The Importance of Strength in Olympic Weightlifting and Other Power Output Activities

Bigger Stronger Leaner Powerlifting & Strength Sports
1

I feel in the US, we have a tendency to overlook strength and get caught up with the speed and technique aspect of olympic lifting too early. Of course technique is everything in whatever you do however strength in my opinion especially for olympic lifting is just as important (truth is IF YOUR STRONG, YOU CAN BE WRONG). If we focused on strength more, we would be doing much better at the olympics.

Chinese Olympic Weightlifting Coach Fang states “BEGINNERS MUST FOCUS ON ABSOLUTE STRENGTH FOR MANY YEARS”. For a sport of speed strength and technical precision like olympic weightlifting, absolute strength must be damn important for an awarded oly coach to say it. Look at lifters like Klokov who can high bar squat over 700 pounds or Lü Xiaojun who squats in the mid 600s+. Even Crossfit Games champion Rich Froning spends 8 months out of the year solely focusing on getting his squat, press and deadlift numbers up. Have you noticed the majority of successful strongmen who compete in events that require a huge power output are/were powerlifters who compete in the slow lifts.

In other words if your a novice/beginner (including myself here), you shouldn’t worry about your snatch, clean and jerk until your squatting at least 400 pounds.

“Who can clean more, someone with a 200lb deadlift or someone with a 500lb deadlift.” - Rip

2

I agree with all of that, except for squatting 400lbs. I think the goal should be a double body weight front squat for guys and 1.5 times for the ladies. I’m nowhere near that, the most I have done is 1.5 for a triple.

Edit: To compete internationally you need to be doing more around 2.5x to 3x bodyweight depending on weight class. Very few American lifters come close to that. Lack of strength and lack of technique leads to poor results.

3

Shouldn’t worry about your snatch or clean and jerk until you squat at least 400lbs? That’s ridiculous. Most of the people here are far past the ideal starting time for becoming elite. Both the Chinese and Russians begin gymnastics training at the age of 6 or 7, and don’t lift a barbell until they are 9 I believe. Then, they start learning BOTH the classic lifts and trying to get nice and strong.

If they waited until they had a 400lbs squat to start training, they wouldn’t attempt the clean and jerk or snatch until they were 15 or 16 years old. Probably later. My point is this: the majority of lifters start at a time where not teaching them the clean or snatch until they have a 400lbs squat probably means they won’t be able to accomplish ANYTHING in their career, let alone making the Olympics.

Let’s look at our best lifters and see if they aren’t strong: Kendrick Farris(94kg): 280kg for a triple I believe. Ian Wilson(105kg): 240kg back squat (at 17). D’Angelo Osorio (94kg): 240kg squat at 18 years old. Travis Cooper(85kg): 245kg for 5, 260 for a double. James Tatum (77kg): Somewhere between 230 and 245kg for a single. Or how about Pat Mendes, the guy that Rip and them always like to say was doing it right?

Well he had a 363kg back squat, and yet never snatched or cleaned anything comparable to his international counterparts in competition. His best clean and jerk was 230 or so? Best snatch was in the 170s in competition? There are guys his age in the 94s who are snatching 190+ in training and cleaning 220+. Ilya Ilin’s best competitive total is 15kg higher than Pat’s. Even now, after not having lifted for a year, Ilin can still snatch over 140. Klokov says this is because he drills technique with just the bar EVERY DAY.

Then lets not even get to the amount of missed lifts that the US accumulated at the World Championships this past year. We missed about 40% of our lifts. Some people only hit one snatch and one clean. Now, if they were stronger they might have been able to hit the weights they missed, that’s a given. But, if they were stronger, they would have been attempting higher weights, and still missing. So what does that tell you?

That means focusing even the majority of time on strength doesn’t yield these magic results that guys like Rip and Louie Simmons say they do. The reason that the Chinese and Russians don’t miss is because they drill the lifts for thousands and thousands of reps. Not just because they are stronger.

Rips best clean is something like 105kg, but he has deadlifted over 600lbs correct? So it doesn’t look like strength has done him any good. Hell, there’s a kid at cal strength who can probably only deadlift 140kg but is cleaning 105.

Anyways, I just had a bout of word vomit, but please go read some other work from people who actually DO coach the lifts, and their take on getting stronger. I’ll give a quick summary: the idea that American lifters AREN’T focused on getting strong is asinine. However, the more you push the squat, the less you can push the snatch or clean because of recovery. So at some point (after you hit a squat PR) you focus on the main lifts. Now, please go read some of Greg Everrett and Glenn Pendlay’s articles on the subject.

4

Read a few articles by Rippetoe et al, did you?

[quote]xagunos wrote:
I feel in the US, we have a tendency to overlook strength and get caught up with the speed and technique aspect of olympic lifting too early.[/quote]
Maybe I’m on the wrong side of the 49th to notice, but I am not aware of this epidemic of weightlifting gyms who do not try to get their lifters stronger.

[quote]xagunos wrote:
Of course technique is everything in whatever you do however strength in my opinion especially for olympic lifting is just as important (truth is IF YOUR STRONG, YOU CAN BE WRONG). If we focused on strength more, we would be doing much better at the olympics. [/quote]
Have you been reading articles about how the old times lifters got brutally strong and managed to muscle their way through awful technique? Because I’ve read a couple of those articles and frankly I thought they were shit. It doesn’t matter what Bill Starr saw some guy muscle over his head in the '70s, the game has changed, and your technique needs to be on point if you want to be an elite lifter in today’s day and age. That means refining and ingraining proper technique in lifters while they’re still young and pliable so they can spend their formative, high testosterone years training the lifts at high intensity.

There are a lot of things holding the US (and Canada) back in terms of international competition in weightlifting, and trying to boil down the issue to “well we just need to get stronger and then we can beat those Russians/Chinese/whoever durrrr” is just ignorant.

[quote]xagunos wrote:
Chinese Olympic Weightlifting Coach Fang states “BEGINNERS MUST FOCUS ON ABSOLUTE STRENGTH FOR MANY YEARS”. For a sport of speed strength and technical precision like olympic weightlifting, absolute strength must be damn important for an awarded oly coach to say it. Look at lifters like Klokov who can high bar squat over 700 pounds or LÃ??Ã?¼ Xiaojun who squats in the mid 600s+.[/quote]

Yeah, those Chinese, they don’t do any snatch or clean and jerk work with their youths at all. Yes, generally speaking you need to be brutally strong to be an elite weightlifter, but if you’re not applying that strength to the lifts then that strength is utterly useless, and the strength required for the lifts is sufficiently position-specific that lifts such as the low bar back squat, strict overhead press, and conventional deadlift (all espoused by Mark Rippetoe) are of less than limited utility for a serious, competitive weightlifter, in my opinion.

Also, nice job cherry picking a handful of the most popular (and strongest) lifters right now in Klokov and Lu Xiaojun. I believe when Norik Vardanian left the United States and went back to Armenia to train, he said it was months before they let him put any weight on the bar (if they even let him use a bar, it might’ve just been a broomstick, I can’t remember). They had to fix his technique first. Szymon Kolecki was a lifter known for not being a strong squatter, and he still set a junior (and former senior) world record in the clean and jerk that may never be touched.

[quote]xagunos wrote:
Even Crossfit Games champion Rich Froning spends 8 months out of the year solely focusing on getting his squat, press and deadlift numbers up. Have you noticed the majority of successful strongmen who compete in events that require a huge power output are/were powerlifters who compete in the slow lifts.[/quote]
What crossfitters and strongmen are doing in their training is largely irrelevant in a discussion on how to improve your snatch and clean and jerk for a weightlifting competition.

[quote]xagunos wrote:
In other words if your a novice/beginner (including myself here), you shouldn’t worry about your snatch, clean and jerk until your squatting at least 400 pounds.

“Who can clean more, someone with a 200lb deadlift or someone with a 500lb deadlift.” - Rip[/quote]
Both of these statements are asinine. If you refuse to train the lifts until you hit an arbitrary level of strength you are only limiting yourself, as the lifts are skills unto themselves that have to be learned and perfected, and the sooner you begin that process the better.

And I really hate that quote from Rip, it comes across as a disingenuous attempt to convince you of the truth of his argument by using an utterly ridiculous question. Of course someone who cleans 500 pounds can clean more than someone who deadlifts only 200 pounds, a more pertinent question would be whether someone who increases their deadlift from 500 to 600 pounds, or 600 to 700 pounds, will see an increase in their performance in the snatch/clean and jerk, and the answer to that question is probably not.

If I remember correctly, when Glenn Pendlay and Donny Shankle were still at California Strength, at some point they decided they would get Donny’s squat up to 300kg. They put all the emphasis on his squat for a while and he did hit that 300, but his snatch and clean and jerk went down. Putting too much emphasis on raw strength had a deleterious effect on his lifts.

DISCLAIMER: It may not sound like it, but I don’t have anything against Rippetoe or any of those old-school guys. Rip comes across as quite intelligent and an article he posted on this site was probably the best and most objective write-up about CrossFit I’ve ever seen. I just vehemently disagree with just about everything he says regarding producing quality weightlifters.

5

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
BLAH[/quote]
Nice word vomit.

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
Ian Wilson(105kg): 240kg back squat (at 17). [/quote]
A quick youtube search shows Ian Wilson has hit some beefy front squats lately:

I’m excited to see what he can do as he fills out the 105 class, I can see him and Kendrick Farris going at it for the lone male spot the US should earn for the Rio olympics.

6

Very well put Jonty. Thank you for saying what I was trying to say in a concise, non-word vomity way. Also: yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing Ian Wilson put up some big numbers. If he can push his snatch into the 180s and clean into the 210-220 are, I could see him taking the spot from Farris.

7

There’s a big difference between not training in the classic lifts and not focusing on them. Technique work is fine, but spending your entire training cycle focusing on heavy classical lifts instead of strength when you are incredibly weak relative to international competition seems a bit backwards.

8

[quote]amayakyrol wrote:
There’s a big difference between not training in the classic lifts and not focusing on them. Technique work is fine, but spending your entire training cycle focusing on heavy classical lifts instead of strength when you are incredibly weak relative to international competition seems a bit backwards.

[/quote]

Except, that doesn’t happen. None of the top level coaches program that way. Even my coach, who isn’t nearly as well known as Pendlay, Everrett, Broz, Kono, or McCauley, spent the first 6 weeks of the year pushing up the squat, push press, and pull. There was only one session a week which in which guys snatched, and it was at the end of the workout. My teammates are now peaking for a meet in two weeks. Then after that will start another squat strength phase.

Pendlay runs the texas method for all of his lifters for the squat. They’re supposed to hit some sort of PR just about every week.

Broz has guys squatting every day, most of the days fairly heavy.

And incredibly weak compared to international competition? You do realize the amount of work it takes to move your squat from 500-600lbs right? it takes months, if not years for a raw powerlifter to do it while focusing on pushing the squat up. Now a weightlifter who also has to recover from the classical lifts being trained every day is going to have a much harder time REALLY pushing the squat.

9

Recovery isn’t as much of an issue for international lifters. If Farris isn’t on, I would love to see what he could do with it.

10

[quote]amayakyrol wrote:
There’s a big difference between not training in the classic lifts and not focusing on them. Technique work is fine, but spending your entire training cycle focusing on heavy classical lifts instead of strength when you are incredibly weak relative to international competition seems a bit backwards.

[/quote]
If you want to be proficient at heavy classical lifts, you need to do heavy classical lifts. Because of the ballistic nature of the movements, a lift at 98+% is different from a lift at 90% which is different from an 80% lift and so on and so forth. Mentally and physically you need to practice the skill of weightlifting applied at high intensities, doing technique work with lighter weights will only take you so far. If the emphasis of your training is on strength to the detriment of performing heavy classical lifts, when it comes time to do those high percentage lifts you are going to be inefficient and inconsistent.

Of course, you do still need to get stronger. Coming up with a program that will allow the lifter to perform the classical lifts at high intensity while still having recovery ability left over to work on strength is difficult at best, and something that is largely impossible for most lifters on this side of the pond who start later in life and have other responsibilities besides lifting. Bit of a catch-22 for most of us, really. Put all your focus into getting as strong as international lifters and you’re going to wind up a strong but incredibly inefficient lifter (think Paul Anderson); conversely if you dedicate yourself to perfecting your technique while avoiding getting stronger you will be a very polished, and very weak, lifter. And if you try to do both at once you’re fighting an uphill battle against recovery capacity and the fact you’re 10-20 years behind the international competition.

I’m not trying to say that strength work is unimportant, I just think that heavy classical lifts have to take priority. Strength work (squats, pulls, presses, etc) is, in my opinion, accessory work for the snatch and clean and jerk, and should be viewed and programmed as such.

[quote]amayakyrol wrote:
Recovery isn’t as much of an issue for international lifters. If Farris isn’t on, I would love to see what he could do with it. [/quote]
Besides the drug issue (which isn’t likely to change for better or worse anytime soon if you ask me) one has to consider that elite international lifters have been training since their youth (6-7 years old sometimes) in a long-term program designed to produce world and olympic champions. If that sort of thing doesn’t develop the ability to handle insane workloads week in and week out, then it certainly weeds out those who can’t handle it.

11

I found this yesterday, thought it was kind of interesting and related.

York Barbell Club, back in the day. Back when strength was really all you needed to win. There’s some technique, but the difference between then and now is pretty striking in my opinion.

12

Yeah, the sport is completely different now with only 2 lifts instead of three, the ability to touch the thighs during the clean and the snatch. Plus the advent of the modern lifting shoes and the acceptance of the squat clean and squat snatch as being the best ways to move the weights rather than the deep split.

13

By the way: Tommy Kono is a beast. My coach is one of his former students

14

[quote]nkklllll wrote:
By the way: Tommy Kono is a beast. My coach is one of his former students[/quote]

900+ total with no hip brush? Yeah, that’s pretty beast. That press was disgusting. Olympic Lifting is much more elegant now.

15

Yeah those Chinese only ever train strength…
The reason the Chinese can focus more on strength and heavy maximals sooner in their development is because they have 8 year olds snatching with better technique than I do. They get the technique spot on waaaaay before the individual is ready to improve their strength, that way they are primed to take advantage of strength gains as their technique is already that much better.

16

These WEIGHTLIFTERS ARENT STRONG guys are really beating a dead horse huh

17

[quote]xagunos wrote:
Chinese Olympic Weightlifting Coach Fang states “BEGINNERS MUST FOCUS ON ABSOLUTE STRENGTH FOR MANY YEARS”. For a sport of speed strength and technical precision like olympic weightlifting, absolute strength must be damn important for an awarded oly coach to say it. Look at lifters like Klokov who can high bar squat over 700 pounds or LÃ?¼ Xiaojun who squats in the mid 600s+. Even Crossfit Games champion Rich Froning spends 8 months out of the year solely focusing on getting his squat, press and deadlift numbers up. Have you noticed the majority of successful strongmen who compete in events that require a huge power output are/were powerlifters who compete in the slow lifts.
[/quote]
You are completely misinterpreting that statement - I should know because I wrote the article that you quoted it from. In the context of the article, I was stating that beginners should focus on absolute strength as opposed to SPEED STRENGTH. Even for a beginner both are important, but absolute strength will be the limiting factor for many years before speed strength. HOWEVER, technique and perfect reps in the full lifts is ALWAYS the priority. The lifters in China generally do not push the squat and pulls until the lifter reaches puberty, at which time they are still considered a beginner despite having trained for 2-4 years or so. For those first few years they are learning and reinforcing perfect technique with thousands of precise repetitions with little concern for weight. Even when pulls and squats become a part of the program, the priority is still ALWAYS perfect technique.

18

i dunno what’s more retarded Rippetoe’s low bar back squat or cleans with chains and rubber bands

19

[quote]dnd611 wrote:
i dunno what’s more retarded Rippetoe’s low bar back squat or cleans with chains and rubber bands[/quote]

Snatches with chains.

But I actually have trouble understanding Rippetoe’s press. If you’re going to do an Olympic Press, do an Olympic Press… or do a stricter overhead press, but I can’t make sense of his weird “hip drive to start, then finish strict” press.

20

That just sounds like a push press to me.