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Originally Posted by Dan.Linehan  2. Olympic style weight lifting for strength and bulk.
There are only two lifts in Olympic style weight lifting, the "snatch" and the "clean and jerk." Both utilize the whole body as a pose to isolating one or two particular muscles at a time. These lifts are considered much more natural than many other exercises, and they go back a long time, for example, the bench press only came into popularity in the sixties, but lifters in the thirties and fourties all used overhead presses as a measure of strength. These lifts are very popular overseas, but have not taken off in the US as much.
There are very few injurys in the sport for a couple reasons. First, technique is heavily emphasized from the get go: how much you can lift is always secondary to good form. A friend of mine has been lifting in this style for a year now and says he only now fully understands all the technical aspects that he needs to. Second, the weight that you press overhead is distributed over dozens of muscles, joints and bones while doing the lift. You are not isolating weight onto one joint or bone repeatedly, which causes wear and damage. If your body as a whole cannot lift the weight, well, then you drop it. On each attempt all of your muscles work as a team, and fail as a team, it's very difficult to blow out one muscle or joint with this approach.
It's ideal to work out only 2 or 3 days a week on this system; which is nice as I don't really want to burn hours upon hours at the gym doing a million isolation exercises. Since everything gets worked out at once you don't need to do the variety of things normally included in a fitness routine. Hopefully, a few hours a week will be enough to show results. |
Nice Glad to see you are doing o-lifting. I myself do olympic weightlifting. I also have an olifting website, you can check the profile for it. Weightlifting was popular in the 50s, 60s, but then bodybuilding and machines took off later and weightlifting was cast to the back.
Yeah, there are very few injuries because of the emphasis on technique and lifters are taught how to fail a lift correctly. Actually there really is no "pressing" per say, rather it's more of a leg drive, pushing the body under the bar, and locking out. But shoulder strength needs to be strong enough to support the weight overhead.
Also knowing the biomechanics behind the lifts really helps with progress.
There are also different training methods too, such as Soviet style, bulgarian, american bulgarian, etc. Very fun and interesting sport, extremely popular in foreign countries, ie Greece, Iran, etc.
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2) I don't think that you're going to see "bulk" obtained from the Olympics lifts. The Olympics lifts primarily stress fast-switch muscle tissue and will be great for building althetic explosiveness and agility. To get larger muscle gain, you'll still need to factor in some traditional weight training exercises. The squat is a classic, but it's probably the most effective in terms of stressing multiple, major muscle groups.
When you watch the Olympic lifters, you'll see that a majority of their bulk is in their legs and abs (yes, underneath that seemingly beer belly are massive abs, at least at the elite heavyweight level). They do a lot of core front squats and dead lifts to give their body the fundamental support to carry such heavy weights.
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Well in order to improve in the classic lifts assistance exercises such as pulls, back squats, front squats, overhead squats must be done. Most weightlifters practice pulls instead of deadlifts though. Actually, fast twitch muscle fibers have the greatest hypertrophy potential.