Lately, I’ve been reading many articles and different points of views
pertaining to the Olympic lifts and their use in training athletes. Many people
say that the lifts are nothing more than a means to reach triple extension and
that there are other ways to achieve this such as by jumping, bounding, or
performing squat jumps, box squats, kettlebell swings, and tire flips.
People have various opinions and stances on training, but I think the biggest
factor is to find what works best for you in your given event and in your
personal goals. There are so many different ideas and principles out there for
training athletes in power sports from the conjugate method to the whole
stability ball, “functional strength,” and sport-specific movement.
I’m a huge advocate of the Olympic lifts. They’re athletic, powerful, and
precise. Yet each lift is really one simple movement that activates everything
between your fingernails and your toenails. They can be very addicting, too. It
just feels good to hit rock bottom and catch a snatch over head or stand up with
a heavy clean and stick the jerk. And they’re just plain ole’ work! I’m not
talking about power cleans or power snatches but the lifts in their full form. I
think they’re an excellent exercise not just for athletes but for anyone
including your grandma.
I remember watching 85-year-old Mel Katz compete while a member of Peaks
Weightlifting Club in Flagstaff, Arizona. Most 85 year olds are just trying to
get out of bed. By the time you hit 25 years old, if you haven’t regularly used
or overloaded your fast twitch muscle fibers, they begin to atrophy. They
continue to atrophy if not overloaded, more and more each year until finally you
can’t even get yourself up out of your favorite TV chair. Then before you know
it, you’re 85 years old stuck in a nursing home bed being spoon fed Jello.
The physiological workings of the human body are truly quite amazing. We know
that strength is the ability to exert a force. Force is equal to mass times
acceleration. The basis of all motion is force. All activities in life require
the movement of an individual or the ability of an individual to set a given
piece of equipment in motion, like getting up out of our favorite TV chair or
the ability to pick up a hammer and drive a nail into the wall.
And then you have power, which is equal to force times velocity. Power is the
rate of work we are able to accomplish in a given unit of time. By increasing a
person’s power output, you can increase the probability of athletic success in
any given event. A 60-foot shot putter is now able to throw 65 feet. An
11-second hundred meter sprinter is now able to run 10.5 seconds. The greater we
can manipulate power output, the bigger the results in improvement will be (but
it’s important to remember that efficient transfer of the power into a given
event can only happen through precision technique, which comes by actual
practice of the event itself).
It would be nice if increasing power was as easy as it looks on paper. We
would all be Christian Cantwells or Usain Bolts, winning medals and breaking
records. But every athlete has his or her own genetic capabilities and limits.
What makes a training program successful is being able to help each athlete
reach his or her maximal potential, even go beyond it, while avoiding injury and
enjoying the journey. So what we choose to do in any allotted training time
(i.e. types of lifts, volume, intensity) is of optimal concern. We want to
choose the things that will help us to safely achieve the best results with the
least amount of effort and/or time.
There are only two ways to increase an athlete’s ability to generate
power—increase the strength of the muscles that exert the force or increase the
velocity of the movement being made. While the exact physiological cause of
increased strength isn’t known, we do know where the possible sites of
adaptation can take place.
In the nervous tissue, changes in the nervous system can result from the
effects of a proper stimulus. As a result of neural adaptation—an increased
neural drive to the muscles—an increase in the synchronization of motor units or
an inhibition of the protective mechanism of the golgi tendon organs can occur.
All of which allows your body to react faster and produce more power over time.
In the muscle tissue, hypertrophy (the increase in cell size) or hyperplasia
(the splitting of the cell) can occur. When we strength train, we stretch the
muscle, which then signals the body to release the hormones that lead to
hypertrophy (muscle growth). In the connective tissue (the transmitter of
force), as a result of a heavy stimulus overload, adaptations can lead to an
increase in collagenous fibrils, making your connective tissue stronger.
In the skeletal tissue, an increase in the density of the bone can result
from strength training due to an increased deposition of mineral salts in the
skeletal tissue. Bone modeling is a response to mechanical loading by
application of a weight bearing force, which causes the bone to bend, thus
creating a stimulus for new bone formation at the regions experiencing the
greatest deformation.
The Sports Science Exchange gives these qualifying characteristics of a
bone-building exercise:
· It should involve faster rather than slower movements.
· It should exceed 70 percent of maximal capacity.
· It should involve some type of impact.
· It should involve a variety of muscle groups and movement direction.
· It should be a closed kinetic chain activity (standing on your
feet).
And then there are the factors that can affect speed. You can improve the
power to weight ratio. You can develop better mechanically advantageous
techniques in your given event (good technique is important in anything we do).
You can decrease resistances to movement by losing fat, improving joint
mobility, or increasing flexibility. You can train the central processing
mechanisms of the stimulus-response component (fast twitch muscle fibers) to
react faster. Or you can maximize the awareness of signals (cues to attend to).
Now, after examining the physiological properties of the body and how
adaptations take place, we can ask ourselves, what movement in sport best
facilitates these factors in promoting the generation and production of power as
well as the positive adaptations we seek in performance and body composition?
Yes, I would say the Olympic lifts are an amazing fit. There is a reason why
Olympic weightlifters are some of the most powerful and amazing athletes on the
planet.
What other lift or movement in sport overloads and stretches the whole body’s
muscular system (not only forcing the large muscle groups to fire but sending a
chain reaction throughout the body to every muscle) to the point of hypertrophy
while also promoting an increase in the collagenous fibrils of the connective
tissue, meeting the criteria for a bone-building exercise, training the nervous
system for optimal responses, training the body to move in precision at maximum
speed (mechanically advantageous techniques) and at the same time requiring
enormous flexibility and joint mobility while being safe (if done correctly with
good technique) and able to produce results in the least amount of time and with
less effort than combining a bunch of exercises in hopes of manipulating the
same results? And in what sport do athletes have a greater power to weight ratio
than Olympic lifters? So why would we not incorporate these lifts into our
training programs?
In my next article, I’ll play the role of antagonist to many of these common
arguments against the use of the “full Olympic lifts” for training athletes of
all levels of performance.
Oliver Baahozho Whaley is an exercise and wellness major at Brigham Young
University (BYU). He currently throws hammer for the BYU track team. For more
information, visit his blog at
www.haskestength.blogspot.com or email him at
oliverwhaley@yahoo.com.
Elite Fitness Systems strives to be a recognized leader in the strength
training industry by providing the highest quality strength training products
and services while providing the highest level of customer service in the
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