BENEFITS OF OLYMPIC LIFTING
1. Transform your physique:
Performing a snatch or a clean and jerk is a full-body, fun, intense exercise working your legs, glutes, back, abs, shoulders and arms all at the same time. You burn a lot of calories during your workouts in a short amount of time. Olympic lifts are a great way to decrease body fat, build muscle, increase strength and maximize your time strength training.
2. Get stronger, more powerful and run faster
Snatches and clean and jerks produce some of the highest power outputs in all of sport. Power, the product of strength and speed, is the key ingredient to helping people run faster and jump higher. Incorporating the Olympic lifts into workouts is the most effective way to build power and speed.
3. Boost Work Capacity
Olympic lifts are versatile, causing a range of positive changes to your body depending on how you program them into your workouts. Olympic lifts can be used to improve strength, speed and power as well as enhance high-intensity exercise endurance, recover more quickly and handle higher amounts of training. With greater work capacity, you can do more exercise each session and reach your health and fitness goals faster.
4. Protect Against Injury
Olympic lifts are full-body movements that target the shoulders, hips, knees and ankles and help promote flexibility and stability across joints. Controlling a load throughout the ROM of all these joints is key to preparing the body for the high forces encountered in sport and in some activities of daily living. A major predictor of future injury is having endured a prior injury, so utilizing the Olympic lifts in training and improving flexibility, strength, and stability, can greatly reduce susceptibility to injury.
5. Improve Bone Density
Especially for women, strengthening bones is critical to prevent osteoporosis and protect against bone fractures. Olympic lifts produce large forces on the legs, spine, and arms, precisely what is needed to stimulate the body to lay down new bone and improve bone density.
6. Enhance Coordination
The Olympic lifts are full-body movements requiring precise coordination, rhythm, and timing. Improving body awareness and coordination are great for both sport performance and activities of daily life.
7. Improve Sport Performance
The Olympic lifts require an athlete to exert a force into the ground through a quick and coordinated “triple extension” of the ankle, knee, and hip, mirroring what happens in sprinting and jumping, the core components of most sports. Other than practicing the sport itself, Olympic lifts have the next highest carryover to directly improving sport performance in sports where strength, power, and speed are essential.
8. Get Confident
Strong is the new skinny; as you get stronger physically, it permeates your whole life. As you are able to master new skills and see what your body is capable of, your confidence in and out of the gym will blossom. Lifting weights with speed and technique as in the Olympics lifts is a rush and many people find that the process of learning and refining the Olympic lifts keeps them excited to workout. The more consistently you workout and use strength training as a tool, the more results you will see.
9. Improve Range of Motion
While some people associate lifting heavy weights with being stiff and bulky, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Olympic lifters are some of the most flexible and mobile athletes in the Olympics.
10. Develop Dynamic Stability
In sport and in life, people are rarely in need of strength when stationary so it’s important to stress the body in the gym to reflect that. Olympic lifts provide strength and stability around major joints at a fast speed of movement, which is what enables the body to be stable in activities of daily life as well as sport. Weightlifting movements are truly functional exercises.
What is Olympic Weightlifting?
What is Olympic Lifting? Learn more about the sport of Weightlifting. If you’re looking to join us on your journey send us an email info@yorkcountybarbell.com
Refine Your Focus
York County Barbell is an Olympic Weightlifting & Strength and Conditioning facility located in Southern Maine close to The Seacoast of New Hampshire. We specialize in Olympic Weightlifting (Oly lifting) and Strength and Conditioning for adult and youth athletes. You don’t have to be an advanced level athlete to start your journey with us. We work with anyone and everyone.
Principles, Practice, Persistence
Principles - building a foundation based on solid principles will eventually lead to building a solid structure. Without a solid foundation your end result might look more like the Leaning Tower of Pisa than a solid AF brick house. This is where the initial principles play a huge role in any athlete's development. Learning each element of weightlifting can be difficult and even daunting. However, these foundational principles are what make weightlifting such a rewarding sport.Practice - repetition is really the only way to get better at anything in life and weightlifting is no exception. If you aren't putting in the hours your results are going to reflect that. You wouldn't expect to be Picasso if you barely touched a paint brush. Pick up the bar and pick it up often. Persistence - yes you will have a love hate relationship with weightlifting. You can have some really incredible days in the gym and you can have some really terrible days too. These fluctuations come in waves and as long as we understand that and allow ourselves to ebb and flow, persistence will become second nature and something we eventually stop questioning. If you fight against it and hate the process you'll eventually fall out of love with weightlifting or anything else that appears daunting.
Should I Compete?
Weightlifting is a sport based around two lifts: the snatch and the clean and jerk. There are weight and age classes to even the playing field to ensure a fair competition for everyone. Each person competing will attempt three separate lifts in both the snatch and clean & jerk. The highest weight performed in each lift is totalled to give you your overall total for the competition. (This is just a summation of what a competition without getting into all of the finer details).
Why is competing important?
Reason # 1
When you show up and train you are putting a lot hard work in on a daily and weekly basis. That work is done in a very controlled environment assuming you lift in the same gym, with the same bar, same plates and with the same people each session. When you beat a previous personal record in the gym it’s really amazing and took a lot of hard work to get there. Hitting big lifts in a new environment with different equipment on a platform in front of other people is a completely different story. It's a different kind of test to see if all of your training is paying off outside of normal routines.
Reason # 2
This is a very inclusive sport that allows any age, race, and gender to perform to the best of their abilities no matter where they are within that journey. You do not need to be a 20 year old that lifts world record numbers to go participate in a competition. You could be in your 50s and have maybe 1-2 months of experience with the snatch and clean and jerk before competing. Weightlifting competitions aren't only for the most elite level lifters to test their progress.
Reason # 3
It gives you a goal. If you don't have a defined goal for your training, choosing to compete will give you a purpose for showing up and pushing your body to do difficult things day in and day out.
What is your Why?
Without a why, anything you do will eventually start feeling pointless.
You might not be a morning person, but you get up early to walk my dog. That's a solid why.
You might dislike your job, but you want to pay your mortgage or have money to go on vacation. That's a solid why.
Having a why is like having a north start to keep your eye on. Your why is an internal driving force to stay focused on the things you value in life. These are reasons that help you follow through with something, especially when you want whatever it is badly enough.
If a doctor told someone that they were at risk of a heart attack if they didn't clean up their diet and start moving or working out, that would be a great why/north star for someone to stay focused.
If someone else wants to be the strongest version of themselves, or win a competition that's coming up in a few months, that's a great why/north star. This can be coupled with micro goals along the way, such as wanting to PR their clean and jerk by 2 kg in the next 4-6 months.
If you don't have a reason to keep improving in whatever it is you're investing your time and money into, then you probably won't see continued improvement.
Try to find your inner why. Use your why/north star as your guide, and you'll see far more success in your endeavors.