Olympic-style Weightlifting and FIT

by John Nyguen, FIT Exercise Director

In late 2001 Gabe and I lobbied for an Olympic-style weightlifting platform at FIT. We poured over the pages of gym equipment catalogs for weeks, discussing which platform architecture is most utilitarian for the facility. Some platforms included benches, racks, bars, and other wonderful metal contraptions. You can perform a gazillion exercises on them, and they would impress any serious strength coach in big college weight rooms. They would certainly blow the roof off of a home gym. On these elaborate platforms you can do the snatch, clean and jerk, and all their derivatives, as well as the muscle-head routines that include bench press, pull-up, pull-down and the almighty bicep curl. You can even tap-dance on them, if that is your thing.

But instead of a fancy platform with a jungle gym, we chose a simple platform made of plywood and a couple strips of rubber mats, fitted into a square space that used to be a raised plyometric floor for power exercises (that everyone used for static stretches instead).

So in early 2002 FIT finally took delivery of its first simple weightlifting platform, along with a specialized bar and rubber bumper plates. And here begun the era of Olympic-style weightlifting in a little training facility in Los Altos, California.

It turned out that the platform was used constantly (we even considered a sign-up sheet for its reservation), so several months later we accommodated its increasing popularity by bringing in two more platforms. Eventually, clients arrived to their training sessions on a Monday morning to find a total of 5 platforms. Still, there weren’t enough platforms, and so we decided to trash all the wooden platforms and made the entire side of the facility one big platform by using fitted rubber mats so that anyone can perform Olympic-style weightlifting practically anywhere. And it has worked well as a fundamental component to the overall service at FIT.

Since the day FIT gave a home to its first platform, we hired several great coaches who specialize in Olympic-style weightlifting. One of these coaches is Rob Earwicker, who coaches right out of the facility a bona fide weightlifting team that boasts national-level competitors. The team is separate from the services at FIT, but has a direct relationship to what the rest of us believe in. At FIT weightlifting is the one component that is widely prescribed to and used by the most number of clients and trainers in order to achieve health and fitness.

There are some clients who currently don’t participate in these lifts for one reason or other, and some might even question the utility of Olympic-style lifting in a general fitness program. That is, most people simply want to look, feel and function better, so why Olympic-style weightlifting?

Olympic-style Weightlifting and Function

Unless you are a para- or quadriplegic, or a bilateral lower-limb amputee, you use your legs for many activities of daily living. A partial component of weightlifting requires a triple extension of your lower body, in which your ankles, knees and hips extend against the ground. The speed at which you extend varies and depends on the situation. Standing from a chair requires moderate speed, but jumping over a puddle of water requires rapid extension of the legs. Dashing out of the way of danger requires explosive power of the legs and, therefore, in a survival situation can make a difference between a close call and a tragedy.

Olympic-style Weightlifting and Speed

I believe it was Bruce Lee who said, “If you want to be fast, then train fast.” (Or maybe he said, “I will kick you in the head.”) With this “train fast” statement, he was well ahead of most members of the physical culture of the 1970s. And while you might not throw kicks to your neighbor’s head, you still need to move fast at one point or another, because life doesn’t happen in one speed.

Olympic-style Weightlifting and Aging

As we age, one of the first motor qualities we lose is quickness. Literally, we slow down. Our fast-twitch muscle fibers – those that contract with high velocity – begin to diminish. And our nervous system becomes deconditioned to stimulating muscle velocity. This motor loss leaves us vulnerable to falling accidents because we lose the ability to move our feet quick enough to catch ourselves when we lose balance. Weightlifting, with its high-speed yet safe execution of whole-body movement, keeps us moving like we’re young, allowing us to dance longer into our later years. But forget about dancing grace for a moment; weightlifting allows the elderly to rigorously survive the unforeseen and the sudden, those to which the slow becomes victims.

Olympic-style Weightlifting and Body Composition

If you want to lose weight, then your body should reach a calorie deficit. You can do this by either consuming fewer calories or burning more of them. At the end of the day, your body should have a negative balance of calories, if a loss of weight is to be realized.

Eating less to create a calorie deficit is an effective way to losing weight, but studies show that the diet-only method produces weight loss that comes from both fat and lean muscles. This results in a lower metabolic rate, making further weight loss challenging, or keeping lost weight off nearly impossible. Generally, weight loss by just calorie restriction produces only a thin version of a fat body. In other words, the body is devoid of tone and shows only flab, a disappointment for some when the time comes to slip into the bathing suit.

Other studies show that eating less while resistance training, however, can create a calorie deficit that results in weight loss from mostly fat while preserving lean muscles. This encourages the development of a toned body, because the state of being “toned” is possible only with muscles. But aside from the aesthetics (however defined by culture or peer), preserving or creating muscle mass offers function and health beyond preferred cosmetics. Articles in past newsletters have discussed the health and wellbeing achieved by increased muscle mass (insulin sensitivity, glucose uptake, VO2, etc.), so for now just remember that low muscle mass is undesirable in more ways than just appearance.

But, you may ask, why Olympic-style weightlifting over those methods typically used in many modern health clubs? You know: the gym-rat staples of bench press, lat pull-down, leg extensions, bicep curls, etc.

While those exercises seen typically at large commercial health clubs are useful in their own rights, the Olympic-style weightlifting exercises are among the most metabolically expensive exercises per unit time. Not only do the snatch, the clean and the jerk – and all their variations – use almost all the muscles in the body at once, their execution also requires a high mechanical power output. Mechanical power output requires metabolic power output, and this process is fueled essentially by calories. The greater the metabolic power, the greater the calorie consumption. If an appreciable level of mechanical and metabolic power output can be sustained for a period of time (measurable in average output), serious calories can be burned. And recall the importance of calorie deficit in the quest for improved body composition.

The Transfer of Power

The capacity to develop power through the use of weightlifting can transfer to other activities in the gym and in life, so that you can ultimately increase your capacity to achieve more work in less time, which is the essence of fitness and the crown achievement to increasing calorie consumption. This is one of the most predominant physical traits gained from the use of the Crossfit methodology (in which the Olympic-style lifts are fundamental).

Borrowing Our Health and Fitness from Sports

Almost all of the workout methods that you have ever seen in gyms or read about in magazines are mere offspring of various sports. It so happens the sport of bodybuilding, in which grown men and women in skimpy suits prance on a stage in front of judges to flex their muscles, gave birth to an endless liter of generic weight training exercises that rooted itself in gyms around the world and in the psyche of the average person. The barbell curl – a long-time favorite of bodybuilding champs like Arnold Swartzeneger for creating huge muscle mass in the arms – are revered by the average person as a generic exercise to tone the arms. The mentality is that the bodybuilder borrowed these exercises from the gym, when in fact it is the bodybuilder that gave these exercises to the gym.

Before the sport of bodybuilding there was the sport of strongman, reserved for mostly circus freaks and showmanship, but nevertheless a sport on a stage in front of a crowd, and they used cannon balls and kettlebells and other composed slabs of iron.

Olympic-style weightlifting is from the sport of weightlifting sanctioned at the Olympic Games. This sport has been around since the 19th century. Athletes of numerous sports currently use Olympic-style weightlifting, as does a new crop of fitness buffs who want to get fit, burn fat, and become more athletic (several years ago Vogue even featured an article about the benefits of Olympic-style weightlifting).

Sports gave us the fitness programs that doctors now deem vital to our health, function and longevity. Taken to extreme these programs return to their status of competitive sports, but taken with commitment, dedication and hard work, they meet almost every fitness and health goal we set. So, to have reservation about the Olympic-style lifts because they are the tools of great Olympians is like being afraid of the lunges and the bicep curls because they are the tools of gigantic bodybuilders. These are all useful tools that benefit us in one way or another, for one purpose or another, at one time or another. Trainers at FIT know which tools to use when, for whom and for what purpose