An Olympic-Lifting Perspective - John Coffee (2001)

From the May-June, 2001 Issue (#72) of Hardgainer magazine.

Courtesy of Stuart McRobert.

https://www.hardgainer.com/ 

https://www.hardgainer.com/shop/hardgainer-print-magazine-issues/

I expect many readers don't have the almost forty years of experience Olympic weightlifting I have, and may be taken in by the arguments of some of the detractors of Olympic lifting. 

I first became interested in physical culture and weightlifting in 1956, when I was 10 years old. This was the year that Paul Anderson won the Olympic superheavyweight gold medal at the Melbourne Olympics. Since he was from the same state I lived in, Georgia, it was hard for even a 10-year old boy not to know of Paul Anderson.

I believe it was 1957 when I sent off for a George F. Jowett course. In 1958, like many of the other boys in my neighborhood, I acquired a 100-pound barbell set and started trying to build some muscle on my 12-year-old body. 

The big lifts for us in those days were the standing press, and one- and two-hands clean & jerk, always working to our limit single. Maybe we were just lucky, but I can't remember any of us even having so much as a sprained wrist from the effects of this youthful folly. 

As far as I knew, there were no squat racks or bench press benches in the whole town at that time. 

In 1959 I bought a copy of Bob Hoffman's "Better Athletes Through Weight Training," and of course this book spoke about the benefits of Olympic-lift training for athletes in all sports, particularly sports involving great strength and power, like football, which was the main sport I participated in while in high school. 

I'm far from being genetically gifted, and at 5-7 and 155 pounds at the time, it was only through weight training, including lots of presses and two hands clean & jerks, that I was able to enjoy a measure of success in football and even compete with boys taller and heavier than I was. 

By 1963 we also had squat racks.

In 1965, a friend of mine, David Jones, and I began lifting on a team from Savannah, Georgia -- Savannah Barbell Club run out of Howard Cohen's Gym. 

      

than Above and below:

Howard Cohen

About once a month David and I would make the three-hour drive from our hometown of Eastman, to Savannah, to train with the gang at Howard's Gym. And we made the circuit of south-eastern weightlifting meets. 

David Jones, much more gifted than I, eventually was able to win first place in the Senior Nationals a couple of times, and also won silver medals at the Pan American Games in 1979. Howard Cohen and his son Michael, as well as David Jones and many of the characters from that era, are still involved with the sport of Olympic lifting as meet promoters, coaches, etc., so it's been pretty much a lifetime pursuit for all of us. 

In the summer of 1971, while on a trip to Florida with my girlfriend at that time, I went by Deland and spent just about a whole day with Arthur Jones, etc. I remember seeing some of the first Nautilus machines being welded together behind Arthur's modest home in what appeared to be converted chicken houses. Later in the afternoon I was put through my paces by Mr. Jones himself. 

I remember doing the old manual hip-and-back machine to failure, then barbell squats with 185 pounds to failure, and last, leg curls. Certainly, the heavy low-rep Olympic-lift training I was doing at the time didn't prepare me for the kind of work I did that afternoon, and I believe my quads, glutes and hamstrings were deeply sore for almost a week after that experience. 

I even talked with Arthur about moving down to Deland and training on the Nautilus machines to improve my Olympic lifting. Arthur was all for the idea of my being kind of a guinea pig in this experiment, but I never did get around to doing this, and from what I know now I expect it was just as well that I never did try this experiment. 

Nowadays, at over 50 years of age, much of training is done on various Nautilus, Hammer, Cybex and Flex machines, but in my youth, practically everything I did, for many years, was only with an Olympic barbell. 

It was about this time, late sixties and early seventies, that I started training some athletes, particularly football players. Power cleans, high pulls, squats and pressing movements were the mainstay of the training. 

In 1980 I opened Coffee's Gym in Marietta, Georgia, a northern suburb of Atlanta, and started recruiting and training Olympic lifters. We've had pretty good success at this endeavor. 

During the last forty years I've no doubt taught Olympic movements to hundreds of men and women -- many people who wanted to learn Olympic lifting so that they could compete, and many who wanted to learn Olympic lifting movements in order to become quicker and more explosive in other sports, as well as a few who just wanted to do the movements simply because they look like a fun challenge, and a change of pace from the usual workouts. 

Olympic lifting as I have taught it, has always been a safe and relatively risk-free activity. You can imagine how I resent the comments of detractors who very likely have only a very limited experience with Olympic lifting type movement and who would probably be incompetent to try to teach anyone how to perform these exercises, yet set themselves up as the voice of prudence and wisdom, and warn of the dangers of performing these movements. 

It may well be true that it would be dangerous for the detractors to teach power cleans (for example), to a rank beginner. It does not follow, however, that Olympic-lift movements taught by John Coffee, Ben Green, David Jones or Mike Cohen would be dangerous also. 

As you know, the Olympics in 1996 were held here in the Atlanta area, and since my gym was the only commercial gym in the area with lifting platforms and bumper plates, I let it be known that Olympic athletes in all sports were welcome to use my facility free of charge for 6-8 months before the games. I must have had dozens of athletes who were living and training in the Metro Atlanta area visit my gym for workouts. 

Mainly I had track and field athletes. 

These athletes, many of whom went on to win medals, trained almost exclusively in my small Olympic-lifting facility at the back of my gym, doing mainly power snatches, power cleans, quarter and half squats, lunges, stepups, straight-legged deadlifts, etc. 

Now, in my gym at the time were also extensive Nautilus, Hammer, Cybex, Flex, etc., machines but these athletes, jumpers, sprinters, hurdlers, throwers -- people mainly interested in developing great power-to-weight-ratio strength -- didn't seem to be interested in these fancy machines. They were welcome to use the machines, but they were interested in doing the things that worked for them.

I do realize that people were doing mainly the exercises they had done back home on the equipment they had back there, but I also have the feeling they were doing the exercises which work for them. Why would high jumpers do hack squats and leg extensions when they can do quarter squats and step-ups, movements more specific to the way they apply power.

Plyometrics, when done systematically and safely, seem to work also to improve quickness and explosiveness to a considerable degree, using various forms of explosive overload training. 

If proper technique and protocol are adhered to, it's possible to train explosively and still be safe. If a man's not robust and tough enough to do power cleans, high pulls, standing broad jumps, etc., how can he be robust enough to play football, rugby, basketball, etc.? 

At over 50 I no longer train explosively. Maybe I'll do some one-hand snatches or rep dumbbell power cleans and presses from time to time, just to break the monotony; but mainly, I do just standard bodybuilding stuff with free-weights, cables, machines, etc. I'm mainly interested in feeling good and staying alive a while longer.

The point I'm trying to make is that THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO TRAIN. 

I even do super-slow reps on Hammer machines sometimes, and enjoy training this way from time to time, but I'd get bored training this way all the time. 

THERE ARE MANY METHODS TO USE WHEN RESISTANCE TRAINING. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a "properly performed set" or a "properly performed rep." I'd hate to think that I must take every set to the point of momentary failure, but I do sometimes go to failure when I feel like doing it; and I certainly feel that athletes who want to develop their maximum in strength and development must train very hard and heavy at times. 

Training high-level strength athletes is tricky. It's part science, part art, and I don't think that anyone has cornered the market on how to train to get big and strong. 

There are many approaches that will work and have worked, and I get VERY SUSPICIOUS of anyone who says you MUST train his specific way if you want to get big and strong. 

Arthur Jones knew that in order to sell his Nautilus machines he had to represent them as being better than free weights -- very good salesmanship, not very honest perhaps. By now there are people who really believe the Nautilus mythology to be true, but these are individuals who have a very narrow perspective on the muscle-building and strength-building field. 

Casey Viator, one of Arthur Jones' original guinea pigs for Nautilus, has been around my gym for the last couple of years; in fact, he worked for me for a while. He tells me that when he was in Florida with Jones, in the early seventies, and bring touted as the example of what Nautilus methods could do, he always had barbells and dumbbells back at his apartment, and did some extra training that Arthur Jones didn't know about. 

 

Also, if you've ever seen a picture of a 17-year old Casey on the cover of IronMan magazine, you'll know that Casey already had most of this size and muscles before he'd ever heard of Nautilus and Arthur Jones . . . 

Note: Here's more from Mr. Viator on Arthur Jones etc.: 

https://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2012/07/1984-casey-viator-seminar-jack-kirwan.html

Enjoy Your Lifting!