the girls from the track team and things like that so the summer time and the fall are the big recruiting times because that's when the new students come to school and uh i get the siblings of the students that i have now to come in and work out in the summer and try to encourage them to come during the school year i would like to see somebody purely selfishly i'd like to see one of the kids make the olympic team because i have a feeling that that would represent how much you can do at a grassroots level at a regular school in the united states that's the last goal that i have personally and generally the goal is to get kids to learn how to use weight lifting to help their life and hopefully weightlifting will teach them some some discipline so that they can apply that same uh they can build up certain characteristics that will help them in life because they did weightlifting and they and weightlifting is hard i always tell the kids that if weightlifting was easy everybody would be doing it if you can get through a workout you can get through a year you can be on the weightlifting team and you know be on the track team it'll help you deal with things in life that you know are going to be difficult because these kids are not gonna these kids are your non-traditional kids they're first-generation kids or their kids that aren't coming from the greatest background and if we can get them into if we get them in the weightlifting team and get them to graduate from high school and get them to go to college then that's what it's all about even if they don't do weightlifting in the future they at least were exposed and maybe hey maybe they maybe they have a kid or something and they bring their and then they introduce them so it's this multiplying effect with the benefits of olympic weightlifting [Music] weightlifting competition is is really very simple in theory and like a lot of things in weightlifting it becomes far more complex in actual execution you have your lifters divided into eight different weight classes for men seven different weight classes for women and of course this allows athletes to compete against other athletes of similar potential physical ability just like you would see in wrestling or boxing each athlete has three attempts at the snatch and then has three attempts at the clean injury the best of each lift is added together to create the total and the highest total wins that weight class [Music] my first attempt on the platform is not my first attempt that i've taken all day so we start in the back warm-up room i'll start with the bar warm up until i actually get to a weight that i'm going to open up with but during that time there are other lifters that are going because the bar starts at the lightest weight and we'll work up from there so our coach always has to know where we fit in with that bar working up out on the platform so the coaches are constantly jockeying for your placement and how you're gonna you know beat the next person out by one kilo [Music] as a coach essentially have to determine how many attempts are going to occur before your athletes first lift and provided that no one changes lifts you still can't predict that with a hundred percent certainty because there's no way to 100 percent predict the size of the weight increase in athlete will take between his first or second or second and third lifts which can change the the time that your athlete is going to be at [Applause] [Music] coaches will often manipulate that system in order to gain advantage for their lifter or to produce a disadvantage for a competitor and so there's a great deal of strategy a great deal of you know spur of the moment decisions and there's a good deal of luck involved with it too i would say in order to provide the the best possible circumstances for your athlete's lifting as an athlete there's just a huge amount of pressure and there's i think a large amount of fear based on that unpredictability [Music] i hate competing but i love it at the same time i feel like everything leading up to a competition i hate i hate the two weeks before i love when the last warm-up is done and the first lift is over i like from then then on but everything leading up to it the week before is miserable for me i get so unbelievably nervous and i think that you have to kind of find a nice balance between being a little bit nervous and nice and calm i think that there are times when i've competed where i've been so calm that i feel like i'm in a dream like everything's kind of fuzzy dream like state i feel like i'm half asleep like whatever just put the weight on the bar and i'll lift it and it's like i'm watching myself lift and i don't feel completely present in the moment and i think a little bit of nerves can help keep you out of that dreamlike state one of the things about a weightlifting competition that is considerably different from a lot of other sports is the in frequency with which you tend to compete most higher level weight lifters are only going to do a handful of competitions in a year they may only do three or four total and what that means is that you have hours and days and weeks and months and years of preparation and of uh very difficult training that all lead up to these incredibly brief moments to prove not only to spectators or to other athletes but to yourself that all that work has been worthwhile and that's i think a huge amount of pressure for any athlete to cope with if you're having a bad day and your performance is suffering you don't have teammates who can pick up the slack for you once you're out there on the platform there's really nothing your coach can do for you and so you have six total lifts each of which will take you know two to five seconds maybe that collection of lifts that 20 seconds whatever it is combined is essentially the measure of the months and years of training leading up to that point and i think that throughout a competition and even in the the days and weeks leading up to a competition that is very much looming over every weight lifter's head that idea that you've invested so much time and so much energy made all these sacrifices and you have this incredibly brief window to succeed or to fail that alone weeds out a lot of athletes who simply don't have that mental fortitude to deal with that kind of pressure and more importantly to be able to accept failure or a less than perfect performance and be able to continue moving forward with as much motivation as much energy and enthusiasm as they had prior to that competition [Applause] [Music] you got this what oh pretty soon my brother's kids who i was in college he was starting these kids as freshmen 8th graders even 7th graders i mean they started doing just bigger and bigger weights and you know we'd go to the national meets and like we're getting destroyed by these kids who we thought were lifting incredible weights but we realized that just because it was heavyweights for us physically me and my brother it was like we found talent just everywhere he went from sacred heart to lincoln a couple years into it he had 300 kids out at summer camp on 100 platforms underneath these bleachers and he had 10 kids that were like clean and jerking 120 kilos which was awesome we had never had that before and then i moved here to sacramento and obviously wanted to catch up to him i thought it would never happen but it hap like in three months i had a kid that was you know with donovan ford came from here he's at the training center now kind of our first kid best kid i got a pee job on campus when i started p being you know we ran the mile we played football we played basketball you know badminton and i was coaching football and i kind of went to them and my argument was it wasn't really an argument it was just you know i'm out on the football field three hours a day anyway in the sun i don't want to be out on the sun for nine hours a day doing you know pe football and then you know i mean it's too much and i have i feel like i have a very unique set of skills and a unique you know talent to kind of teach this unique sport they saw the commitment level on my end i bought all the weights i bought all the shoes i bought all the squad racks all the bars i invested a lot of money and they saw that and they kind of gave me the green light they gave me one weightlifting class that one weightlifting class was a huge hit it was like the talk of campus it was cool we were lifting weights we were going heavy kids didn't have to run the mile so they were all fired up about that then there was like a waiting list and so after the first term i said you know what i can just do weight lifting classes all day long so in one pe class there's 50 to 60 kids at a time i have three pe classes a day when i say pe i mean weightlifting right all they're doing is snatch clean jerk so we have 60 kids at a time coming in during the day after school a bunch of those same kids come back along with a bunch of other kids who don't have me for pe for whatever reason they couldn't get my class so you know on our team right now we have maybe upwards of 200 lifters 250 lifters now how many of those kids are competitive on a regular basis and go to meets like all the time probably 60 or so i really enjoy watching the kids get better i take a lot of pride in the fact that you know like we're the number one team in the country i say that you know i mean that's what i tell people that's how i sell our program but there's not a whole lot of competition there's not a whole lot of other programs out there like us not to say that what we're doing is is not good it is but if there was more competition if there were more weightlifting teams if there was a weightlifting team at every high school in the country you know we wouldn't be as dominant as we are but i really enjoy the shock and awe of it where we show up to a whale up to me and we got 50 kids and not only do we have 50 kids we got like 25 of them are like snatching over 100 kilos and they're all in high school and they're beating the college kids like you know the sac state kids or other kids like adults and whatnot yeah i take a lot of pride in the fact that you know they're good and they're they they get to do things and you know in the short time i've been here i've had kids go to thailand to chile peru canada romania you know all over the world and i think it's pretty cool [Music] ultimate goal is to just to produce olympians you know on like a regular basis we kind of have a blueprint we kind of have a system our system is not the system that's everywhere else it's kind of the system we have because we're on a high school campus we have access to these kids um you know the system hopefully is get the kids in sixth and seventh grade they're over there on campus at the junior high get them started get them through high school the goal is by the time they graduate high school when they're seniors they have an opportunity to do something because there's a lot of kids who are seniors in high school who can do you know 110 and 140 120 and 150 and that's great but you got to get the kids by the time they're 18 before they go to college there has to be a real opportunity to go somewhere so they don't have to go to work so they don't have to go live the real world they they're good enough to either get some direct financial support from usa weightlifting or get a slotted in colorado springs or get a slot in northern michigan uh or or tie into our scholarship funds where they can you know train in and go to school at the same time and and get it consistent enough to where every year there's an olympian coming out of this weight room you know and like and it's continuous it's not like a a fling we're not like a blip on the radar you know just to sustain because i mean i'm going to be here for probably 50 years i'm going to be that guy who's teaching pe you know when he's old and to have had maybe 10 olympians through 10 quads i mean that would be pretty cool [Applause] [Music] it's not just about being strong being strong definitely helps it's not one of those things that you say well i don't really care about being strong i'll just be fast that's not how it works being strong is very important but more important than strength is more your mental attitude if you don't have the mental ability to know that you're going to go out there and make a weight then you won't if you don't have the confidence or the drive to to know that you can succeed and to know that you can be a champion then it doesn't matter how strong you are you're never going to be able to succeed on the platform i think you got to be mentally tough and a little bit crazy you have to be crazy to put something over your head drop it down and redo it over and over almost every day one who can get over a loss quickly and move on i think that's what it really takes uh besides one who can you know uh get over things quickly is how to block stuff out and remember you're on four meters by four meters okay you're on this platform alone and there's so many people there watching you can you still execute in the same way uh you've got three judges you know they're looking at you you got the camera sometimes you have a flash you hear the buzzer go off i mean your senses are heightened when you're on that platform can you do and execute what you did in the gym when you've got music playing and you're wearing shorts and a t-shirt can you execute the kind of person the sport demands is someone who can put up and accept failure and disappointment i think that you have to be very strong-minded and strong-willed no matter how strong your body is and how much you want to go into the gym and work hard every day you have to really be a person who can kind of get shut down every single day and still remember why you have a love affair with the platform and the bar because you may go a year without ever coming close to your pr and you have to keep working you still have to remember why you're doing it and you have to love what you're doing because the motivation is you know can be hard to come by some days all the individual sports where the margin of victory is so slim that the the demand and the pressure is so high it's brutal you know weight lifting is very hard to get better at especially when the weights get heavier and heavier so it really it takes someone who is totally self-motivated totally dedicated and committed to not only the workouts but understands the lifestyle that has to go with it and it just it takes a certain kind of kid who really wants to be good and you know it takes the type of kid who is gonna really claw and fight for that one kilo to make it because it's weight lifting is not a formula it's not sets times reps equals result you know it's like it's fighting for every kilo on that bar you know for the long run all those kilos add up you have a very high level of discipline over a long period of time that's required weight lifting is the kind of sport where you're investing months and years of daily training sometimes twice daily training you're making a lot of sacrifices in terms of social life work family all these things that you really have to set aside to a large degree in order to be completely successful with the sport and so it really demands a kind of person who has that fine focus and that ability to put all of his or her effort into this single pursuit [Applause] if you don't love weightlifting you're not in weightlifting that's it i think at least some of the appeal to me is that it is an obscure sport that becomes part of the challenge it's the kind of sport that you only survive in if the work itself is personally gratified because no one else is watching weightlifting is a great challenge to make me see what i'm capable of doing and i enjoy the aspect of of knowing that my fate is in my hands but it also is a disadvantage in that sense because if i do poorly i have nobody to blame but myself so as much as i really enjoyed the team environment growing up when i was younger there's definitely something to that individual component where you know that when you succeed it was because of you but you also know that when you fail it's completely your fault as well i love weightlifting because it's a very competitive sport it's a it's a sport that you are responsible for yourself your performance on the platform speaks of everything it's you know how i've been training what's my mental outlook uh am i prepared uh am i nervous but it just it defines you i love the feeling of being strong i feel like when i'm my body is strong that mentally i'm stronger and i love chasing the numbers you always want more and more and more and i love perfecting my technique but i think that what i love the most about weightlifting is that it keeps me connected to the people that i love on its face weightlifting is such a simple sport you lift a barbell from the floor to over your head but i think the the more involved the longer you're involved the more you realize how deep that rabbit hole really goes and uh you know i think a lot of people don't ever come back out it's a wild love affair that has given me many happy things and has torn me down in many ways and i think that more than what you can accomplish with the barbell weight lifting to me is a family and it's hope when you have none and i think that [Music] i was a lost little girl and i didn't have any direction and one day i walked up a hill and met mike bergner and that family and it's like the sky opened up for me weightlifting to me has always been love even when i wasn't succeeding or easy even when i was self-sabotaging or taking time off it always in some way connected me to what i love most in this world [Music] so i was playing football little league right pop warner and my brother tells me who was a high school football player you know you need to start lifting weights if you're going to do anything all right so i started lifting weights the very first day at the local high school gym i walk in and i don't know what i'm doing i'm just following all of the bigger guys i'm doing like a bench in walks a coach sees me knows i'm out of place starts to ask me questions what are you doing here i tell them i'm in the eighth grade i just want to get stronger for football blah blah blah and he's looking at me how old am i and he's looking at me he says put your hands on top of your head and do a squat for me right i had a little gymnastics in my background so flat-footed beautiful i mean i think i think his eyes lit up he says okay grab this bar and um showed me the clean then he showed me the snatch it was my very first day in the weight room i don't think i'd ever been in one at 12 13 years old and uh i pretty much quit every sport right after that that was it coach mack was his uh was his nickname bill mcdaniel he coached quite a few big names back in my day jeff macy tim mcrae some of those names they were all florida guys he was didn't have a huge program like i do he was one of those one-on-ones right he had me maybe another two kids and himself and so i think i got a lot of work done because of it and he took me really far i slowly started moving up if you will started getting a little bit better and stronger during my junior years and i started making squad camps when i turned 16 usa weightlifting and i think back then it was still uswf they said we got a new pilot program all right we're going to take three guys and women weren't in the olympics for weightlifting yet right so we got three guys we have three spots we're gonna take them in high school at the olympic training center in colorado springs i go to an american open fresno california did well i go to junior nationals won a medal did well there go to seniors man i'm on a roll everything it was just a perfect setup and they selected me for the program now i'm 17 years old and i start as a resident at the olympic training center going to high school in the morning coming back midday training a few hours later training with the rest of the residents i did that my whole senior year and that's really i think where i just catapulted the olympic center did so much for me i made my first junior warriors my senior year now i'm turning 18. i made three junior worlds in a row did some other international meets a minor i did a senior international meet at the time it's called nakachi's similar to pan ams now and i i was a u.s team member that whole time um did great had a wonderful experience wouldn't take it back for the world and retired uh when i became a senior so now i'm 21 and i hung it up i said i couldn't do it i was just i was burnt i woke up one morning and i said i just i'm over trained i'm beat up looking back i wish i would have had that one person to tell me you're just tired you know take a month take two months it happens at that level and i consider myself at the elite level but no one told me back then that there was a temporary feel that i could get over it and i decided to retire so my career was from 13 years old i did all the school age all the junior stuff and i retired at 21. [Music] so come home what are you going to do i finished school and at the process i said well i need to i need to find a job i landed a loss prevention job security job while i would pop in and see my coach coach mack who was here all right he was pissed off at the world that i retired he thought i'd retire too soon i guess i did but he had me come in from time to time and check in so story goes i'm in this gym which is now 11 years ago i walk in i'm saying hi to my coach and i can't help watching all these other kids in here training and some corrections i could make and i just helped myself i just felt like i could hey buddy if you keep your elbows up here watch your hand grip there and it seemed to work i ended up building rapport with a few of the kids and they started calling me hey can you coach me i'm like man i'm 22 years old you know now i 23 i don't know if i'm ready to start coaching and i got suckered into it and when in some sorts and so i began coaching here i am man and i became a police officer and i do both and so i began to coach here and there and there is a pe teacher here at the time who says hey you know you should start your own program it just so happened that at this time the city was starting this new wave this this push this trend where they were starting all kinds of programs flag football tennis wrestling and what have you and they never thought about weightlifting i just happened to be there my wheels started clicking i said wow that'd be great it was my way of being involved i always loved the sport never fell out of love with the sport wanted to stay involved i decided to retire coaching sounded like the best way to go so i approached the city i said hey rumor has it you guys are starting this pro these programs many of them what do you think about weightlifting power lifting no no olympic weightlifter oh bodybuilding no weightlifting and i put together a proposal they loved it they loved it they did one you know six-week deal like a class to see how it went the feedback was wonderful and so i've been here ever since i will from time to time go to different athletic events and see certain movements of kids and might say to myself wow he might be okay then i might have like a isolated one-on-one conversation but i don't actively recruit my athletes all come from the middle schools and high schools i'm at a high school that's the easiest one i'd like to coach one olympic team at least before i croak i would like to one day to be named as the head olympic weight olympic team weightlifting coach but in order to get there what's the main thing you need is to put an athlete on a team they kind of go along with each other you can't have one without the other and i would first certainly love to put in place not just one couple you know each gender male and female put them on an olympic team that's what i'm doing that's my whole goal that's my whole goal if i do that i can hang it up i can die after that [Applause] i believe that because of our association with teaching others how to do the snatching the cleaning jerk through crossfit that usa weightlifting's membership has gone from uh you know three or four thousand to six or seven thousand i think it will help in the fact there will be more money in weightlifting and there will be more exposure are any crossfit athletes going to be world champions no because crossfit athletes are like 25 years old crossfit kids maybe so i think it'll help because the funnel will get bigger and because the money since the funnel's bigger the money will be a little bit better there's no question that crossfit has helped sport and whether or not you like crossfit is entirely irrelevant what crossfit has done is create a community of people that's very large at this point and that is growing very rapidly and is comprised of people who are not just interested in fitness but are interested in weightlifting at least as it pertains to the crossfit program and so the the the help is not necessarily direct in the sense that crossfit is not exactly producing athletes who will become world-class weightlifters for us but the fact remains that it is providing more exposure to more people of the snatch and the clean injury and my hope is that this generation that is currently in childhood who is growing up seeing mom and dad older brother older sister snatching and cleaning drinking in the gym is not going to find the sport of weightlifting so incredibly odd and unlikely you know as a choice all of us who really love and care for the support of weightlifting have to do whatever we can to keep making it possible make making it fair for everybody making it attractive to to attract a high-level athlete because we're going to catch 22 until you before producing some world champions you don't get the money but you can't produce the champions you don't have the money to get that young kid out of high school and make sure he gets into the proper training environment and then gets to his competitions and so forth ultimately the the state of usa weightlifting is the responsibility of every athlete and every coach in the organization and you know it's it's our responsibility to promote the sport to support our athletes and coaches uh in whatever manner is available to us to help the organization lead from the top down i think the clubs ultimately currently as we speak kind of run the show and and i mean that not administratively of course but they are funding their own kids if it's not out of pocket they are coaching their own kids they're recruiting themselves they're holding their own meets they are producing u.s athletes i think the most important thing for a usa weightlifting member is to understand every day that they're an ambassador for the sport if they impact one person in a year and that person becomes interested in our sport or becomes a member we could double membership in 12 months i want to see athletes and coaches do what it takes to save the sport because it's what they love and it's what they care about you know i don't i don't want help from the outside i don't i don't want some benefactor to come in and save us and i think that unless the change comes from the people who are in this community and who are 100 percent dedicated to the sport it's not going to be effective or lasting anyway i think everybody who does the olympic list in this country is they fit into the puzzle somewhere every coach every athlete and every administrator everybody who's involved with the sport at all bears a responsibility if you've decided to be a weightlifting coach then your job is to go out and round up as many weight lifters as you can regardless of their talent level and if you've decided to be an administrator an lwc president or a regional director or something like that your job is to run as many high-quality weightlifting meets as you can and uh try to find ways to get those meats into the public eye where people can actually see them if you're an athlete it's it's uh it's pretty simple i mean your job is just to try and train as hard as you can and you know be as enthusiastic as you can about your team and the people you work with but this sport's a small one in this country we're all in it together i decided that i was going to move down to southern california to train with mike bergman and i you know that was that was the decision that really initiated all of this you know going down and you know training with mike bergner training with the team there was really the the experience that shaped me as a lifter and as a future coach so after being down there a couple years my now wife amy and i moved up here to the bay area in order to open our own gym and we came up one weekend in november of 2008 looking for both a place to live and a facility for the gym i think we found both on the same day as a matter of fact and by the next month we were moved in and uh by the first of january we had the doors open to the gym we invested really every penny we had and then some more that we didn't have into what we felt was essentially the best weightlifting equipment that we could afford and then just kind of crossed our fingers that we'd be able to actually make enough money to pay the rent fortunately you know i had written a book i believe i had a dvd out at that time i had been publishing the performance menu journal and it was all those things that really kept the gym afloat for the first couple years the gym itself was not supporting itself we were not making enough money and you know we certainly weren't expecting competitive weightlifters to pay our bills and so we were in an unusually good position because we had these other sources of income that allowed us to keep such a nice facility and gave us the space and the ability to kind of generate that momentum that we needed for the weightlifting team you know there's no doubt that we have one of the nicest you know largest and best equipped weightlifting gyms in the country but you know there isn't a day that goes by that i don't i don't miss training in bergner's garage and i i have very much a sense of nostalgia for that period of time because it was so formative of me uh as a lifter and as a coach and because it was such a great atmosphere and i very much try to kind of create and nurture that same sort of atmosphere in that same sort of environment here i've never actually recruited lifters and it's not that i never wanted or needed more lifters than we had at any given time it's simply that i didn't have the time and energy to do it after having done all the things that needed to get done to keep you know the business afloat i mean i remember very clearly you know having only two lifters in here on some days you know early on when we first opened the gym fortunately in you know the almost five years that we've been here we've managed to generate a good deal of momentum and we now have a pretty large team but one that i'm i'm very proud of and i'm very happy to be a part of you know we've definitely had a good number of people come and go over the years some of them on their own some of them because we simply didn't want them here anymore you know the the atmosphere of the gym is so important and i think that it has such a huge effect on the athlete's ability to train well and to be successful competitively and so we definitely have done some house cleaning over the past couple years and what that's resulted in is a very close-knit team a team that gets along extremely well and is very supportive of each other and i think that we're somewhat unique in that respect i think that we have a level of camaraderie that is unusual [Applause] [Music] i think a lot of people are are under the impression that we're getting rich with this stuff that i'm a professional weightlifting coach but the fact is we're a really small operation and it's a lot of work just to keep our doors open even to this day even after five years of being in this location and you know almost nine years of being in business with the performance menu journal and those sorts of things i mean i i write books i make dvds we publish the journal create website content for multiple websites i write articles for other publications i do all these things to be able to have a place to coach a weightlifting team coaching weightlifting doesn't make me any money it costs me money that is really to me that's the payoff for all the work that i do all that work is is really done to allow me to be a coach plus [Applause] you know i'm not the best weightlifting coach out there and not even close i think really my contribution has been to make the sport a little more accessible to more people and helping to drive its growth through that through you know publishing educational materials and the other things that i do you know of course the the real goal is to continue to coach and produce better and better lifters but you know i think i'm at least on that road i want this place and my coaching and my influence to really be a part of mike bergner's legacy yeah i'm i'm just an infant as a weightlifting coach you know it's it's guys like mike bergner john thrush bob takano jim schmitz these guys who have dedicated decades of their lives to the sport who i look up to and i consider mentors you know these are guys who existed in an era before shameless self-promotion on the internet and who just cared about coaching great athletes and did exactly that you know that's the standard i want to live up to [Applause] [Music] [Applause] a lot needs to change with weightlifting people need to know what weightlifting is when i say i'm a weightlifter they shouldn't ask me you know immediately how much do i bench press or do i pull a tractor it should be my the first question should be oh how much do you clean a jerk i just wish that it was in people's vocabulary that olympic lifting is a sport weight lifting is a word is accepted as the name of the sport in something like 170 nations that are members of the iwf and the official working language of the iwf is english so in all the countries outside of the united states if you say weight lifting it means competition the snatch and cleaning jerk in this country if you say weight lifting it can mean a myriad of things so somebody needs to define that term so that people understand what it is first of all and and i think once it's defined and it's it's seen as a as a legitimate sport and people get some idea as to what sort of training is involved for it i think then you've got a chance for it to have some viability i believe if we can get more sponsorship more funding it would be channeled in the right areas everything is attached to that to compete internationally we have to first and foremost develop an attitude that we can develop an attitude that we're not in any way shape or form incapable of doing it you know i i have come to know that the commitment and the dedication that other international athletes have in this sport and i think that we have to be realistic that if we want to compete at that level we have to match their intensity we have to match their training we have to match their dedication we have to match their commitment and if we don't do those things which we control then we we have to be careful how much blame we put on other areas what i want to see from our athletes is match your your actual physical commitment to what your stated goals are if your stated goals are to win an olympic medal look at the commitments made by people that win an olympic medal and make those commitments [Music] [Music] [Music] i think you should always be hopeful about it otherwise you should get out if we treat weightlifting like a substandard sport that's what we're giving people that's what it is we can't treat it as such it's like it's a beautiful sport it's an awesome sport and it should be it should be looked at to a higher standard as long as we can step outside the box and be proactive in the resurgence of the sport and i think you know sitting back and pointing fingers and being political our sport would be a dying sport if we took that route but i don't think that's the route we're going to take best athletes in the world are in this country and we prove it year in year out in every sport we just got to get those athletes in the weight room and they will and they're getting in the weight room and it just takes time and it's growing and it's moving in the right direction i'm positive about it a because i'm in love with the sport and love makes you do stupid things right there's too much talent there are too many coaches and and luckily a lot of young up-and-coming coaches i don't see limitations i i see opportunities to get better in my opinion a limitation is largely an excuse you know if you want to find a reason not to accomplish something there's plenty of limitations to identify you know the sport is about athletes and it's about coaches and real athletes are going to continue to compete and push themselves whether or not anybody is watching you either have it in you to go as far as you can and be the best you can at whatever you're doing or you're just uh you know a dabbler you're just a dilettante you're just you might as well be doing curls or whatever you want to do but get out of weight lucy [Music] [Music] i don't even know yeah there's nothing funny about me loving weightlifting but i need to start over all right i look dumb every day that was really confusing [Applause] maybe i should start this question [Laughter] you know that's i forgot the question should you be squatting out low i should i don't know about you [Music] i just lost my train of thought the second thing they ask me is whether or not i he threw me off okay [Music] [Music]

Channel: Catalyst Athletics

Views: 339,917

Keywords: weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting, snatch, clean, jerk, catalyst athletics, greg Everett, crossfit, american weightlifting film, american weightlifting, american weightlifting documentary, american weightlifting movie, weightlifting movie, weightlifting documentary, weightlifting film, olympic weightlifting documentary, olympic weightlifting film, olympic weightlifting movie, documentary greg everett, movie greg everett, movie catalyst athletics, documentary catalyst athletics

Id: i6UzIWxKrW0

Length: 118min 53sec (7133 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022