Conditioning For Olympic Weightlifting

Want to be a better weightlifter? One word. Conditioning.

Weightlifting isn’t a sport of unpredictability like football or baseball. In ball sports, there are theoretically an infinite number of things that can happen on the field. Training for these sports reflects that. Relative to weightlifting, ball sport athletes need to train for a number of different scenarios that they’ll encounter during competition. In weightlifting you only need to prepare for two: Snatch and Clean and Jerk.

Since there are only these two lifts, high-level athletes get extremely efficient and good at both of them. It’s the same as a football player solely focusing on his speed. If this is the only thing that he focuses on, he’s going to get significantly better. Knowing this, to get what we'd consider good, a weightlifter has to put in an inordinate amount of time only focusing on the two lifts and the qualities that improve them.

Look at the top athletes in the world of weightlifting and their training. Sure, some of their methods might not be well known, but quite a few top lifters have no problem sharing their knowledge, whether it be at any of the many Russian seminars that Klokov, Polovnikov and Ilya or guys here in the states put on. One trend that I’ve noticed among these top lifters is that they train. A lot.

These athletes are in extremely good shape and have conditioned their bodies to:

1. Recover between sets quickly; and