Should You Be Olympic Weightlifting?

Olympic lifting has skyrocketed in popularity over the last 10 years. When I was a gym manager over a decade ago, you would do well to find one gym locally with a single lifting platform where you could safely drop a barbell without facing the wrath of a gym owner because you put 2 dents in their gym floor.

When I became Head Coach of a private S&C facility 9 years ago, we were pretty much the only place locally where the whole gym was set-up to allow heavy Olympic weightlifting for all members at all times. However these days you can't walk 100 yards without stumbling across a private gym, box or affiliate gym where you can pick up a bar, put it overhead, and drop it on the floor as many times as you like. So should you be Olympic weightlifting as part of your training programme as an everyday athlete, to help you unleash your inner athlete? The Benefits Olympic weightlifting will give you many of the benefits that you'll get from more traditional, less dynamic resistance training. Benefits like increased strength, bone density, injury prevention, range of motion, balance etc. But they really come into their own when it comes to power, explosiveness, rate of force development, and moving external loads much more violently than you would in a squat, bench press or deadlift. Because you are lifting the barbell over longer distances (floor to shoulders in the clean, or floor to overhead in the snatch) bar speed is much more important and a much bigger limiting factor. This means you get the benefits of moving heavy loads at higher speeds, which is great for developing the explosive power than you'd want to develop for sports performance. From a strength and conditioning standpoint, we talk about the Force/Velocity Curve, and we aim to "surf the curve" and improve all the key aspects we find on the continuum between high force/low velocity (aka maximal strength), and high velocity/low force (aka maximal speed).

The Force/Velocity Curve

Traditional commercial gym training is predominantly build on high force, low velocity strength or hypertrophy training.

No problem if those are you goals.

But if you want to be more powerful, more explosive, and express more speed in your sport or day to day life, then Olympic lifting could be a really potent tool.

While your heavy squats really tick the high force/low velocity box, you can benefit massively from pushing that whole curve to the top right, following the green arrows.

Meaning you need to not only improve your maximal strength, but also your:

• Strength Speed (heavy weights, slightly quicker)

• Peak Power (sweet spot of strength and speed)

• Speed Strength (lighter weights, much quicker)

• Speed (limited weight, extremely fast)

Cleans are a great exercises for Strength Speed, and snatches a great exercise for Speed Strength.

The Drawbacks

The most commonly discussed drawback is the complexity of the Olympic lifts, and how long they take to learn, progress and perfect. They also demand greater flexibility, mobility and stability than the traditional compound barbell lifts.

Because of the greater flexibility and mobility demand combined with their dynamic nature, they can be tough on your joints.

In the time it could take you to learn, gain the mobility and strengthen the positions required to perform the olympic lifts with a significant enough load to have a training effect, you could be doing something much simpler like a barbell jump squat, or a trap bar jump.

That being said, I do think their complexity is overplayed.

In the grand scheme of sporting skills, cleans, jerks and snatches are still simple, closed skills.

There is no external impact or forces at play they we have to react to.

They are in only one plane of movement involved in the lifts.

And the fact we can load them relatively heavy still is because they are still relatively simple and stable, meaning we can still apply plenty of force.

This is amplified further if you decide to use partial variations of the clean and snatch like a power clean, or a hang power snatch.

Don't let coaches put you off trying them by saying they're incredibly complex. You can get to a point of useful loading quite quickly with the right variations and high-level coaching.

The Elephant In The Room

One of the biggest reasons for the increase in popularity of the Olympic lifts is CrossFit. CrossFit puts a huge importance on the Olympic lifts, and incorporates them into their programming in a variety of ways. CrossFit will programme them heavy, with plenty of rest, with a high focus on technique with the aim of improving power and explosiveness in their athletes, exactly the same way as I would.

They will also programme them at lighter loads, for much higher reps, as part of "metcons", or conditioning circuits. I personally would never do this. The main massive benefit you will get from Olympic lifting is the adaptation of power, by increasing strength speed/speed strength.

The enemy of speed, power and strength training is fatigue. So incorporating the Olympic lifts into a conditioning workout or metcon, where fatigue and endurance is the goal, negates the main benefit or the lifts themselves.

When done well, the Olympic lifts benefit from efficiency derived from good technique and minimising the distance the barbell needs to cover to maximise power output and loading.

Introducing high fatigue will hider this technique, and further reduce the effectiveness of the lifts themselves.

For metabolic conditioning workouts, you are better off choosing simpler, more cyclical movements, unless your goal is competition in CrossFit.

I'm in the old school of strength and conditioning when it comes to that.

Should You Be Olympic Weightlifting?

If your goal is to unleash your inner athlete, and improve your performance in and out of the gym, the Olympic lifts can be a great tool.

They are excellent for developing power, explosiveness and improving your balance and co-ordination around a barbell.

They can also provide a new challenge to experienced lifters, where the goal is more qualitative than quantitative, keeping training engaging.

They are not as complex as many make out, and most injury free, mildly athletic people can get to a point of loading that will cause positive physiological adaptations much quicker that you think. Especially with high-level coaching which I would 100% invest in if you're serious about incorporating them into your training effectively.

If you want to use them for conditioning, unless you are going to compete in CrossFit, I would look elsewhere. Simpler, more cyclical movements will be a far superior tool.

If you want high-level coaching that is going to help you incorporate the Olympic lifts into your training in a way that increases your power and explosiveness, helping you unleash your inner athlete in the process, check our my 1-1 Coaching Service here.

Ian.