There’s always something.

The bright lights.  The Top 20 pop.  Someone wanting to talk to you about the something about the time you did the thing.

Ignore them.  Not nasty.  Not with distain.  Because now is the time, the moment when you concentrate on the task ahead, on the never-ending belief that what’s about to go down will go down, that you can’t be beaten.

Every ounce of psychic energy you’re about to bring to bear; it’s easy to disrupt, easy to kill.  You have to protect it, feet on the ground, head down, focusing on the simple mental images of success.

Successful lifting depends on four elements: area of base, center of gravity, combined center of gravity, and torque. If the aspiring coach understands the relationship between these elements and how they inform technique, the quick identification of faults and their respective remedies becomes automatic.

Area of base is a simple concept. It is the field delineated by the outside of the athlete’s feet and the space between them, length and breadth. It changes in size based on foot position, but is always rectangular.

Center of gravity is the point within any body around which its mass is evenly distributed. For our purposes, we can think of it as the point on which gravity acts. While coaching, we must worry about three separate centers of gravity: that of the athlete, that of the object lifted, and that created when they are joined together (the combined center of gravity).