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.