Olympic Lifting. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Part 1

There seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to training for sports. And why wouldn’t there be? With all the different information out there, who really knows the truth behind the madness?

One of the biggest debates is whether or not you should be doing Olympic lifts like the clean and snatch to develop power. Some say absolutely, some say hell no.

I’m here to try to break this shit down for you guys and try to simplify things a bit.

Hey, I’m a pretty simple guy after all.

I’d like to start off by saying Olympic lifts like the clean are tremendous exercises for developing power and putting on slabs of muscle. These full body movements can really benefit any athlete. That is, however, if they are done properly.

You see, if you walk into most high school and even college weight rooms (with the exception of the schools that have tremendous strength coaches who I greatly respect), most coaches are utilizing these lifts for their athletes without really even knowing how to do them themselves. Most kids are competitive by nature and continuously put more and more weight on the bar, trying to outdo each other. Coaches of course love this type of environment, and hey, who doesn’t love some good competition?

The problem is that not only will these athletes not benefit from doing these exercises with shit form, but they are actually setting themselves up for injury. When you do these movements wrong they will put a shit load of stress on the wrists, shoulders and elbows and can actually damage the soft tissue in the joints, which in essence can set them up for more frequent injuries on the field or worse, in the weight room!

Unfortunately, most coaches can’t spot these flaws in technique, and will encourage the athletes to keep increasing weight. That’s not a knock on coaches who are probably great at coaching their sport, they just aren’t strength coaches.

So what can be done to maximize an athlete’s explosiveness without putting them at a great risk for injury? Glad you asked!

In my opinion, if you don’t have the right strength coaches to teach and coach Olympic lifting, you should use different jumping and throwing variations.

There are a ton of variations out there that create extreme power development and are far safer than Olympic lifts.

These explosive movements include the vertical jump, broad jump, box jump, squat jumps, overhead medicine ball throws, med ball slams and med ball soccer throws to name a few.

There aren’t many exercises that require more explosive power than a vertical jump. And the huge plus is just about anyone can do all of these movements!

Another incentive is that it takes about 1/8 of the time to teach jumps and throws then it does to teach a proper clean.

And this doesn’t just go for athletes. Anyone can benefit from training explosively and should start adding jumps and throws into their program. Just ease your way into the jumps if you haven’t been doing anything like that in a while.

Again, I want to remind you that I think OLYMPIC LIFTING IS GREAT, IF YOU’RE FORM IS CLOSE TO PERFECT. If you don’t have a qualified coach to teach you, then you are far better off with jumps and throws.

I personally think that if you have a limited time to prepare an athlete for their season, and can create enormous power development by jumping and throwing, then why waste so much time trying to perfect Olympic lifts? It is certainly more time efficient to get an athlete ready by using the alternative.

After all, Olympic lifting is a sport in itself.

I hope this eliminates some of the confusion out there. Stay tuned for part 2 of this post to learn how to maximize power development in your workouts!

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Train hard. Train smart.