Weightlifter Jared Fleming is making a move to CrossFit.
For a time in 2015, the -94kg athlete held the American record in the snatch, which he set at that year’s USAW National Championships with a lift of 170 kilograms (374.8 pounds). Watch the lift below, then watch a very American celebration after it’s completed.
Fleming hoped to compete at the Olympic Games in 2012 and 2016, and even lived at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado for six months in 2011, but he never wound up representing America. It looked like there was a chance he would go to Rio, but in 2015 he tore his ACL at the Weightlifting World Championships in Houston.
The now 25-year-old took to Instagram yesterday to say that CrossFit® training helped him overcome the depression he was suffering after missing out on Rio, and he announced,
A chapter in life for me has ended and new one is starting. I’ve decided that for my immediate future I will be training with intent on making the 2018 Crossfit Regionals.
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I’d love for all of you to follow me on my journey as I grind my way back to the top and show perseverance conquers all adversity.
The full post can be seen in the post below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXD_Ennj1Zg/
It’s not unheard of for weightlifters to switch to CrossFit — after all, the winner of the 2016 Reebok CrossFit Games, Mat Fraser, started out as a weightlifter. Check him out snatching 132kg (291 pounds) as an -85kg athlete at the 2012 USA Weightlifting National Championships.
The snatch and the clean & jerk are probably the most technically challenging exercises in CrossFit, and knowing how the right way to execute them before getting started in the sport can certainly be an advantage. It’s also handy that proficiency in these lifts requires (or produces) multiple modalities of fitness, like explosive power, anaerobic endurance, raw strength, fine motor skills, mobility, and a solid vertical jump.
But if we’ve learned anything from the details of the 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games events, it’s that this is a sport that requires competence in everything from swimming to dumbbells to biking to obstacle course racing to sandbag exercises. Fleming has a lot of work ahead of him, but he’s got an important prerequisite: passion for the sport.
Featured image via @muscledriverusa on Instagram.
