Dear friends,
My name is Sergey Bondarenko and I am an Olympic weightlifting master of sports of international class (Russian top sports rank). This thread is my humble way to contribute to Olympic weightlifters community and to share my knowledge and experience which I received while making my path to Russian national Olympic weightlifting team.
I had my first weightlifting workout when I was 6. My grandfather and father were weightlifters so the choice of a sport was never a question in my family. When I was 11, I started to train regularly in my native town in Ryazan region in central Russia, finally ended with setting over than 30 regional records in various weight and age categories.
In 2006 I entered Oil and Gas University named after Gubkin and moved to Moscow. Moscow region was much more competitive in terms of weightlifting and my studying made it even more challenging. I was lucky to be coached by Alexander Skonnikov who also coached at that time a well-known Russian weightlifter, powerlifter and strongman – Misha Koklyaev.
I left the campus at 7:00 am and after the classes took a 2 hours bus ride to training camp, coming back to my place only by the midnight. That was my schedule for every working day. Hard work and persistence let me progress despite the unfriendly circumstances, by the year 2011 I set 8 regional records in Moscow and Russian national records in snatch (440 lbs., U23), participated in international competitions and trained in Russian national team camp.
By that time my best pulls were 450 lbs. snatch and 510 lbs. C&J and I decided to take a rest, devoting more time to education and starting coach career. Since that time I wrote numerous articles on weightlifting in Russia sharing them free of charge in various weightlifters communities. I also started coaching weightlifting in one of the most famous and well-know CrossFit facilities in Moscow and have a few junior trainees competing on international level. I also contribute a lot to the development of weightlifting in my native town and region, training kids and representing my region on various events.
Now I found that my knowledge and experience appeared to be helpful to many weightlifters both novice and advanced and decided to share my knowledge with athletes beyond the borders of Russian Federation.
I currently work on translation of my articles into English and writing the new ones. I will publish them here from time to time, encouraging you in-between to ask any questions on weightlifting training, technique and programs.