Train Like an Olympian
Even if you don't have gold medal aspirations, you can benefit from the same exercises performed at the Olympics
The 2024 Olympic Games began last week in Paris, and though the hype doesn’t feel as big as it used to be, there are still events worth watching. Notably, the USA has a chance to bring home a few medals in weightlifting, something our country hasn’t done in decades. Olympic weightlifting was once an American-dominated sport until the Eastern Bloc kicked their athletics programs into overdrive. At the same time as the Eastern ascendence, professional football and basketball began to attract our biggest, strongest, and most powerful athletes into their ranks which totally depleted the American weightlifting talent pool.
The national governing body of the sport, USA Weightlifting, hasn’t done the best job of promoting the sport either. Until recently, they’ve presented Olympic weightlifting as a complex, almost esoteric sport when the premise is actually very simple: lift as much weight as possible from the ground above your head. That’s all there is to it. Sure, there are nuances to proper technique, but the sport has a straightfoward goal. Lift the heaviest weight and you win.
The inaugural Olympic Games of 1896 featured a handful of weightlifting events testing the ability of the athletes to lift maximal weights with one hand and both hands. By the 1920’s, the program was shortened to three events: the barbell snatch, clean & press and clean & jerk (all done with both hands). In 1972, the sport was further truncated with the elimination of the clean & press leaving only two events. To clear up the jargon, the two remaining events call for a single move to get as much weight overhead as possible (the snatch) and the clean & jerk requires two moves — one from the floor to the shoulders then from the shoulders over the head. Again, pretty straightforward. No points are awarded for technique, time taken to complete the lift, or anything else. The weight is all that matters.
You probably don’t aspire to make it to an Olympic podium, but everyone can benefit from performing the snatch and clean & jerk. I’ve included these exercises in programs for young and old, competitive athletes and regular people alike. Below are some specific benefits for different demographics:
Maintaining Speed and Coordination for Older Adults
Losing strength and muscle mass comes with the territory of aging, but thankfully strength training helps enormously in mitigating the decline. Another physical trait that declines with age is speed, or more specifically power. Power, simply put, is strength displayed quickly. Think about jumping as high as you can or throwing something as fast an possible: both require a certain amount of brute strength, but those movements are really about using your strength as rapidly as possible.
Power falls off ealier in life than strength usually because it’s not something most people train for, even those that already spend a lot of time in the gym. But training power can have enormous, even potentially life-saving benefits, later in life.
Falls are huge concern for older adults, accounting for 1 million hospitalizations and 83% of hip fracture deaths. Older adults tend to fall due to an inability to re-orient their center of balance under a shifting center of mass — in other words, they can’t quickly reset their feet underneath their body to prevent a fall. The key there is the speed of the motion: if you’re thrown off balance, you need to move your feet fast to keep yourself off the floor. This is where the Olympic lifts come in.
A clean and snatch require what’s essentially a jump to propel the bar over your head or to your shoulders. As you catch the weight, you’ll need to quickly reset your feet in order to stabilize both your body and the barbell. After spending time building up strength in the squat, presses, and deadlift, adding the Olympic lifts help develop speed and quickness that will translate into activity outside the gym. The Olympic lifts are safe, scalable, trainable, and can be learned at any age. Practicing them and training your quickness can have an enormous carryover to activities outside the gym, and can go a long way in staying on your feet.
Below is a video of a client who had never trained with barbell until his late 50’s nor was he an athlete earlier in life. After a few months of the performing the regular barbell exercises to build up his strength, we introduced power cleans into his program. It didn’t take long to learn proper technique and start moving some weight.
Developing Athletes
It’s obvious that most sports require power, and the higher the level of competition, the more powerful you need to be. Even for endurance athletes, strength and power improve performance. It’s most crucial for sports that involve jumping, throwing, sprinting, and full-body contact.
The snatch and the clean are general movements that any athlete can perform, and have advantages over bodyweight exercises like jumps. The main advantage is that the Olympic lifts involve moving fast with weight. For a sport like football, being powerful only goes so far if you can’t use that power against another person. Cleans and snatches train athletes to move rapidly against a heavy weight.
The second advantage learning to transfer power from the hips through the entire body into an implement, which is exactly what field sports (e.g., shot put, hammer throw, javelin) are all about. Looking back at last week’s post, this is also a great way for baseball players — pitchers, especially — to develop throwing power through a more general movement rather than creating more wear & tear on their elbows from repeated high-velocity pitches.
A third and lesser-known benefit of the Olympic lifts for athletes comes from catching the weight. I first learned this during a seminar with strength coach Al Vermeil, who won a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers and six NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls. Coach Vermeil was working with athletes who already were among the most explosive and physically gifted people on the planet, so his primary focus in the weight room was injury prevention. While the barbell clean helps develop power, it also helps train deceleration. This latter aspect of the lift is something far too often neglected as part of an athlete’s training program. Many coaches focus on increasing an athlete’s speed and jumping abilities without developing their ability to better slow down and land — it’s like continuously tuning up an engine to go faster without ever adjusting the brakes. This inability to land or decelerate properly, especially in a sport like football or soccer that requires rapid cuts, leaves an athlete vulnerable to knee and ankle injuries (ACL tears chief among those injuries). Catching a clean or a snatch requires absorbing the force of the barbell and stopping it from driving you straight into the ground — something called reactive strength — an an athlete with better reactive strength can more safely and effectively stop and change direction quickly.
Check out the video below of 6-foot 10-inch tall Horace Grant performing cleans with Coach Vermeil:
Building Muscle and Power for General Trainees
Even if you’re not a competitive athlete but young enough to not worry about falling, the Olympic lifts and their variations have a place in your training. These lifts require a little more athleticism than the standard squat, press, and deadlift, so they can help you become more coordinated and more powerful.
Higher repetition sets of cleans and snatchs from the hang position have muscle growth benefits — they can add mass to your traps and upper back especially if you’re doing multiple heavy sets of 4-6 reps. Most people could use a more muscular upper back and more development in that area of the body carries over to all the other barbell exercises.
You can also break up the monotony of training by adding the Olympic lifts to your routine. They can be used as a substitute for other barbell pulls such as deadlifts and rows, or you can add an extra day of training dedicated to the snatch, clean, and jerk. If your training has become stale, add these lifts into your training to keep it fresh.
There’s a place in nearly everyone’s training for the Olympic lifts, not just the people at the Games. These lifts might require slightly more time to master than the slower barbell lifts but provide a handful of benefits that other exercises can’t. Find a place for them in your training and give them a try!
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