Those big numbers didn’t mean diddlysquat when the meet started. I remember there was a skinny kid who was two or three weight classes below me who snatched and clean and jerked more than I did. This kid had a sunken chest and his legs looked like a pair of pliers with shorts on, but he could crush me in the Olympic lifts because he was snappy and his technique was twenty miles ahead of mine. I was a lot stronger than him, but it didn’t matter. He still won. 

Six years later, I was competing at the National Championship in the old 108 kg class. I snatched 137.5 kg and clean and jerked 172.5 kg, which placed me fifth. I remember there was a guy in my class named Gary Keylon. Gary was a Georgia lifter who did a 125 kg snatch and 175 kg clean and jerk, so obviously he was a few spots below me. He cleaned 182.5 kg twice and missed the jerk both times. I remember looking at Gary and knowing 100 percent that he was stronger than I was. He was a chunk of muscle, looked like he was carved out of granite. And there was no way I could clean 182.5 kg at that time. But I still totaled 10 kg more. He was a lot stronger than me, but it didn’t matter. I still won.

Stories like these aren’t uncommon in Olympic weightlifting. We’ve all seen situations where the strongest lifter isn’t necessarily the best lifter. When we use the term “strong,” we’re generally talking about the lifter who can hit the biggest weights in brute strength movements: squat, deadlift, press, etc. In these lifts, I could have annihilated that skinny kid who beat me in my first meet. And I’m completely certain Gary could have beaten me in all of them when we lifted against each other at Nationals. But that’s one of the interesting parts of Olympic lifting. It’s a barbell sport where the heaviest weights win, but the strongest lifters aren’t always the ones who place first.

We all know this. The Olympic lifts are about strength and technique. It doesn’t matter how strong you are. If your technique is lousy, you’re not going to have success. This isn’t a big news flash to any of you. But I think we should take a look at some of the nuances of this conversation. I did a podcast recently and I was asked, “How big is the role of strength in the Olympic lifts? Exactly how much does it matter?”

In other words, we need to go deeper than the simple “the strongest one doesn’t always win” idea we already understand. If we really want to gain some understanding that can help us in our own careers as lifters and/or coaches, we need to dig beneath the surface. Let’s take a look at a few things.

Examples and Ideas…

People talk a lot about efficiency in our sport. Efficiency is generally considered the amount of performance you’re getting in the snatch and clean and jerk relative to your overall level of strength. Let me give you an example to illustrate this. Let’s say Bob has a 250 kg back squat and a 160 kg clean and jerk. Then you have Jeff, who also has a 160 kg clean and jerk, but he can only back squat 200 kg. Jeff is much more efficient than Bob. He’s squeezing out a much higher result in the Olympic lifts relative to his level of squat strength.

I’ve seen plenty of examples of this throughout my career. I used to train with a guy who had a 180 kg clean and jerk, but he couldn’t deadlift 200 kg. At the time, I was clean and jerking 185 kg, and I could dead lift 305 kg. This guy was obviously much more efficient than I was. I also trained with another guy who could clean 170 kg but couldn’t deadlift 400 lbs. (182 kg). He was probably the freakiest example I’ve ever seen.

Those were deadlift related examples, but there are plenty of squat strength examples out there as well. I used to train with a guy who had the same clean and jerk max as me, 185 kg. My best back squat at the time was 245 kg, and this other guy could do 275. And if you watched both of us clean 185 kg, I was standing up with it easier than he was.

So right away, one of the biggest factors we have to look at is the position and strictness of the squats. When you’re an Olympic lifter, your front and back squat positions (and depth) should look as close to your snatch and clean and jerk bottom position as possible. You’re not helping yourself if you’re using a squat movement that doesn’t have any physical similarity to your clean and jerk or snatch, like when you’re squatting in a powerlifting style: sitting your hips back with the bar low on your shoulders, only going to parallel, etc. When lifters throw out gargantuan squat numbers with disproportionately low clean and jerk results, this is very often the culprit.

In terms of the deadlift, it’s a different story. A legitimate maximum weight powerlifting deadlift is going to be a slow movement. There’s not going to be any significant carryover from that into the snatch or clean and jerk. I used to train with a world champion powerlifter who was trying to convert over to Olympic weightlifting. This guy had a best official deadlift of 825 pounds. But after a year of full-time Olympic lifting training, he could still only clean 150 kg, and it wasn’t a very easy looking clean either. The pulling strength you develop from doing snatch pulls and clean pulls, where you’re using explosive snappy movement in the same pattern as your snatch and clean and jerk, that’s what is going to make you a better Olympic weightlifter.

But does this mean big strength lift numbers have no benefit to an Olympic lifter? No, that’s not the case either. We don’t want to misunderstand this. Let’s say you have a lifter who has an incredible level of technical mastery and efficiency. Excellent technique, fantastic speed, perfect positions. If we take a lifter like this and add 30 kg to his/her squatting and pulling strength, is that going to lead to better results? Most likely, yes.

There’s also such a thing as getting strong enough to overcome some of your technique problems. Sometimes, lifters can actually fix glitches in their movements simply by getting stronger. This happens as well. So when we talk about efficiency and how big squats and deadlifts don’t make you a good Olympic lifter, let’s not get carried away and think we’re saying strength isn’t important.

Upper body, too

You probably already know Olympic weightlifting was a three-lift sport until 1972, right? The three competition lifts were clean and press, snatch, and clean and jerk. If you didn’t already know that, I probably just blew your mind. Yes, you used to have to do a maximum clean and press before you even got to the other two. Needless to say, the lifters from this era had massive upper body strength. For god’s sake, there were super heavyweights pressing over 500 lbs. by the time the press was eliminated.

People wonder sometimes if upper body brute strength is important for an Olympic lifter. In other words, will you be better at the snatch and clean and jerk (mainly the jerk) if you can press a lot of weight?

Personally, I haven’t found this to be true at all throughout my career. The Calpian weightlifting club I trained with back in the 90s was the top club in the United States at the time, and we were particularly known for having big clean and jerks. The “Calpian clean and jerk” was a thing back in those days. Talk to anybody who was on the scene in the 90s and they’ll tell you the same.

We did almost no pressing or upper body strength work at all. I had a 185 kg clean and jerk and a 192 kg rack jerk, and the most I ever strict pressed was 105 kg. And I was probably on the high end of upper body strength for most of the other guys in the club, if you want to know the truth. My training partner Dean Goad, who was a four-time national champion, could rack jerk 200 kg, and I’m completely positive he couldn’t strict press as much as I could.

Hell, if you want to talk about some even bigger examples, Wes Barnett once told me he had never pressed anything heavier than 105-110 kg, and he could clean and jerk 220 kg. Robin Byrd, another former training partner of mine, held the women’s world record in the snatch and made the 2000 Olympic Team, and she had to use two hands to lift a skillet of hamburger off the stove when she was cooking. Her upper body wasn’t strong enough to pick it up with one hand.

The jerk is a lower body lift. The upper body is obviously involved, but what you do with your legs is going to determine how much you jerk. I’ve been doing the sport for over 30 years and trained with a lot of highly successful weightlifters, and I’ve never met one who believed pressing strength was an important factor.

But once again, we have to look at every part of this. You may have situations where you have a lifter with a tremendous deficiency of upper body strength. Like this lifter isn’t even strong enough in the upper body to complete the snatch and clean and jerk effectively. Would it help this lifter to add strength work into the program? Most likely. So as always, it’s never black and white.

In closing

Should you train to have a big squat if you’re an Olympic lifter? Yes, absolutely. Should you train to have a big deadlift? No, but you’ll probably wind up with a big deadlift anyway. Most Olympic lifters, just because of the sheer amount of pulling work they do in their training, usually have monster deadlifts if they ever decide to try pulling a max weight. I once trained with a guy who had never tried a heavy deadlift in his life, but he could snatch 150 kg and clean and jerk 180 kg. He went to a powerlifting meet once just for fun and deadlifted 300 kg with no belt.

You probably won’t do much pressing or upper body strength work, mainly because most of your coaches won’t put a ton of it in your program. But you’ll still develop a strong upper body with great looking muscular shoulders. Take a look at the best Olympic weightlifters in the sport and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Most of them don’t train their upper bodies like bodybuilders or powerlifters, but they‘re still muscular as hell.

These are just some thoughts about a subject that comes up frequently in weightlifting discussions. In the podcast I did in June, the guys who interviewed me were a couple of really prominent voices in the sport, as athletes and coaches. And they asked me about this subject because they were still trying to come up with concrete answers to a lot of these questions. It’s a legitimate subject, and it helps to have some accurate ideas about it that are based on experience and real in-the-trenches weightlifting stories. Add these thoughts to your toolbox as you continue your journey of development in the sport.