I’m not sure how old you are, but I’m going to roll the dice and assume many of you remember the late 90s when the Y2K hysteria was running rampant. The year 2000 was approaching, and society was abuzz with harebrained theories about how banking systems were going to collapse, computer networks were going to crash, and the world’s infrastructure was basically going to disintegrate when the new millennium hit. It was a heyday for conspiracy theorists and drama mongers. Nothing came of it, but it was quite the ruckus for a while.
 
That’s basically what’s going on in Olympic weightlifting right now as the new IWF bodyweight categories are looming on the horizon. I’m writing this article on June 6^th, 2018, and we’re about a month away from the public announcement of the new weight classes. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the International Weightlifting Federation is going to wipe out the current weight classes in the sport and start all new ones for both men and women.
 
Nobody knows what the new classes are going to be, and the sport is in a Y2Kish guessing game frenzy about the whole situation. Everybody is looking at their own current weight class and freaking out about how far away their new weight class is going to be. 69 kg lifters are running around in a tizzy wondering, is it gonna be 70 kg? 72 kg? 68 kg? Am I gonna get to gain a little weight, or will I have to CUT now?? Small superheavyweights who weigh 117 kg are licking their chops about a potential 115 or 120 class so they won’t have to compete against the 160 kg rhinos anymore. On and on it goes. The IWF has really kept this thing under wraps, too. Nobody has any inside information, and nothing is leaking. We’re like the earthlings looking up at the alien spaceships in the movie “Independence Day” and wondering if we’re going to get a friendly gesture from ET or a hot laser blast to the face.
 
Your bodyweight class has a tremendous impact on your career as a weightlifter. It determines how difficult your life is going to be whenever you compete, and what kind of approximate bodyweight range you need to stay in when you’re between competitions. Since the whole sport’s weight class structure is getting redone very soon, I thought it was a good time for an article about how to pick the right weight class, and when it’s time to change. If you’re a competitive lifter, you’re probably already looking at this. All you 77 kg lifters are trying to decide what to do if the new weight classes get announced as 72 kg and 84 kg. Do you go up, or go down? Where would you be more successful? Is it physically reasonable for you to drop 5-6 kg, or gain that much? This is all going to affect your life quite a bit. I know I made fun of the hysteria associated with the situation, but it’s a legitimate concern. The new classes are going to have a big impact on everybody. That’s why I think it’s a perfect time to take a look at the best way to choose the right class for you.
 
Weight Class 101
 
Everybody has a normal walking-around bodyweight. Most of us don’t gain or lose 10-15 lbs. every few days. There’s a particular number you sit at, with the usual few pounds of fluctuation from big meals, exercise, stress, etc.
 
Ideally, your weight class is going to be the one that’s closest to your normal weight, erring on the heavy side. Let me explain that a little. If you weigh yourself consistently for a period of time and you’re almost always at 91 kg (200 lbs.), your weight class should be 94 kg (208 lbs.). Why? Because the other weight class in your range is 85 kg (187 lbs.). That means you would have to lose 13-14 pounds when you want to compete. DON’T plan out your competitive career like this. It always cracks me up when newcomers start getting ready for their first competition and they look at the weight classes for the first time. They almost always pick the class that’s significantly lower than their normal bodyweight and say, “I think I can cut to…” Listen, this isn’t wrestling. You normally don’t want to cut lots of bodyweight.
 
Let’s acknowledge that there are some people who are carrying around a lot of excess bodyfat, and losing a significant amount of it is part of their overall health goal. They set their sights on getting down to the 105 kg weight class because they weigh 120 kg and they’re morbidly obese. This is fine. But this article isn’t going to focus on those situations. For the purposes of our analysis, we’re going to confine it to people with a solid basic physiology and fitness who don’t need to do a Biggest Loser kind of reduction.
 
Back to the conversation. Weightlifting is a sport where it usually pays to gain a little size. That 91 kg guy we talked about? He’s not going to cut to 85 kg. We know that. Now, his weight class is 94 kg. That means he’s walking around 3 kg (6-7 lbs.) below his class limit. The intelligent weightlifting move would be for him to gain around 3-4 kg bodyweight. He’ll be stronger with that extra mass. He’ll most likely lift bigger weights, making him a better competitor. The rule of thumb in this sport is this: you want to maximize your weight class. If your weight class is 94 kg, you should ideally walk around at 95ish kg. You keep yourself as big and strong as possible, maximizing the amount of weight you can lift in training. Then, as your competition approaches, you lose 1-2 kg (mostly water weight), make the 94 kg class, and hit some big numbers. For those of you who are new to the game, the process I just described is basically standard procedure in weightlifting.
 
At this point, somebody often pipes up and talks about how the added bodyweight will only be productive if it’s muscle weight. If it’s fat, it won’t help. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. In Olympic weightlifting, having a lot of mass under the barbell is always a good thing. Yes, obviously the ideal situation is to maximize muscle density and minimize bodyfat. That’s why all elite non-superheavyweight lifters are muscular and ripped. However, make sure you understand one thing: increased body mass will almost always have a positive impact on your performance in this sport, even if some of it is muscle weight and some of it is fat weight.
 
When we talk about fat and weight gain, many people start freaking out about appearance. They panic at the idea of gaining weight for vanity reasons. Let’s be clear about something: this is an Olympic weightlifting conversation. It’s not bodybuilding or physique. The bottom-line objective is getting the most successful competitive results in SN and C&J. All other considerations (including physical appearance) are secondary. In other words, you can’t worry too much about what you look like if you want to be great in this sport. But have no fear, weightlifting makes you look good anyway. So, you’ll be fine.
 
Back to our 91-hopefully-95ish-sometime-soon friend. So this guy is a 94 kg class competitor, and he’s walking around at a strong-as-hell 95 kg now, cutting to 94 easily for meets and getting great results. The question that always pops up at this point is, “How far above 94 should he let himself get between meets?” This is where it gets dicey. Some people would tell you it’s perfectly acceptable for this guy to let himself walk around at 97-98ish kg (or maybe even a little more) between meets. This gets done quite a bit at the highest levels. I’ve known several elite competitors who train 8-10 lbs. over their weight class limit and then cut hard in the last few weeks leading up to the meet.
 
Personally, I like to stay a little closer to the limit. I don’t like weight cuts to be hellacious factors in competition planning, and I know from experience that your body feels completely different when it’s 10 lbs. lighter. Some lifters acclimate to severe weight cuts, and they figure out a system for doing it without dropping their competition results in the toilet. Admittedly, it’s possible. But as a longtime athlete and coach, my professional opinion is that it’s going to lead to better long-term results if you stay within a kilo or two of your weight class most of the time.
 
Your height also has a lot to do with the weight class you should be in. For the sake of keeping this article short, I’m not going to delve into this area right now. But I can give you a reference. I wrote a free article that’s still on the Catalyst Athletics website called Some Advice That Changed My Whole Career. It’s all about the height-bodyweight relationship in Olympic weightlifting. Take a look at it.
 
That’s how you pick a class. What about changing?
 
With all this conversation in the background, we need to go back to where we started and ask ourselves about these new weight classes on the horizon. How are we supposed to figure out the right weight class once we know what our options are?
 
I think there’s one main question to answer here: how bad has your weight cut been for meets in the recent past? Let’s use a male 69 kg lifter as an example. Hypothetically, let’s say the new weight classes get announced in July, and there’s a 66 kg class and a 74 kg class. Which one should this 69 kg guy go to? The answer is in his normal weight cut pattern. If he walks around between meets at 72-73 kg bodyweight and then has a hell of a time cutting to 69, the 66 kg class is out of the question. We’ve got an easy answer. Go to 74.
 
But let’s say this lifter walks around normally at 68ish kg. Making weight is never a problem because he’s always underweight anyway. In this case, dropping to 66 might be a good possibility. My advice would be to have him make some small dietary cutbacks and see what happens. If he drops to 67ish quickly and with no strength decrease, you’ve got your answer. 66 is his new class.
 
Let’s say he walks around at a firm 69 kg all time, but he’s hard as a coffin nail with almost no bodyfat. Stripping off 3 kg of weight might be a sticky proposition. If he tries some food cutbacks for a reasonable period of time and he doesn’t budge from that 69 kg, my advice would be go to 74.
Here’s some personal experience. I started my career in the old 90 kg class, before the first weight class change in 1993. For my first two years, making 90 kg for meets was no problem. I usually only weighed a couple pounds over that anyway. But then I started growing (I was 20 years old). I was still eating normally, but I started finding myself walking around at 94ish kg. My coach told me it was time to go up a weight class, so I went up to the 99 kg class.
 
Interestingly, I only competed there for a year before I outgrew it, which led me to the 108 kg class. 108 was comfortable for me for three years, but then I started finding myself weighing 111-112 kg between meets. I could still make 108, but it was a mother. Then the IWF changed the weight classes again in 1997, and the 108 class dropped to 105. I knew that was too big of a drop, so I moved to superheavyweight. Within a year, I weighed 117 kg, where I did the best lifting of my career.
 
This process stretched out over nine years for me, between the ages of 17 and 26. So I was a boy growing up to manhood, and I got a lot bigger. I stayed in a weight class until it was completely obvious that I couldn’t do it anymore. Then I moved up. Simple as that.
 
It’s usually pretty obvious
 
Remember when you were a kid and you asked your mom how you know when you’re in love? She answered with, “You just know.” It’s basically the same thing here. I think it’s usually really obvious which weight class you’re supposed to be in.
 
Many of you are competitive lifters who have gotten used to a specific weight class in recent years. Some of you don’t compete, but you’re coaches, which means you’ll probably have athletes who want to compete someday, and they’ll want advice from you about weight classes. Regardless of your specific situation, it’s good to have a basic understanding.
 
We’ll see how this whole thing plays out. When the IWF has changed weight classes in the past, they’ve usually stayed fairly close to the already established ones. The original 82.5 kg class became the 83, then 85 class. The 67.5 kg class from the 70s and 80s became the 70 class, and then the 69 class. Will these new classes follow the same pattern, or will they be drastically different from what we have now? It’ll be interesting to see if some elite lifters have to make career-changing decisions. We could wind up with competitive matchups we never thought we’d see, like Lu Xiaojun and Kianoush Rostami battling head to head. These guys probably never thought they’d compete against each other (and they probably won’t), but if it goes that way, they’ll just have to do the same as the rest of us: roll with the changes. That’s really what it comes down to when we talk about moving to a different weight class. Rolling with the changes.