A Beautifully Executed Jerk by Rhi Reynolds
Seeing a Future National Champion for the First Time
The first time I saw Rhi Reynolds lift, it was in the fall of 2014. She was lifting at an “Open” meet at Lost Battalion Hall (LBH), a legendary Weightlifting training center in NYC at the time. I was announcing the session in which Rhi was competing (and coaching during other sessions).
I was surprised by the tremendous pulling power Rhi demonstrated. While her technique had a number of flaws, her overall performance was impressive for someone in a local meet, who seemed to be relatively new to the sport.
During a two-minute clock between lifts in that competition, I turned to my wife Joanne, who was scorekeeping for the same session, and said “What potential that woman has. If she improved her technique, she could win next year’s Nationals” (which was less than a year away at the time).
Rhi was being coached by someone else at that point, so I never approached her with the idea of the importance of improving her technique (for all I knew she might well have already been moving in the right direction – with whatever skill she currently possessed being better than was the case is the past). I did congratulate her and tell her that I thought she had great potential.
Rhi and I Meet Again in a Coaching Environment
In January 2015, Rhi lifted in the FDU open in NJ, which was organized by my brother-in-law Nick Curry. One of my former lifters and now one of the leaders of coaching education for USA Weightlifting, JP Nicoletta, noticed that Rhi had no one helping her during her warm-ups. He offered to give her a hand and she gladly accepted.
After the competition, JP asked Rhi where she trained, and she said she trained alone at a gym in Nassau County, NY, where she lived at the time. Upon hearing Rhi was training alone, at a facility that was only a few miles from LBH, JP invited her to come to train at LBH whenever she wished. At LBH, at least she could train with other lifters. She showed up at LBH for the first time a couple of days later and said she was actually planning to relocate to improve her training conditions.
I said that sounded like the right approach long term, but told her that, until she moved, she was welcome to train with us, so she could continue to improve while she prepared for her move. After several weeks of training with us, and experiencing some improvements in her performance already, Rhi decided not to move after all, but rather to keep training with us in preparation for the USAW Nationals that was only a few months away it this point.
Preparation For the Nationals Begins
With an eye toward doing everything we could to improve her short run performance, we also started to lay the groundwork for performance over the longer term as well. At that time, Rhi could clean more than she could jerk, so we worked hard on improving her jerk, to bring it more in line with her clean.
Her jerk drive was fine (she easily drove the bar high enough to jerk it), but she needed to improve (lower) the depth of her split, and improve her timing in getting into the split (so she had time to get into a deeper split). She also needed to get lower in the snatch, without compromising the tremendous pull she had already developed. She improved significantly in these areas and by the Nationals she was ready to have her best performance ever.
While Rhi had competed at the Nationals the year before, she’d never been in an A session, let alone with a chance to win a medal. It happened that her class was packed with talent (which included an Olympian and former national champion). But I told Rhi she had the advantage of surprise, since no one knew what she could do and wouldn’t be seeing her as a contender. I suggested that she concentrate on her own performance and let her support team take care of strategy and timing her warmups. I also suggested that she pay no attention to anyone else (many lifters who do this get distracted during their warmups and focus on what others look like).
Looking at what the competition is doing can be a bad practice, whether the competitors look good or bad. If they look good it can be intimidating, and if they look bad it can make one overconfident. Neither of these attitudes is conducive to a good performance. And paying attention to others is obviously distracting you from what you have to do.
Great Success!
Rhi did exactly as I suggested. I didn’t see her once “checking out the competition”. The battle was close and many had a chance to win. But by focusing on her own lifting Rhi amassed a total of 173 kg. (19 kg. more than she’d done the prior year – and she’d gone down a weight class!). On top of that, when the dust had cleared, her total was enough to make her the National Champion and named to the 2015 World Championship Team!
Telling her that she won was one of the most fun things I’d done in a long time. I came backstage after watching the last attempt by a competitor who had a chance to beat her (which was a miss) and simply said “Congratulations Champ”.
I’ll never forget the look on her face – one of the most joyful countenances I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. Those are the kind of days that make coaching worthwhile. Partly from the joy of winning, but more from the joy I saw in Rhi’s face, and the pride she had in her extraordinary accomplishment.
She’d competed in quite a few sports at a high level – from track and field, to boxing, but winning a National Championship in a sport she had come to love more than any other was an incredible experience for her. Helping her do it was in incredible experience for me. Weightlifting can be so much fun!