New Weightlifting gym in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Barbell Club. Looks pretty cool. 6 lifting platforms, tall ceilings.

Photos by Brooklyn Barbell Club

So far there’s 1 Olympic Lifting class/program. At $200/month — may be when I’m a fancy-pants executive and my child can pay for her own life. It’d be cool to check out now and then if they start doing a drop-in rate.

I wonder how the logistics would work out with only 6 platforms though if random people start showing up and a lot of regulars are already working out. Let’s see now, they have 5,000 Square Feet of space. As of September 2009 Craigslist shows commercial warehouse space leases in Williamsburg can be as follows: $5000 / 6500ft², $3000 / 2500ft². So BBC has to make around $6,000/month to cover rent. If they’re charging each person $200/month to use the facility, ($6,000/$200) they’d need 30 regulars to break even on rent. This excludes other bills, like any utilities they’d have to pay for in addition.

http://www.brooklynbarbell.com/programs/:

Olympic Lifting is a 12-week program that will teach you the three contested Olympic lifts: the snatch, the clean and the jerk. We will train you in the fundamentals of these three lifts. We start at the very beginning and move from there. The more advanced athletes will move up in weight faster and the novice lifters will stay with light weight and work on their form. Olympic-style weightlifting is renowned by athletic coaches far and wide as the best way to make their athletes powerful and explosive. Even mainstream fitness magazines are starting to acknowledge that swiss ball crunches are on the way out and full-body weightlifting is the preferred way to get in shape.

Class meets twice a week for 90 minutes….

http://www.brooklynbarbell.com/register/:

Pricing
Programs may be purchased online by clicking the appropriate “Register Now” link, or in person at the Brooklyn Barbell Club. We accept cash, checks, and credit cards.

3 Months Up Front: $600 Register Now
3 Month Contract: $200/month Register Now

This über stylish bag is the only one the training wheels fit inside

good thing it was dark outside, on the way to the gym:

since I practice at a globo gym that doesn’t have bumpers, I have to carry 1 pair of my own to the place each time I work out:

Olympic Weightlifting gyms in St. Louis

These places have bumper plates and trainers who’re certified by USA Weightlifting in proper technique.

• The Lab
  St. Louis, MO;
  Central West End neighborhood
  Founder/main trainer is a competing Olympic lifter
  $40/mo – standard membership gives you 24-hour gym access
• Velocity Sports Performance
  Chesterfield, MO
• St. Louis Weightlifting Club
  Apparently, it used to be a Powerlifting place, then switched strictly to Oly lifting. It doesn’t seem to have a site or a blog…

Some places focused mostly on school age kids:

• Lift for Life
  St. Louis, MO
  ~ Columbus Square neighborhood
  Derrick Johnson, the main coach; also head of the Varsity Olympic Weightlifting program at Lindenwood U (St Charles, MO)
• Kirkwood Weightlifting Club
  Kirkwood, MO (about as far as Creve Couer from downtown?)

lindenwood.edu, Aptil 9, 2009:

Lindenwood Adds Olympic Weightlifting To Its Athletics Department

Lindenwood University announced this week that it has added men’s and women’s Olympic weightlifting to its varsity athletics department. The new programs, the 45th and 46th teams in the largest collegiate athletics department in the United States, will begin play during the 2009-10 school year.

Weightlifting was one of the sports in the original Olympic Games in 1896 and has been a regular event in every Olympics since 1920. In 2000 women’s weightlifting was competed for the first time in the Olympics. Today, there are eight weight classes for men and seven for women.

Collegiate weightlifting is a year-round sport with the biggest event being the National Collegiate Championships which take place in April. Along with adding the sport to its varsity department, the Lindenwood weightlifting program will likely be named a United States Olympic Weightlifting Collegiate Training Center.

The head coach of the Lindenwood program will be Derrick Johnson, a weightlifter and coach in the St. Louis area.

In college, Johnson was a four-time All-American and a three-time National Collegiate Champion. He set the American Collegiate record holder for the 62kg weight class. Among his other accomplishments as a competitor was being a two-time American Open Champion, a two-time Senior National Champion, and participated in the 2008 Olympic Trials.

Johnson, who is a Lindenwood alumnus, has coaching experience as the head coach for Lift for Life Gym in St. Louis. He received the Arnold Schwarzenegger Weightlifting Championships Coach of the Year award in 2006 and 2007 and coaches the top two prospects for the Youth Olympics in 2010.

With the addition of Olympic weightlifting, Lindenwood now sponsors 30 sports that are competed in the Olympics. In 2008, two athletes with Lindenwood ties competed in the Beijing Olympics in Sean McLelland (International Skeet) and Donald Thomas (High Jump).