The Science and Pseudoscience of the Olympic Lifts

An understanding of Olympic lifting is helpful but not truly required for the following. Some attempts are made to accommodate the less initiated.

 

The clean and snatch are not mere weightlifting exercises--but athletic events. Explosiveness, speed, flexibility, and coordination all contribute to proficiency, especially in the “full” versions of the lifts (that is, if achieved by squatting under the bar). Unlike bodybuilding—and to some extent “power”-lifting—it is not at all a stretch to call Olympic-lifting a sport. However, the all-too inevitable aggrandizements of the sport's practitioners have led to the misconception they require more skill and general athleticism than is the case. While in some ways this outlook may motivate O-lifters and provide other psychological benefits, it doesn’t make it entirely correct, nor does it make it a useful outlook for conventional athletes performing the lifts for general strength-training purposes. These aggrandizements coupled with epidemic deficiencies in “thinking” have led to the misbelief that the lifts are “learned skills” mastered by learning proper form with progressively heavier weights beginning with a broomstick or empty bar. Some learning is involved, of course, but what athletes are really mastering is a specialized form of athleticism.     

 

I’ll expound a few conceptions and definitions before proceeding. 

 

Force and strength can be considered synonymous. Net force is mass times acceleration; contact force, measured by stress-strain analysis, is Newton’s equal and opposite force and can be thought of as the “internal force” produced by the body. Technically, due to Newton’s third law, a transferred force is always countered by an equal and opposite force,resistance is determined by the LIFTER, not the weight. Muscles, like ropes, require optimal tension to pull at full force; just as you can’t pull hard on a rope if it’s slack, the muscles can’t produce maximal force without optimal tension. This explains why you can’t pull hard on a swiftly moving bar. Consequently, you can only pull at maximum force on a light load for a spilt second; afterwards, the bar is moving too quickly to maintain optimal tension. Lifting at lower gravity, for example, would allow for greater internal forces than high G because you get a lower acceleration for the same net force, and greater tension throughout the pull.  

 

Explosiveness is the athlete’s ability to maximize force output in this split second. It is generally measured by power output. 

 

There are two other ways to think of explosiveness that might be more useful, even if not entirely correct: 

 

One: If quickness is the ability to move your OWN BODY quickly; explosiveness is, or can be THOUGHT OF, as the ability to move ANOTHER OBJECT quickly relative to one’s strength. An explosive lifter can deadlift half his max faster than a lifter with the same max. There’s much advantage to generating force quickly in sport, and cleans and snatches provide the neuromuscular adaptions that make it possible. An explosive wrestler holding his opponent’s leg has a better chance of lifting him off the mat in the split second before his opponent counters. An offensive lineman needs to push a defensive tackle as far off the line as he can in roughly a second—it doesn’t matter how far he can push him in half a minute. Two: The ability to produce excess momentum—and, thus, force--through a given range of motion relative to max throughout that range. Explosiveness is relevant to the O-lifts because the lifter must subject the bar to an acceleration—and, therefore, a force—that exceeds what would be necessary to simply lift the bar to the upper abdomen.

 

Although it’s often difficult to distinguish between quickness and explosiveness, for explosiveness to come into play, the athlete must transfer a force to a foreign object, which can include the ground, and a human can’t transfer a force without being in contact with the object. 

 

Because muscle tension is higher when the bar is moving slowly, contact and internal force are, likewise, higher. Some have used this to justify slow-lifting, including for athletes (bodybuilders do, and should, perform exercises with varying speeds). But PEAK forces are higher when the athlete lifts at a “natural speed,” and they can do additional reps, which are necessarily slower because the lifter’s nearing exhaustion. Moreover, athletes that require power-output don’t restrain: Wrestles don’t wrestle slow; football players don’t block or tackle slow. The default assumption is that you should train how you compete. An isokinetic machine, a machine that ensures the bar moves slowly regardless of contact force, allows an athlete to pull at maximal force and without restraint for extended durations. In an isokinetic machine, the idea that the lifter determines resistance due to the third law is no longer a technicality.            

 

 

Just because two things look the same or are CALLED the same thing doesn’t necessarily mean they are the same. In wrestling and martial arts, skill is very much involved and certain types of drilling are necessary. But loosely similar misconceptions occur in wrestling as in O-lifting. Suppose a novice grappler wants to master a type of leg attack. This first requires practice and the learning of a skill. Assuming this is successful, however, further proficiency no longer requires improvement in the athlete’s execution of the move itself, but rather his ability to REACT TO HIS OPPONENT. But the relevant actions of the opponent are too subtle for a DRILL PARTNER to simulate. In other words, drilling the move after a wrestler’s learned it ISN’T practicing the necessary process.             

 

Likewise, doing “cleans” with light weights ISN’T practicing cleans. The former is not, in other words, simply doing cleans only more consciously and less “intensively.” Even disregarding the psychological differences, they’re both physically and mentally different and involve distinctly different cognitive and neuromuscular mechanisms. As loads increase, they probably become DISPROPORTIONALLY or nonlinearly different. It might not even be physically possible for an advanced lifter to fully trigger these mechanisms with loads below a certain threshold. 

 

Unlike in martial arts, this can come with a cost: Having athletes doing light loads to work on form trains their minds and neuromuscular systems to think that (minus the obvious differences) doing heavy loads and light loads are the same thing. This leads to confusion and inhibition. In my experience, in general and with MYSELF, the effects of overcoaching a clean or snatch with a distinct push-pull can be PERMANENT*. I can’t do a push-pull clean for this reason, even though I can do an ideal snatch. I either deadlift the bar, stop completely (as opposed to merely slow down), pull my shoulders over the bar, and pull; or a do a one-motion or strength clean. The one-motion clean or “strength clean” is still a perfectly legitimate and safe exercise, which is often performed supplementarily by O-lifters, and can easily evolve into a proper-pull with sufficient practice.

      *A push-pull clean is when the lifter slows the bar down when it gets a few inches above his knees and positions his shoulders forward, allowing his back to make a greater contribution to the pull. This does slow the bar down, requiring a more forceful pull to achieve the necessary momentum to complete the lift, but the lifter can pull harder on a slower bar, as explained.   

  

Coaches also don’t fully appreciate that the physical differences between the beginner and the advanced lifter are not just that the latter is stronger in the relevant ways: They have different strength PROPORTIONS, and advanced lifters can produce force more quickly (they’re more explosive). 

 

The “proper form” is proper because it exploits the proportionally stronger muscles/motions, but the strength proportionality of the proper pulling action verses the “muscling-action” of the cheat-reverse curl/upright row demonstrated by novice’s is far greater for the advanced lifter. Cleans may improve a lifter’s reverse curl, upright row, and front raise some but still measurably less than the pulling action. Moreover, advanced lifters usually have more experience back-squatting. This not only makes the legs stronger, adding power to the pull; it also makes the legs more “neuromuscularly activate,” making the lifter’s unconscious more inclined to call upon them. 

 

Thus, advanced lifters can produce more excess momentum in the pulling action relative to their max force output, and if they fail to produce sufficient excess force with a heavy load, it’s impossible to “muscle it” the rest of the way, simply because they aren’t strong enough. The beginner is less able to produce excess momentum but is comparatively much better at muscling the pull. At minimum, this makes the muscle-action a markedly LESS INEFFECTIVE way to perform the clean.

 

Therefore, the manifestation of “proper form” shouldn’t be thought of as a learned skill (or only secondarily so), but rather the successful cultivation of a specialized form of athleticism. An athlete with good form has “athletically mastered” the clean.

 

 

The misbelief that these are learned skills and/or involve more athletic traits than is the case have led some to falsely believe that multiple workouts per day are necessary to optimally train them. That is complete horseshit. Even if it were a learned skill, it’d be aggrandizement and superstition at best and at worst a delusion of grandeur. The primary justification for multiple training sessions is that the O-lifts require more nervous system adaptions than other lifts, and less from the muscles. Neural structures that fire together wire together, as the old cliché goes. Supposedly, this is best achieved by maximizing the number of cleans, jerks, and snatches above a certain percentage of max performed per week; and this is best achieved, in turn, by multiple training sessions, while all other exercises like squatting are scheduled to accommodate it. 

 

While this was not something I was fully aware of when I was in my prime, I can honestly say that at the time, lifting twice a day only seemed to make sense psychologically—in other words, I liked the IDEA of having more workouts, and it made training more exciting. On the negative side, training twice a day or more is presumed to come with the cost of your best lifts/sets of the week, due to greater fatigue and/or the need to save energy for subsequent workouts. You might get more shocks to the body with more sessions, but the greatest individual shocks are less. Secondly, you get more rest when only doing single sessions. It’s easy to forget that working out only ELICITS strength increases; you only GET stronger when you REST. Although weightlifting and powerlifting are far more different than most people think, there certainly isn’t zero similarity, either--it’s not like the O-lifts don’t involve the muscles—and powerlifters often only bench twice a WEEK, squat once, and deadlift every TWO. If the quality of a training program is based on number of shocks above a certain threshold, the highest/best shocks over that threshold, and rest--single sessions are better in two out of three. My intuition told me the cost of more workouts outweighed the gain (there were, however, additional issues I had at the time that may have muddied my perspective that I won’t elaborate on).   

Thus, I offer a much simpler, alternative explanation (or partial explanation) for multiple training sessions (that appears to sufficiently explains the facts and carries a sufficiently small number of assumptions): Full-time athletes and coaches ENJOY working out more than once a day. Unlike the ridiculous bodybuilders, these guys don’t have a Venice Beach to strut around (and don’t look as good and, fortunately, aren’t as vain, besides). What the hell do you do all day? Although there may be plenty of room for criticism in this case, like most well-adjusted people, they spend their time doing what they think is productive and enjoyable and use whatever justifications suit their purposes. The aggrandizement of one’s activities and methods are a normal part of human motivation (though one should be careful not to allow aggrandizement to become delusion). These statements are more cynical than derisive. Even some of the most profound endeavors are driven by mundane and petty motives, and everyone has a strong—if not absolute—tendency to follow the path of least resistance in one way or another. “Good” and “bad” motives are not only far from mutually exclusive—they’re the norm. Bishko and I might have had legitimate reasons for creating our respective reasoning systems, but we’ve always been heavily motivated by petty vengeance on those who’ve insulted our intellects.    

 

The rules of logic make clear you can base any number of truthful premises on an ultimately false or fallacious conclusion. The fact that a great many things are and are not known about the human body makes it all too easy to come up with arguments to justify all sorts of things. Clearly, O-lifters’ PACKAGE of methods work, but that doesn’t mean all the PARTS work, or that some aren’t detracting. This is especially true if everyone makes the same mistakes—nobody has a net disadvantage, and no one gets exposed. 

 

Additionally, there may be a survivor’s bias. It’s quite possible that many beginners quit because of training flaws, especially the results of overcoaching on form, and the coaches attribute it to any one or combination of the typical reasons athletes quit—laziness, indiscipline, disinterest, lack of talent, or whatever else. 

 

At 43 and now well-aware that I’m nothing more than an eccentric philosopher, I generally steer clear of direct involvement in practical affairs like training athletes, especially competitive weightlifters. As Yoga Bara said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they’re different.” If I were forced to recommend a means of teaching a prospective O-lifter a proper power clean, however, I would have him do cleans off the floor giving minimal instruction (so long as it was safe); in addition to cleans from the elevation where he’d start in proper pulling position. The hope would be that his clean from the floor would evolve into a push-pull on its own. Bishko and I used to have guys pausing at the pull on some reps to encourage the necessary slow down before the pull; but too often, this leads, as it did with me, to a habit of simply stopping, which makes the clean harder than the one-motion “strength clean.” 

 

For conventional athletes, the push-pull is only the ideal clean; if they never evolve past a one-motion clean, I don’t think it particularly matters—and if you disagree, you can have them do cleans off the evaluation or the hang in addition to the floor. While I think doing a variety of cleans and snatches is optimal (e.g., from the floor, hang, etc.), what’s paramount is that they do at least one variation of the clean or snatch that they enjoy and are improving at--anything more is just a bonus. Although I disagree, some strength coaches think the one-motion clean is better for football players. In Florida, where weightlifting (the bench press and clean and jerk) is a varsity sport designed to encourage football players to lift, there was at least a period where the push-pull was banned.       

 

With respect to form, there is room for doubt in my mind. When Bishko and I taught cleans, we may have made communicational errors. Concomitant information, as he called it, is the information you convey by the very fact you chose to say what you said or do what you did. Content information is simply what you say at face value. Inconsistences in communication, like inconsistences in content and concomitant information, lead to miscommunications and confusion. When we taught, we TOLD athletes form wasn’t very sophisticated and that you just need practice along with commonsensical pointers from the coaches; yet we spent the whole time analyzing every lift, giving advice, and speaking with very analytical tones of voice. I’ve watched other coaches give instructions without sounding nearly as analytical. Our inconsistences may have been the cause, or partial cause, of our failures.  

 

 

Beliefs have many attractive properties other than correctness and straightforward efficacy. Beliefs that are gratifying, motivating, glamorous, marketable, avoid litigation, fit well in learning structures, and reinforce other beliefs are often more robust and easier to find. One should not underestimate the importance of a field’s self-correctivity--that is, their ability to evolve correct beliefs/methods through competition and cooperation. The rigors of testing, social incentives like supervision from authorities and competition (along with cooperation), the absence of the need to market to potential clients, and lack of certain psychological factors are what’s allowed science and engineering to prosper as much as anything else. But the self-correctivity of science and engineering isn’t perfect, nor is that of sports. And personal training is light-years from as self-corrective as they are.