Lifting weights in your living room

Lifting weights in your living room is, most probably, the most effective way to enhance your strength. The convenience of working out where you are most comfortable with your territory reduces the chances of missing out of training.



Sjaak Smorenburg, my coauthor on multiple books on home-gym weightlifting, was able to develop home-gym lifting along the strictest rules of Olympic training.  In the attached photo, Smorenburg
breaks down the bar trajectory of a freestyled lift into its minute details.

You could possibly read the lifter's mind by deciphering the trajectories of the motion of masses. The bar trajectory is pushed away from the body when the hips thrusted forward. If the head trajectory is rotated clockwise, to more horizontal plane, the bar could have passed over the groin and stayed on the initial vertical ascent when the hips thrusted.

To the contrary, the following photos shows a person lifting next to his bed and fish tank, which he ends breaking during the lousy biceps curling.

 

Note the casual curving of the spine during lifting which indicates the total lack of awareness of the proper lifting technique. 

Now, the barbell is already gripped from the floor while the back is still hunching. Visualize this lifter after 20 years from today!! In fact, this sort of ignorant lifting is more damaging than good. Muscles are not the primary target of strengthening, the bone posture is.  Say lifting in such poor posture is better than getting hooked on other bad things, right? Wrong. Look at Smorenburg's unconditional commitment to perfecting his posture in his home-gym.

 Smorenburg is a father of two, Floor and Jeop, and works as a train engineer for over three decades. Yet, in his fiftieth, Smorenburg could maintain perfect posture under resistance. 

 

Here, goes the fish!!  

The fish tank broke during the least demanding curling of the biceps.

God gracious. It is just the fish that got hurt. 

Smorenburg has to worry about avoiding head concussion during the high speed overhead Snatch. Smorenburg transformed his attic into such lively Olympic Weightlifting Laboratory by the simplest means of searching, reading, posting on the Internet, and later, traveling to meet with me in search for deeper insight.