Sure. I think one of the reps reached out to my gym owner, C.J. Murphy, back in 2015, 2016. We had their middle bar, which is their Force bar now, which back then was level three. You can’t put the most weight on it, but you can still put about up to 300 pounds pretty comfortably and be able to press that.
I saw that in the gym. I started messing around. I liked it. Then, gradually, over time…It took me…I was using the bar for about three years before they brought me on as an ambassador. What I realized was that, of course, it makes the…Especially in the application of pressing and so far, pressing has been my favorite application for it.
It reinforces form, because if you have too much of a knee bend or you’re not doing a proper…If you’re not pushing your head through in the lift. Or if you’re not in a good solid stance when you catch the bar, for instance, it’s going to humble you. If your form is not precise, you’re going to fail a lift.
That’s one thing that I realized right off the bat. The second piece was I was able to get to a certain speed that I never was able to do with a regular bar. Of course, a certain part of the movement are harder. I would say it makes the sticking points much more difficult. Also at the bottom, you have to brace and really force that bar up.
Especially in Olympic lifting, not only do you have a great bend, but you also are trying to get the bar off your chest or body pop it up. It forces the mechanics. The stability comes in there, in terms of pounding that when it comes to…It doesn’t really flop up and down, but when it gets to a certain weight also moves you back and forth. There’s a degree of difficulty in that sense.
Within the first few years, I realized that. As I kept progressing, it turned into my finer tool. Let’s just say, for instance, you have a certain technique and you’re sandpapering it down. You use the hard sandpaper first and then you use the finer piece.
Generally, in my training, I would build the power using off the rack or off the blocks. Then maybe the last two weeks or the last one week, before I want to hit a large lift, I’ll use a tsunami bar. That brings out the speed after I build the power and reinforces that form. I’ll be ready to go to the competition.
Coming into this last Clash on the Coast training, I used the last two weeks to refine my form, refine my speed, and I was ready to go.