An Interview with Coach Rob, Part 1

by Johnny Nguyen

No other textbook is more curious than Arthur Dreshler’s The Weightlifting Encyclopedia, which dedicates all of its 550 pages to only two sporting lifts – the snatch and the clean and jerk. How is it that an entire book can be filled with information about just two exercises?

The snatch and the clean and jerk are two of the most complex whole-body tasks a person can undertake in sports and athletics. Demanding a series of neuromuscular relays, interplay and reflexes, these lifts offer nothing natural in motor skill acquisition, and is certainly nothing like learning to walk, run or open a book. It can take years of training to reach only near perfection in each of the lifts, and the struggle may still lie in lifting only a few kilograms more than the year before. The snatch and the clean and jerk are as fantastic as they are frustrating, and their complexity in biomechanics and the detail of their training program can easily take up a volume double that of a 550-page book.

And, how is it that one man can tirelessly dedicate so much of his life to only two lifts? I am talking about Coach Rob Earwicker. He recently was one of the main organizers for the 44th annual Golden West Open, the oldest yearly weightlifting competition in the country. It is written on a popular Internet weightlifting forum that this year’s was one of the best Golden West Open ever. But on the day of this competition, Coach Rob was so knee-deep in the mechanics of the meet that he didn’t have the time to realize he was helping to run the best show in town.

And that was OK. As far as he was concerned, what mattered most on that day was the performance of his weightlifting team, and so he spent the entire day coaching his lifters through the complex task of timing warm-up sets and then through the contested lifts themselves. Coaching at a weightlifting meet is both a science and an art, requiring experience and a certain mental sharpness to time a lifter’s attempts within the complicated order of lifting among other contestants. The pace of the competition is controlled by a clock, so miss-timing the warm-up means that the lifter must do it twice and become fatigued or go out to lift while still cold – each case a likely devastation, if not to the lifter’s psychology then certainly to her physiology. If your name is called, you are up, whether you’re ready or not.

For the above reason, and for others, coaching one lifter through a meet is challenging. Rob, on this day, was coaching several. And he did so nearly the entire day with the fluidity of someone who has done it for years. And in between he also oversaw the flow of the meet, the warm-up area, the athletes, the schedule of lifting sessions, and the many little things that came together to earn positive comments from spectators, lifters and people from around the world who watched the entire Golden West Open live on the Internet. All this effort came from a coach who, at the end of a very long day, mustered enough energy to also slip into a lifting suite to compete among the day’s best.

Even being on his feet all day, coaching to the point that his voice became hoarse, Coach Rob walked out of the warm-up room, paced briefly behind the platform, and then stepped in front of the judges and lifted a lifetime best in the snatch. 128 kilograms. 281.6 pounds.

At the end of the day, Coach Rob not only achieved a personal best, but also coached several lifters to breaking their own records, and coached one lifter into qualifying for the American Open. The lifter who qualified for the American Open is our very own FIT Trainer Danielle Durante (if you ever see her lift in the gym, you’ll note the raw talent she displays with speed, brevity and seriousness). Coach Rob knows to keep a close eye on this new talent. “This girl is amazing,” Coach Rob said during one of Danielle’s many training sessions. “She’s a machine, and I need to make sure she stays healthy, but also push her hard enough to make gains. She’s got a lot of years in front of her.”

Danielle is not Rob’s first talented lifter to be coached to a high level. There have been other lifters, all members of the FIT Barbell Club that Rob coaches every night and on Saturday mornings. The club is scheduled for one hour each, but it often goes well past the hour. Everyone trains thoroughly and no corner is cut, meaning Coach Rob often stays past the hour on his personal time.

I asked Rob why he commits himself beyond the scheduled one-hour session for Barbell Club. He has a tendency to answer a serious question with a rhetorical question. “Do you think that anyone can snatch 95 kilograms and clean and jerk 130 by training only three hours a week?” Point made, but I think he missed the point that I was trying to get him to tell me about his love for the sport, his soft side for the barbell, his extension beyond business obligations and his occasional acceptance of lost salary in order to travel with his athletes to out-of-state meets. Instead, he took my question as an opportunity to talk about the practicality of what he does. He pointed out that you don’t spread the sport by telling people about how much you love it – you spread it by producing great lifters out of normal people.

[Look for part 2 of this interview next month, in which we’ll learn about Rob’s 17-year journey from his first weightlifting experience, in which a weightlifting coach forbid him to ever wear lifting gloves.]

For more information on Coach Rob, please visit: http://www.focusedtrainers.com/about/staff_robert.htm