Weightlifting: How to train?

Weightlifting, or weightlifting, refers to a sport that demands supreme physical and mental control.

Lifting more than twice your body weight from the floor to overhead, as in the basic weightlifting exercise, is not simply about moving all the muscles in your body.

The athlete requires explosive power, absolute focus, excellent technique, and a fighting spirit.

Athletes must attempt a lift within one minute, increasing to two minutes when successive lifts are attempted.

• To do this, you will truly need a high level of physical and mental conditioning throughout.

This is about challenging yourself to maintain your pace and your ability to stay calm yet energetic while performing a lift.

How is weightlifting conducted?

In the snatch, the weight is lifted in one continuous movement, and the lifter remains still, with the arms and legs extended and the feet aligned.

In the clean and jerk,

• The lifter first raises the weight to the chest (clean),
• Then extend your arms and legs, with your feet once again aligned (jerk), without bending your elbows.

In this weightlifting movement, there must be no imbalance in the extension of the arms, and the bar must not fall during the movement.

The judges (in competitions) also penalize a lifter for starting a lift within the allotted time or for touching the platform with any part of the body other than the soles of the feet.

• Each lifter is allowed three snatch attempts and three clean and jerk attempts.

The best lift in each event is combined to determine the overall result (total), and if an athlete fails to complete a valid weightlifting lift in all three of their snatch attempts, they are eliminated and cannot proceed to the clean and jerk. In the event of a tie, the athlete who reaches the total weight first in terms of time becomes the winner.

In short, we explained how a traditional weightlifting competition is conducted, but what is it really for?

The benefits of weightlifting

Olympic lifts can be useful for developing power in other sports because they improve not only strength but also the speed at which this strength is developed.

Next, our coach from MM Fit shows you how to do a weightlifting workout with two dumbbells.

For beginners, this is not the type of training to start with because doing it safely requires very good mobility, flexibility, and balance.

In addition, it is advisable to forget about cardio until you gain experience, because fatigue reduces the quality of the repetitions, slowing down metabolic work.

Try breaking the rules.

One of the first rules we learn is that training sessions with the highest neurological demands should be performed first.

• In a workout, when the nervous system is fresh, this boosts the rest of the session.

The thing is, sometimes breaking this rule has produced excellent results for some athletes, especially explosive individuals.

Why break the rules?

There are a couple of explanations within weightlifting (and it is likely to be a combination of both);

When you perform a basic strength movement (such as the bench press and squat) with a moderate weight and lift it with maximum acceleration, you must decelerate before reaching the end of the range of motion; otherwise, you will place a lot of stress on your joints.

• The more acceleration you can produce from the start, the sooner you will need to decelerate.

It is as if you were driving a car and saw a wall 100 meters away.

• If you are driving at 40 km/h, you will not be stressed because you can take your time and brake at the last minute.
• But if you are going 160 km/h, you will need to brake much earlier.

Well, the same thing happens when lifting weights during weightlifting, because when your muscles have been fatigued before explosive work, you cannot produce as much initial acceleration, so you can accelerate for longer.

This trains your nervous system to be able to accelerate at points in the range of motion where it would normally decelerate.

• Keep in mind that speed work against bands has a similar effect.
• They allow you to keep trying to accelerate because the bands slow you down / reduce your speed.

Explosive work focuses mainly on fast-twitch fibers, and when they are fatigued, you normally have trouble stimulating them, relying more on intermediate fibers.

Doing explosive work at this point could force your body to keep using fast-twitch fibers, which will cause a little more fatigue.

Although it sounds completely illogical, it works and is worth trying because when your muscles have been fatigued before explosive work, they cannot produce as much initial acceleration, but they can accelerate for longer.