What is Olympic Weightlifting?

By Daniel Jauregui

With our first weightlifting clinic fast approaching, we’d like to take the time to clarify what olympic weightlifting actually is. If you haven’t been involved with them before, the names of various strength activities can all be very confusing.

The Sport:
Olympic weightlifting, or simply weightlifting, specifically refers to the sport in which athletes compete in the snatch and clean and jerk. You might immediately be wondering, what is a snatch? Excellent question. We’ll dive into that in a second. But first, understand that the term weightlifting refers specifically to these three movements. This term shouldn’t be confused with powerlifting, which instead is a sport focused on pure strength movements like the squat, bench press, and deadlift. It also shouldn’t be confused with generally lifting weights. Doing a bicep curl doesn’t make you a weightlifter.

The sport of weightlifting is predicated on taking a loaded barbell and putting it over your head. In the first lift, the snatch, this is to be done in one fluid motion without the bar ever stopping to rest on any part of your body. The second lift, the clean and jerk, differs in that the bar is brought overhead in two separate movements. It is first brought up to the shoulders (the clean) and then taken overhead (the jerk). As fascinating as this must be to read, it’s much easier to understand with a visual.

The Movements:
Here is a video of prominent U.S. weightlifter Mattie Rogers snatching up to 105kg/235lbs.




The next video provides a demonstration of the clean and jerk. This is Kuo Hsing-chun, a Taiwanese weightlifter who weighs just under 130 lbs. Here we see her clean and jerking 135kg/297lbs.



You’ll notice in each of these videos that the lifters move with tremendous speed. Each of them takes the weight and throws it over her head in the blink of an eye. This is one of the defining qualities of olympic weightlifting. It isn’t only about how much force you can produce; it’s about how much force you can produce quickly. This fast expression of strength is known more simply as power. The most successful weightlifters in the world are all extremely powerful; not to mention technically proficient. These movements combine several different motor patterns into one fluid motion. For example, the clean involves a deadlift to get the bar off the floor, a front squat to stand up with it, and then the jerk takes you into an overhead movement.

This combination of multiple athletic qualities working in coordination with one another is one of the things that makes the olympic lifts difficult to master, as you may have experienced with your own cleans in BHIP. Additionally, the lifts put you in extremely demanding positions. In the clean alone, excellent mobility is required at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and that doesn’t even begin to get into the demands of going overhead or squatting. For this reason, the Olympic lifts are absolutely not for everybody. However, there are elements of the lifts that can be useful in everyone’s training.

Purpose:
The primary benefit to training these movements is power development. Rate of force production is typically the fastest diminishing quality as people age. Training power development helps preserve the ability to move quickly. If you don’t want to continually get slower and slower as you age, it would behoove you to do some sort of more explosive and dynamic training. This is the chief reason why we implement cleans regularly at BHIP. Additionally, the complexity of the movement lends itself well to the overall improvement of motor control and coordination.

Once proficiency is developed, the olympic lifts can be extremely rewarding and even fun. The problem is that it can be very difficult to become proficient with the movements, which is why we’re doing our first weightlifting clinic this weekend. Within the context of a single BHIP workout, we don’t always have time to break down every facet of the movement and reintegrate the many components together, but we will have ample time in the clinic with that as our sole focus. So if you’re someone who has struggled to grasp cleans or someone who is interested in learning more about the olympic lifts, join us on Saturday 3/7 from 10am-12pm. Hope to see you all there!