AnanyaRaghunathan

Ananya is the only coach here who came up through a sport rather than into coaching sideways. She started weightlifting at a club in Leeds at nineteen, competed through university, and has never really stopped.

The Olympic lifts are not on the class timetable as a separate thing, and that is deliberate — they get folded into the strength block for the people who want them, usually in place of a press day.

How she coaches

In very small pieces. The snatch is one movement but it is taught as about six, and Ananya will keep you on a broomstick and an empty bar for longer than you think is reasonable. The people who stick with it stop arguing at around week five, which is when the bar starts going up instead of forward.

She is also the best person in the building for anybody who feels slow. Speed is a trainable quality and almost nobody trains it.

What she is less good at

Patience with people who want to skip to the heavy part. She will simply keep putting the bar back down, which some people find maddening, and she is right.