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Guest Post vol. 31: Mel Leads the Scouts

by,

Chris Sinagoga |

Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 4:38PM

I have a feeling the Senior Blobs and the Mr. Warthman's of the world will have a new appreciation for Champions Club pen pal Mel from North Carolina.

About a month back, Mel emailed me wanting to bounce some ideas back and forth that he could use for his son's scouting trip. The theme for the weekend was "Rio 2016," in celebration for the upcoming Olympic Games. Some of the other dads were assigned stations to set up - relay race, javelin, swimming, etc. - and Mel took on the task of teaching middle schoolers the fine sport of Olympic Weightlifting.

Today, he emailed me back with his recap and pictures to go along with it. Enjoy!

...........

Chris,

I wanted to let you know how this event turned out. We had the "Cub-o-ree" this weekend, and my weightlifting station got a lot of traffic! So the background on Cuboree is that it is a weekend camping trip, and on Saturday Cub Scouts go around to different stations from 9-11 am and then again at 1-4 pm. The weightlifting was part of a larger "Cub-athlon" series of stations, where they had 10 different events (decathlon) but all made doable and fun for Cub Scouts. [For example, they had a javelin station where the kids threw PVC pipe with a pool noodle wrapped around it. They also had a sprint, a sled drag, tire flip, etc.] And the Cub-athlon was just 1 of many activities Scouts could do on Saturday (crafts, BB guns, rocket launching, fencing demo, etc).

Given that Scouts are trying to do all 10 events in the Cub-athlon - in say a 30 minute time period - I had to keep the weighlifting session short. Ended up taking groups of 6 Scouts and we would "practice" the snatch and C&J with PVC. Then I would demo the movement with a real barbell. Then they would line up and get 3 attempts at a snatch, and 3 at C&J - with Cub Scout-friendly barbells. I used metal pipe (5#) for the lighter "barbells". The heavier "barbells" took the same pipe and then added some old basketballs (regular size or mini) filled with rocks. So the highest snatch weight was 10 kg and top C&J weight was 15 kg.

It was a ton of work. Not just the actual lifting - probably ran 10-12 sessions each hour for 5 hours - also just the constant teaching, coaching, spotting (and corralling 7-10 y.o. kids). But in the end I think the kids had a good time. We had several who came back a couple times b/c they really wanted to lift that heaviest "barbell". Here's are some shots of the event, and a vid of me demonstrating the lifts: