Today’s story is about Tara. She’s a 17-year-old weight lifter from Adelaide.


TARA CROSSWELL: A lot of people look at me and they go, "You're too little to be a weightlifter! Why would a girl do weightlifting? Shouldn't you be doing dancing?" I was absolutely hopeless my first training session. I just spent most of the time on the ground. But I guess it was the challenge more than anything. I just really wanted to get in there and prove I could do it.

It's usually all guys I'm training with and they get there and they try and lift more than me, and it's good because we push each other. They don't like it when I lift more than them.

Although the snatch looks like one quick, powerful movement, it is actually broken down into a lot of little sections and practicing these sections in training separately does help a lot with the lift. The clean and jerk is a 2-stage lift.

The clean has a narrow grip compared to the snatch with a wider grip. Basically you just pull it up and get under it and then drive out of the clean and then you prepare yourself for the jerk. You steady the bar, take a deep breath.

You've got to keep your body straight and your chest up and your elbows up high and probably a good drive out of the dip and a good split. You have got to have your feet evenly spaced. Most of it is in your head. You try not to think about the weight so much, you just think about the lift. If you think 'Yeah, it's going to be light, it's going to be easy', then it will become easy. It's just mind over matter.

For me to qualify, to go to Mexico, I will have to lift a 160 kilo total. At the moment I do a 152, so it's a little bit out there, but I'm just going to go and just lift the weights and see what happens.