You want to know something a lot of weightlifters have said to me over the years?

“I wish I would have started this earlier.”

With the exception of the few people I’ve known who were brought into the sport when they were in their early teens, almost everybody I’ve ever talked to has said something like this. They wish they would have started weightlifting at a younger age. It’s a sensible statement because you definitely have a better shot at being a successful lifter if you start training early in life. We’ve all seen the YouTube videos from China where girls are snatching 70 kilos at 10, and boys are doing power snatches with the bar at four. They understand that if you start training kids right after they learn to walk, you’ve got a better shot at building Olympic champions. It also helps when the kid knows his family might get shot in the head if he doesn’t lift well.

So here we are in America. In this country, things are obviously a lot different. Kids get put into sports when they’re little, but not weightlifting. Pop Warner football, Little League, T-ball, youth soccer, etc. That’s what kids get into in America, and it’s usually what they stay with. For our sport, the normal best case scenario is drawing kids into weightlifting when they’re in high school. Some fall in love with it and commit to the long haul, but unfortunately the most talented ones usually get sucked into another sport that has college scholarship opportunities. There are a few situations out there where parents who have been competitive lifters start training their kids at an early Chinese-style age, but those are fairly rare.

Then we’ve got you and your old ass.

Many of you started doing the SN and C&J when you were already grown adults in your 20s, 30s, or maybe even 40s and later. CrossFit has created a whole new wave of this. Those of you who fit this description are probably falling madly in love with the OLifts, and you wish you would have started it as a youngster…when you might have had a chance to make a serious run at the big time. I started competing in powerlifting when I was 15, and then I converted to Olifting when I was 17. That’s a late start by Chinese standards, but it’s probably way ahead of where most of you began. With this experience, I can definitely attest that it’s a huge advantage to start training and competing at a young age. But I can also tell you that this thing of ours ain’t a lost cause for you late arrivals. You’ve got some perks you might not be aware of.

I’ve written about this subject in a recent blog post on Catalyst Athletics. I’m going to assume that a lot of you read our blog as well as this magazine, so you might recognize a few things I’m going to talk about here. However, this is an important topic because the majority of you, our readers, are older. When I say older, I mean you’re not in your teens or early twenties. And those of you who happen to fall in that lucky youthful demographic are probably reading this magazine because you love lifting and you want to learn a lot about it. That means you’re probably going to want to stick with it for a while. And you’re getting older. See where I’m going with this? There’s a lot to think about when we’re talking about weightlifting, age, and training mileage. So let’s get some work done.

Our National Membership Explosion…

Man, things have changed a lot in American weightlifting over the last few years. Those of you who weren’t on the scene in the 90s or earlier have no idea what I’m talking about, so let me break it down.

10 years ago, most of the Olympic lifters in this country were young. I’m talking about teenagers and 20-somethings. You also had a decent sized masters division, which are the aforementioned lifters in their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. So you had young people and old people, and there was a big gap between these two age brackets. As a coach, one of the hardest challenges you had was keeping talented athletes in the sport after their college years were over. When our top young lifters passed that 22-23 age range, the pull towards moving on with life and starting some kind of career was pretty strong. We lost a lot of great lifters during these “lean years” and then after they were gone…there was a huge age gap in the sport. There simply weren’t a lot of weightlifters in their late 20s or 30s, relatively speaking.

And then CrossFit started. People in their 20s and 30s started pouring into these black box gyms because the overall workout approach of CrossFit was a huge hit with the public. Obviously, learning the O-Lifts was (and still is) a huge part of CrossFit. In other words, we’ve got more people in this country doing snatches and clean and jerks right now than we’ve ever had at any other point in the history of the sport. Weightlifting is popular. Weightlifting is accessible. Nike is involved in weightlifting, for God’s sake. You newbies don’t understand how much of a switch this has been. It’s insane, when you step back and look at it from a big-picture perspective.

Many of these people have developed a burning passion for weightlifting, which isn’t surprising. Almost everybody I’ve ever known who tried O-Lifting has fallen madly in love with it. Now, it’s happening at record pace. Local weightlifting meets used to have 25 to 30 lifters. Now they have 120. CrossFit is the main reason for this. A lot of old weightlifting veterans don’t like to give CrossFit credit for expanding weightlifting, but reality is what it is.

However, the massive surge in weightlifting activity isn’t in the younger ranks. If you look at our US national weightlifting meets, you’ll notice that the size of the National Junior Championships (age 20 and under) has grown, but not insanely. The meets that have really blown through the roof are the American Open and the Senior National Championships. These meets used to have 250 lifters (in a big year), and now they have 450 to 500. What does this tell us? It’s not a complicated equation to figure out. CrossFit is expanding our sport, but CrossFitters are 25, 35, 45 years old. CrossFit isn’t causing a huge surge in our younger ranks. It’s the old people who are flocking to it in droves.

So, that brings us to you. When I started weightlifting, one of the most common mantras you heard from coaches was, “Your lifting starts to slow down when you’re older. And when you pass 25, you’re old.” Many of you are either way past 25 or approaching it within the next few years, and that creates a bit of a problem. You really, really want to be a successful weightlifter, and age isn’t on your side. What the hell are we supposed to do with you?

KEEP HOPE ALIVE!

First of all, we need to talk about training programs. You see, almost all of the training literature that’s available in Olympic weightlifting is designed for young athletes who are in the physical peak of their lives. These things are written by Olympic coaches who know how to produce Olympic team members. That means their programs aren’t designed for somebody who’s 30 years old. They’re designed for somebody who’s going to lift from the ages of 13 through 26, something like that.

You people are the ones reading these training programs, and you’re trying them because that’s what the expert coaches on the internet told you to do. In other words, we’ve got a situation where a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s are trying to handle the same training volume as an athlete in their teenage years or early 20s. You’re following programs that are specifically designed for young people, and you’re probably getting your ass kicked. I can’t even tell you how many people have come to me over the last five years with this conversation:

Lifter: “I read a training program on the internet and tried to follow it, and I could barely walk after a month.”
Me: “How old are you?”
Lifter: “29.”
Me: “Let me see your program.”
(Lifter hands it to me, and I thumb through it.)
Me: “Well, this is a harder program than I was following when I was 22 years old and training full-time for the national championships. You’re 29 and you have a job.”

You can see where we’re going with this. Now, this article isn’t specifically directed at how to design effective training programs for older athletes. That’s a massive topic that I’ve written about from time to time, and I’ll continue to hit it in the future. But I can definitely tell you that if you’re older, you just can’t do as much work. You have to train less, and lighter. That’s not what you want to hear because you’re extremely motivated, but it’s the truth. That one simple concept is the whole reason why I’ve been able to continue lifting and competing successfully. I’m still an active weightlifter who can total more than most of the lifters in this country, and I’m 41. The reason I’ve been able to do this is simple…I’ve learned to back off over the years. I think many of the athletes I came up with would like to still be competing, but they’ve been driven out of the sport by injuries. The injuries probably happened because they never learned how to back off when they got older. They kept trying to train the same way they did at 22 because they thought that was the only way to be successful, and they broke. That’s my two cents on the subject.

Anyway, back to you. If you started this sport when you were in your 20s or maybe 30s (or older), you have some disadvantages. First of all, you’re trying to develop perfect technical motor patterns in the SN and C&J, which it takes a very long time to do. People like me have a big advantage over you, because we’ve been doing this for 15 to 20 years or longer. We’ve got a lot more muscle memory than you do. I’m not going to lie to you about this. It’ll be hard for you to develop world-class technical ability in the OLifts because your old body is going to demand a lot of rest breaks while you’re working on it.

But that doesn’t mean you’re screwed. In fact, there are some ways that you might have an advantage over veterans like me. I’m talking about the concept of iron mileage. I’ve been lifting for 26 years, so my body has a lot of iron mileage on it. Many of those years were at the national level, which means the training was very high-intensity and demanding. I snatched over 300 lbs for 15 consecutive years (1994-2009). That kind of activity takes a toll on you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hobbling around in pain or anything like that, but I’ve definitely passed my physical peak in Olympic weightlifting. I can still do it, but I’ll never be as good as I was fifteen years ago. You, on the other hand, just started this recently and you don’t have the kind of mileage I do. That means you’ve got the best lifting of your life ahead of you, not behind you. Are you going to lift enough to make an Olympic team? I don’t know, probably not. But do you have a long road of personal records ahead of you that might stretch into your old age? Yeah, I think you do.

Actually, I KNOW you do…

You learn a lot about this sport when you’ve been doing it for 20 years, especially when you’ve had time periods of huge success and frustrating failure. One of the main things I’ve learned is that your whole experience in it will have to start with a decision.

Are you going to be a weightlifter, or not? Make a decision. If the answer is no, none of this matters. Move on with your life. If your life is going to include coaching, then it’s important that you continue to learn, especially considering the fact that many of your athletes will be older in this day and age. But if you want to hang it up as an athlete, it’s understandable.

If your decision goes the other way, and you choose to commit to weightlifting, then you’ll need to have a “failure is not an option” mentality about it. You understand that you’ll take your lumps from time to time, but the possibility of giving up before you accomplish what you set out to do…that’s not part of the picture.

You didn’t get pulled into this sport when you were a little kid. So be it. Would you have been a national champion if you would have started young and been coached well? Maybe, but that’s not the discussion that matters. What you have to be thinking about is HOW you’re going to be a successful lifter in these older years you find yourself in. I can tell you with certainty that it’ll require patience and a willingness to admit the limitations your age is putting on you. But when you learn how to work within those limitations, and you start to apply some creative thinking to your own training, the ball will start rolling.

I’m never going to set another lifetime PR. I know that. But many of you are, and it might happen at a later age than you once thought possible. That, brothers and sisters, will be a pretty great feeling.