A Little Lesson From Mat Fraser

Here’s Mat Fraser snatching 315lbs (143Kg) back in 2014.

It’s pretty cool, right?

Mat finished second in 2014 to Rich Froning, and then finished second in 2015 to Ben Smith. The year Mat said he didn’t work as hard as he could have.

Here’s Mat Fraser snatching 291lbs (132Kg) in this year’s Games. The year he won by the largest margin in history. The most dominant performance ever.

And he looks pretty happy with it too, right?

Mat Fraser’s 1RM snatch went down but his overall, consistent fitness went up.

Now, the counter argument is in 2017 he was mid competition, and that’s going to play a role. But we’re also talking about the most focused dedicated athlete the sport has seen, and his lift has gone down 11Kg in 3 years.

It’s easy to get up thinking that increasing our 1RM will automatically improve our fitness, because our brains want to boil this complicated sport down to something simple and go after that. It’s cool to get a new PB, just not an the expense of the rest of your fitness. Fitness is more than just your one rep maxes.

We still have days that are pure strength focused. About one in every 10 training sessions. Why that frequency? Because strength is one of the ten physical components of fitness.

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