It’s the summer of 2019, and the international weightlifting scene is red hot. Athletes from all around the world are starting to put together their highest results in preparation for 2020 Olympic qualification. In decades past, this wasn’t always a particularly exciting time in US weightlifting because, frankly, we’ve often been too far behind the pack for the Olympic picture to really apply to us. Our top American lifters have usually been significantly out of medal range at the international level, so we’ve had to content ourselves with hoping to grab a few table-scrap Olympic qualification spots, maybe sending one or two men and three or four women to the Games.
 
But now, it’s all different. In case you’ve missed it, the US has been steadily emerging back to a position of importance on the international scene. Lifters like CJ Cummings, Mattie Rogers, Sarah Robles, and Harrison Maurus have been the spark plugs for Team USA, hauling in World Championship medals, breaking records, and establishing themselves among the international elite. More recently, a young firecracker named Kate Nye has joined the fun, winning the Pan Am Championships, destroying our entire US record book, and being crowned Best Lifter at the 2019 Junior Worlds, where our women won the team championship and the guys were second.
 
In short, American weightlifting is a legitimate force now. We haven’t pulled even with China and Iran at the senior level, but we’re on the rise with a bullet. It’s a welcome difference from years past.
 
But the medals and results aren’t the only change I’m noticing with Team USA’s top athletes. There’s another big difference from the old days that not many people seem to be talking about.
It’s caught my attention, so I’m going to address it in this article.
 
I’m talking about how OFTEN many of our best weightlifters are competing these days. Take Kate Nye, for example. She turned in a dominant victory at the 2019 Pan Am Championships, breaking all US records in her weight class. That was in the last week of April. Then she won the Junior Worlds with even more records in the first week of June. Next month (end of July), she’s going to compete in the Pan Am Games. Later in the year, she’ll obviously lift in the World Championships (last week in September). That’s four top international competitions in a span of six months, with peak performances at each one. And Kate isn’t the only US lifter competing with this kind of frequency. Over the last few years, this has become fairly common with our elite Americans.
 
This is much different from how things have been done in the past. Typically, an elite lifter only does two or three peak competitions each year (often just twice with uber-elites). Both nationally and internationally, this has been the norm. Hitting your best stuff and smashing records four times in six or seven months isn’t standard procedure in international weightlifting.
 
I want to address this situation from two different angles: caution and curiosity. It’s not a typical method of structuring a weightlifter’s competition year, and I honestly don’t know if it’s good or bad. I’m still making up my mind about it. Coincidentally, it’s a great topic for this magazine because most of you are athletes or coaches (or both), so the question of “how often should we compete” is an important one. It’s one of those things that can have an enormous impact on your career, so let’s take a look.
 
Standard Procedure
 
First, we’ll examine the basic traditional guidelines for how often an Olympic weightlifter should compete. In the early years of a lifter’s career, five or six meets per year is pretty normal. At this stage, the athletes need a lot of platform time. Competing is a skill unto itself, and the only way you can get really good at it is to do it a lot. Nothing complicated there. If you want to master the snatch, you have to do lots of snatches. If you want to master the competition platform, you have to lift in a lot of meets. Plus, lifters in the beginner/intermediate stages aren’t lifting heavy enough weights to wreck them physically. Their skill level isn’t advanced enough to lift weights that will beat up their bodies, so they can recover quickly. I competed in five or six meets every year for at least my first five years. Most advanced lifters have done it the same way. It’s pretty common.
 
And as the lifters develop, the weights get heavier and (hopefully) their competitive level moves up. If you have a lifter who’s been competing for six or seven years and now qualifies to lift at the national (or maybe international) level, peak competition frequency usually decreases. Let’s look at the best of the best as an example: the European and Asian lifters we see winning the Worlds and Olympics. The normal pattern for these lifters is to peak twice a year. In the spring, they lift in a continental meet like the European Championship or Asian Games. Then in the fall, they compete in the World Championship. These are the two meets where they’ll go for their highest level of performance, attempting to break records and win medals.
 
It’s not uncommon for these lifters to compete in maybe one or two additional meets during the year, but they usually aren’t going to be peak performance situations. In these extra meets, they’ll generally lift weights that are much closer to their normal training level. For example, many elite European lifters have often gone to Germany to compete in the Bundesliga during the summer. The Bundesliga is a sports league that runs throughout the year, and there’s good money available. A lot of top Europeans compete in it simply to make some extra dough. However, the weights they lift in these meets are normally well below their maxes. Let’s say you’ve got a world-level superheavyweight male who can snatch 210 kg and clean and jerk 250 kg. If he lifts in a Bundesliga meet and hits 195/235, he makes some cash and doesn’t have to lift weights heavy enough to wreck him physically. 195/235 is probably his normal training range anyway, so it’s just like a day at the office.
 
Essentially, you’ve got a system where an advanced weightlifter builds up to a peak level two or three times a year. Any additional competitions are going to be “training meets” where they lift the same weights they’d be hitting in the gym anyway. This is how it normally gets done in our sport.
 
WHY does it get done this way? Risk of injury, mainly. When you’re a beginner, you’re not lifting weights that will hurt you. A 70 kg female who snatches 65 kg isn’t going to be at a significant injury risk, aside from the normal minor strains and tendonitis that we all deal with. But when you’re talking about a 70 kg female who snatches 105 kg, it’s different. That’s a ton of weight, and there’s obviously higher risk of injury. You want to use some intelligence and careful planning with how often you peak an athlete like this.
 
The more often you go for peak performances at this level, the more often you’re rolling the dice. Now, it must be understood that elite lifters train very close to their peak levels most of the time anyway. If you’ve got a 70 kg female who snatches 105 kg, 95-100 kg is a normal day in the gym. When I was doing my top lifting, my personal record snatch was 155 kg. During this time period, 145 kg was a weekly minimum. I probably hit 150 kg at least twice a month during serious phases. I also trained in a gym with several other national/international lifters, and their working level was the same as mine. So when we’re talking about “peaking” an elite lifter, we’re not talking about athletes who spend their training year working 20 kg below their personal bests. Kate Nye snatches 110 kg, and she goes up to 105-108 pretty often in the gym, probably weekly. Lasha Talakhadze snatches 220 kg, and 205-210 is normal training range for him.
 
For athletes like this, “peak” competitions are going to be the times when Nye tries to snatch 111-112 kg or Lasha goes for 222 kg. That’s a small increase above their regular training load, but that’s what we’re talking about with elite lifters: razor-thin margins. And you have to be smart about how often you push the envelope at this level.
 
So is it risky or not?
 
Based on the system I just described, it sounds like the peaking frequency we’re seeing with many of our Team USA lifters these days is a little over the top. Traditional methodology would lead us to believe they’re going for record-breaking performances too often, and the chance for injury is high.
 
At this point, I want to make it clear what I’m NOT saying in this article. Many of you think I’m second-guessing the competition planning that’s getting used with our US lifters. I’m playing armchair quarterback and predicting doom and gloom, waiting for our studs to get injured so I can say told-ya-so and feel like I was smarter than everybody else.
 
Nope. That’s not what I’m doing. First of all, I’m a complete supporter of Team USA and I want our athletes to set the world on fire. I’m loving every minute of this American resurgence in weightlifting, so I DON’T want the wheels to fall off from injuries. Second, I want to make it clear that there’s another mindset that can be applied to this peaking-four-times-in-six-months approach. And this one is much more optimistic.
 
You have to remember that most of the US lifters I’ve used as examples in this article are very young. CJ Cummings, Kate Nye, and Harrison Maurus are still juniors, and Mattie Rogers is in her early 20s. They don’t have years and years of pounding and punishment accumulated on their bodies. I know they’re lifting the biggest weights we’ve ever seen in this country, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still in the intermediate stages of their own personal potential. In other words, they’re elite lifters, but they’re still in the development phase of their careers. Kate Nye is snatching 110 kg in the 71 kg class, which is the biggest weight we’ve ever seen in the US. But you could easily make a case that Kate Nye is still far below her ultimate physical potential. She probably has a 116-118 snatch in her somewhere down the road. We can get lured into thinking that she’s pushing her body’s limits to a risky degree simply because she’s so much better than anybody we’ve ever had, but in reality, she’s still progressing through her early years. Same goes for Cummings and several other US lifters at the top of our national rankings these days. They’re young, and they seem like they’re squeezing the sponge pretty hard because of the sheer amazingness of how much weight they’re lifting. But the truth is they’ve got a lot of gas in the tank, and they can handle the demanding challenges we’re throwing at them.
 
This is the idea I want to believe in. Plus, I think there’s something to be said for taking risks and going for glory when you’ve got an opportunity to do something incredible. You don’t win Olympic medals by being cautious. You don’t go from snatching 110 kg to 120 kg by holding back. At some point, you have to understand the business you’ve chosen. This is weightlifting. If you want to make it to the top, you must push beyond your limits and reach for greatness.
 
So I don’t think these athletes are being mismanaged. If I was coaching them, I’d probably be handling them the same way. Sure, there’s risk involved with attempting big record weights on a regular basis. Everybody knows that. But when you look at the athletes’ physical potential, and then you combine it with the opportunity they have in front of them, you come to a clear conclusion: they have to lay it on the line and take that shot at the big time. Moments like this come along once in a lifetime, and they require daring.
 
However, long-term perspective has to figure into this too. These lifters aren’t going to be able to handle this kind of grueling competition schedule forever. If they’re going to compete for two more Olympic cycles, there’s eventually going to have to be a reduction in the number of times they peak each year. You can handle a lot when you’re young in this sport, but things change when you get old. When it comes to elite weightlifting, you’re old when you pass 25 (assuming you started in your teenage years). If you want to avoid blowing up, you have to be smart.
 
Just keep an eye on everything
 
If you’ve got an athlete with extraordinary ability and no signs of physical damage or injury, and there’s a massive opportunity in front of them to accomplish something, you have to step up and go for it. However, there’s a difference between risk and calculated risk. Let me give you a personal example of what I’m talking about.
 
I suffered a major injury right when I was doing the best lifting of my career. It was 1999, I was 27 years old, and my best competition total was 335 kg. From the spring of 1998 to the summer of 1999 when I got hurt, I competed seven times and totaled 330, 332.5, or 335 at each one. Everything was going great, I was medaling at all the top national meets, and life was exciting. Then I dislocated my knee and tore my ACL, and that was the end of it. I recovered and continued competing, but I never totaled higher than 317 kg again. And 18 kg is a massive drop-off when you’re at that level of competition.
 
Did my injury happen because I was competing too often, and hitting my peak lifts every time? I’ve always wondered about the answer to that. Maybe it would have happened if I was only competing twice a year, I don’t know. But I’ve always had a gut feeling that I could have avoided the disaster if I would have played my competition schedule a little smarter. Who knows? It’s weightlifting, after all. Injuries can happen.
 
I suppose my personal catastrophe is part of the reason I’ve been thinking about this. We’ve got a stable of studs in the US right now, better than we’ve ever had before. I don’t want anything to screw this up. But honestly, I think my injury was a combination of peaking too often and age. I don’t think it’s simply that I was going too heavy too often. I think it’s the fact that I was going too heavy too often at 27. These kids are all young, so my instinct tells me they can handle it.
 
Think about these ideas in your own career. If you’re old (which most of you are) and you’ve been lifting forever, pick your peak competitions carefully. Spread them out, don’t go crazy, and listen to your body. Build up to the big numbers slowly and gradually. Just use the most intelligent approach you can think of, and then get out there and attack when it’s your time. That’s what you’re supposed to do in this game, after all.