My grandfather tells me that Adolph Hitler is still alive. In fact, my grandfather knows exactly where he lives.

One of the men I work with tells me that George Bush personally planned the 9/11 attacks, all the way down to the hiring of the terrorists who hijacked the planes.

A weightlifter I used to train with once told me that my elbows would feel better if I found a way to hook them up to a car battery between workouts.

One of my uncles once told me that you should never marry somebody who is better looking than you are.

I believe one of those statements is true, and I think the rest of them are all pig vomit. But the longer you live and the more people you meet in the world, the more pieces of information you’ll hear. Some of them will make a lot of sense and you’ll believe them right away. Others will sound so stupid that you immediately classify them as false. And then there are the occasional tidbits that you’re not entirely sure about. They definitely sound a little shaky, but there is enough sense in them to give you pause and stick an ongoing question into your brain.

Weightlifting is, without a doubt, a sport where you will hear a lot of these tidbits. First of all, you have to know that almost everybody you meet in weightlifting will consider themselves an expert on it. The ones with more years and experience in the sport will often think that only they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is retarded. In any case, you will never, ever have trouble finding a weightlifter who isn’t willing to tell you everything you need to know about training, competing, how to fix US Weightlifting, how to beat the Chinese, how to file your taxes, how to keep from losing your hair, how to win the Super Bowl, etc. Our sport is the mother ship of mental giants who can fix your life if you’ll just listen to them and learn.

Knowing this, we can use this article to throw out a few popular weightlifting ideas and classify them as fact or fiction. I am absolutely not going to try to convince any of you that I have all the answers on everything. I’ll even go a step further and admit that there are a few areas where I’m as clueless as a sorority girl at a Mensa convention. Being handsome is a mystery to me, for example. Hell, I was just born that way. I don’t know how it happens. However, being a weightlifter for many years has given me the chance to know a thing or two about a thing or two. So here we go...

FACT VS. FICTION

Statement- Bulgarian weightlifters don’t use pulls as part of their training. Fact or fiction?

Fiction- Some of the Bulgarian lifters use pulls in their training. There has been a common conception about the Bulgarian method over the years. Most people believe that their approach is completely stripped down to using the snatch, clean and jerk, and front squat in training. No assistance exercises, almost no back squats, no pulls, etc. This is what you frequently hear when you read weightlifting forums on the internet. One of the reasons people think this is true is that there are several training hall videos of the Bulgarians available through Randall Strossen’s IronMind company and, in most of those videos, you only see the Bulgarians performing the competition lifts, the front squat, and the back squat. Right away, that dispels the front-squat-only myth about them. Every Bulgarian training video I have ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them, shows a lot of back squatting. And in regards to the no-pulls myth, Strossen has a Bulgarian training video available on IronMind that shows Zlatan Vanev doing snatch pulls in the training hall of the 1996 Olympics. Apparently, they do use pulls in their training. It might very well be true that the Bulgarians don’t use pulls with much frequency. But many lifting enthusiasts take this idea and run with it, eliminating pulls from their training because “that’s how the Bulgarians do it, and the Bulgarians are the best!” Because it’s in my nature to be “skeptical up the receptacle” as Don King once said, I’ll suggest that the Bulgarians probably do a lot of things that aren’t necessarily a good idea for every weightlifter. I certainly wouldn’t take their advice on how to pass a drug test, for example. Their methods have produced some of the most phenomenal results in the history of our sport. There is no denying that. But there is also no denying the fact that the Bulgarians have a dark side to their training that has led to some of the most shameful controversies in the history of our sport. I think it’s important to look at all the angles when thinking about how to train. Bulgarian weightlifting has more angles than an architectural textbook.

Statement- It’s better to lift without the use of any supportive equipment (wrist wraps, belts, knee sleeves). Fact or fiction?

Fact- But this one has an asterisk next to it. Most lifters begin their training, or should begin their training, wearing only their workout clothes and a pair of weightlifting shoes. If the lifter continues to train and time goes by and the lifter never feels any soreness in the wrists, back or knees, then there is no need to add any equipment. Now, this is the real world and it has to be acknowledged that their will be times in many weightlifters’ careers when they develop this soreness and stiffness in these areas; when these pains surface, using wrist wraps, Rehbands knee sleeves, or a weightlifting belt can allow the lifter to continue to train. There is nothing wrong with this. At different times in my career, I have used all of these pieces of equipment. There were times when my wrists were so sore that I don’t think I could have made it through the workouts without wrist wraps. However, lifters should also be willing to get rid of equipment when they don’t need it anymore. After a few years, I decided to stop using wrist wraps and my wrists were fine without them. I also used to wear knee sleeves, and then I eventually stopped using them. Now, I’m thirty-six and the only equipment I use is a belt when I do heavy squats or clean and jerks. I don’t wear anything when I snatch. Interestingly, my body actually feels better now than it did back when I was using more equipment. The image that pops into my head is watching Ronny Weller compete at the 2000 Olympics. For those of you who don’t know, Weller is one of the legendary lifters of our sport and his list of major injuries throughout his career would make you cringe. But there he stood in 2000, at thirty-one years of age, snatching 210 and totaling 467.5 wearing nothing but his lifting suit, a t-shirt, and his shoes. He found a way to train without equipment. Now, he was beaten at that Olympics by Hossein Rezazedeh, who was wearing a belt, wrist wraps, and knee wraps. Which method is the correct one? Neither. One lifter needed to use equipment and the other one didn’t. If you don’t need it, don’t wear it. If you need it, wear it. Just don’t be afraid to get rid of it if you find that you can.


Statement- Upper body pressing strength is important for jerking successfully. Fact or fiction?

Fiction- The jerk is dependent on the strength and power of the lower body, not the deltoids, triceps, etc.. Using the muscles of the legs, hips, and core to drive the bar off the shoulders is the secret to jerking. In fact, many elite lifters do not have phenomenal pressing strength because they don’t use presses in training. Overhead pressing can be a useful supplemental exercise and having a strong upper body is certainly going to be a benefit to any strength athlete. (Let’s never forget what we’re doing here. We’re lifting weights. Being strong is a good thing.) However, relying on the muscles of the upper body to elevate the bar in the jerk is a recipe for failure. I once had a conversation with Wes Barnett about pressing strength. Wes had a best official clean and jerk of 220 kilos and my best was 185. I used military presses (strict form) in training occasionally and I mentioned that the top press I could do was 105 kilos. Interestingly, Wes told me that his top press was probably around the same weight. 105 kilos/231 pounds is not impressive pressing strength when you consider that many elite bench pressers can do strict military presses with over 300 pounds. But I was able to jerk over 400 pounds and Wes could do close to 500 pounds because of technique, speed, and power from the lower body.

Statement- Many of the top lifters in the world squat with lighter weights than the massive poundages you hear rumors about. Fact or fiction?

Fact- Most of the rumors you hear about the squatting numbers of the best lifters in the world are greatly exaggerated. When I began weightlifting, I was told by one of the top US lifters of the time that Soviet world champion Alexander Kurlovich could front squat 400 kilos for two reps. This was a lifter who had been on some international trips to Europe and rubbed elbows with the world champions, so he definitely seemed like a knowledgeable source. Years later, I read an interview with Kurlovich himself where he stated that his top back squat was 350 kilos. Now, 350 kilos is 771 pounds. By any standard, this is a jaw-dropping amount of weight, especially when you consider the strict form and depth used by the world’s top Olympic Lifters. However, a 350 kilo back squat is much different from the 400x2 front squat that I originally heard about from Kurlovich. This same exaggeration exposure has happened with Leonid Taranenko and Anatoly Pisarenko when they candidly reported their top back squats. These men don’t circulate misinformation. Misinformation gets circulated by others on their behalf. Pisarenko, interestingly, has one of the highest clean and jerks in history (265 kilos) and he has personally stated that he rarely squatted with heavier weights than he could clean and jerk. This is not to say that leg strength is unimportant, obviously. Leg strength is one of the most critical factors in weightlifting success. Any expert would agree to that. However, the common notion among the weightlifting crowd is that the top Olympic Lifters in the world can regularly squat weights that are in excess of the squat world records from powerlifting. This is not true. If you travel to Russia and visit a national training center, you will see some insanely strong weightlifters who have some of the most powerful legs in the world. But many Americans believe that those Russian lifters are loading the bar up to 900 pounds on a daily basis and knocking out sets of three like they’re doing deep knee bends with a broomstick. This is simply not true.

And there’s more where that came from...

This article would be longer than Gone With the Wind if we threw every weightlifting rumor we’ve ever heard on the table. Even if you’re a relative newbie in the sport, you’ve most likely come across some pretty substantial eyebrow-raisers. The tricky thing about these little chunks of information is that all of them have a devoted faithful following. Every misconception is gospel truth to somebody. Try convincing my grandpa that Hitler is dead. See where that gets you. Or better yet, try approaching some of the old-timers you meet at weightlifting meets and tell them that upper body strength is not crucial to weightlifting success. These are the senior members of our crowd who used to watch ABC Wide World of Sports when Serge Reding and Vasily Alexeev were pressing (if you want to call what they did back then “presses”) over 500 pounds and dagnabit, those guys were the REAL weightlifters, sonny! Even as this article comes to a close, I’m positive that somebody who reads it is going to seriously disagree with one of the claims I’ve made. And it’s fine if we disagree. Because unlike many of my weightlifting brethren, I’m not the definitive expert on every subject under the sun. I mean really...I married a woman who is much better looking than me. What do I know about anything?