Lately I’ve been getting a lot of calls from athletes asking specifically for Olympic weightlifting training. They believe that focusing specifically on becoming better at the Olympic lifts (snatch, clean, and jerk) will help them become stronger, explosive, and better overall athletes. That in itself is the problem with the fitness industry, many uneducated NYC personal trainers and performance coaches see a sport and think that just because the athletes in that respective sport are explosive that they should train just like them…
The Benefits of Olympic Weightlifting for Athletes
Olympic weightlifting is a VERY explosive and an EXTREMELY technical sport. Weightlifters need to move heavy weight very fast, which can potentially help translate to explosive vertical movements. Anecdotally evidence shows that most elite weightlifters can jump pretty damn high and the nature of the lifts (triple extension) can potentially help you run a bit faster. With that said, I can see the draw for athletes to learn the lifts and hope that it’ll transfer over.
Training Olympic Weightlifting for Sport Athletes
Through my experience working as performance coach in the private sector, D1 collegiate level, and the NFL, and as a personal trainer in NYC, I don’t believe Olympic weightlifting is really all that beneficial for athletes, if you’re not a weightlifter. The main reason being is because of time constraints, most high school athletes play two or more sports, so then the off-season is significantly minimized. From the coaching stand point, if I have only a few months to train my athlete, why would spend time teaching a very technical sport that takes YEARS of training to become efficient at. Keep in mind that Olympic weightlifting is a sport in itself, so now we’re asking the athlete to learn another sport and try to gain the benefits of it as they are also learning it…The time spent trying to become efficient enough to elicit the benefits of the lifts, the athlete could’ve spent more training and building other performance attributes.
During the off-season most athletes need to work on:
- Cardiovascular energy systems
- Strength
- Power
- Speed
- Flexibility/mobility
- Skill work
If they spend their time focusing on trying to learn the sport of Olympic weightlifting, they are now spending a significant amount of training time on one skill set = vertical power output and still learning how to efficiently lift the bar. Instead of time spent learning how to do a full snatch, clean, and jerk they could’ve utilized some of the auxiliary lifts or even avoided it completely.
For example:
Vertical power: the personal trainer or performance coach could have the athlete focus on power cleans, jump shrugs, or rack clean pulls. If the trainer decides to avoid Olympic weightlifting all together, the athlete could do weighted vertical jumps, resisted band jumps, dumbbell jumps etc…
Risk of Injury
The other aspect you have to take into consideration is risk of injury. I’m a very conservative coach in this manner, as I’ve seen some athletes get injured due to improper execution of exercises. As we stated earlier Olympic weightlifting is a technical sport and also requires a good amount of mobility and flexibility. Take for example the clean above, the athlete is clearly very strong and explosive but doesn’t catch the bar in the rack position. This can POTENTIALLY cause undue stress on the wrist, which is vital for any football lineman. In my eyes, I want to minimize the amount of stress during their off-season so that the athlete can recover from an arduous season and build them back up. For this example, if the football player is constantly taking a beat on their wrist during the in-season and off-season, they won’t get to fully recover = lead into the season beat up = very bad. I don’t want to go in a long tangent about this but theres more information about the topic HERE.
With that said, I’m not judging the coach above. They have their methods and it may work well for their system. These are just my thoughts that I’ve developed over the years of coaching and training athletes and weightlifters of various levels. There are many roads that lead to success, my path is just a bit different and maybe a bit more conservative then some.
Conclusion
The take home point is that an athlete has to develop multiple skill sets while trying to minimize the total stress on the muscular skeletal system, nervous system, and mind. A good sports performance coach or personal trainer knows this and will try to find the simplest path to effectively achieve the off-season results an athlete needs. This includes developing sprint mechanics, change of direction skill, strength, explosive and reactive force development, conditioning, and mobility. To try to build on all these skills while also trying to teach the athlete the full snatch, clean, and jerk, IMO is just too difficult of a task and will deter the athletes focus away from the end goal.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t learn from other sport training, what I am saying is that you should take into consideration the total stresses on the athlete and maybe consider the simplest form, in this cause accessory movements (clean pulls, jump shrugs, power cleans, etc..). I just don’t believe the time vs. benefits of doing the full lifts vs. medicine balls, plyometric, common strength exercises etc… is really worth it. This may not sound all glamorous, but in my experience working as a personal trainer in NYC and as a strength and conditioning coach, I’ve found this focus to help me optimally choose how we develop our off-season plan for each athlete.
Find the simplest method to obtain your goals and develop your program from there.
Train smart,
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