Blake Asks: I have been doing Olympic lifts and have been involved in strength and conditioning for about a year now. I love the website and I always make a point to check it out at least once a day. I noticed, in the training videos, that when you guys do pulls from blocks you break the elbow and do a high pull; but when you pull from the floor, you keep the elbows straight and shrug (which is how I do my pulls). What's the significance of doing the high pull from blocks?

Greg Says: That may appear to be a pattern in the videos, but that’s not exactly representative of what we do. A clean or snatch pull is the same whether it’s from the floor, hang or blocks; likewise, a high-pull is the same from any starting position. That being said, there are times when I tell a lifter to do different things with the arms in a pull. In a high-pull, the goal is always getting the elbows as high as possible and out to the side (note that this is a different goal than getting the bar as high as possible). In a pull, the goal is to train the extension of the legs and hips.

However, there are times when the arms need to be involved somewhat. A lifter who is very stiff-elbowed in his or her pulls will swing the bar away from themselves at the top of the extension. You can shrug to give the bar somewhere to go other than forward, but sometimes that’s not enough. So in that case, you break the elbows and guide them to the sides. This is guiding more than pulling and it’s a chance to ingrain that timing and the mechanics of the arms to ensure that the stiff arms and delay in pulling down doesn’t transfer from pulls to snatches or cleans. For a lifter who has a habit of letting the elbows turn toward the back rather than keeping them oriented to the sides, this can also be appropriate to train that position and those mechanics. So more often than not, I will have lifters do pulls with that slight break in the elbows. For a lifter who has a habit of pulling early with the arms, forcing them to do pulls with perfectly straight arms is more appropriate (just make sure that he or she is actively pushing the bar back into their bodies and not swinging it out).

PD Asks: Love the articles, videos and resources available on CA. My question relates to the Olympic lifts as part of a training program to get more explosive for sports (specifically ice hockey in my case). I'll do the power versions of the lifts once a week, but always from the ground… I'm wondering if I'm doing myself a disservice or leaving anything on the table by not incorporating them from hanging positions and blocks, etc. Thanks for everything you do!

Greg Says: If you’re doing them properly, then I wouldn’t be worried about short-changing yourself. However, you might consider incorporating hang or block lifts at least for the sake of variety if nothing else, or to add a second day of lifts into your training at a lower intensity and higher speed.

For example, on day one you may do power cleans at relatively heavy weights, and on day two do hang power cleans or hang power snatches at a lower intensity, focusing on speed primarily. This will give you double the exposure to the lifts that you currently have, which will mean better speed and power development, but also technical improvements that will help you push the weights up in your primary lift day, i.e. your heavy power cleans.

Another approach would be to use hang or block work at the start of a training cycle and gradually move down to the floor as the cycle progresses and weights increase. For example, in the first 2-3 weeks, you might do power cleans from the blocks just above the knee; the next 2-3 weeks, power cleans from the blocks below the knee; and the last 2-3 weeks, power cleans from the floor. This will work naturally with the increasing weights over the course of the cycle, and will also help improve your speed early on, which will then be put to good use when you’re lifting from the floor again.

Rocky Asks: Hi Greg, What can we learn or possibly take from the training regiments and approaches to lifting from some of the more 'Powerhouse' weightlifting nations such as China and Russia?

Do their programs differ from ours (in the English-speaking world where lifting is not such a 'common' sport outside of the Olympics)? What kind of training cycles/techniques/exercises would their athletes use?

Would be interesting to see the differences and similarities.

Greg Says: I will answer this question as well as I can with the disclaimer that I don’t know everything about other countries’ programs, and in fact, no one really knows exactly what they do except those lifters and coaches. I’ll try to keep my assumptions to a minimum.

I would say that in terms of the actual training programs, the biggest difference is in volume and frequency. To the best of my knowledge, it’s most common to train twice daily at least 3 days per week and once daily another 3 days. This is actually the schedule used most of the time at our own Olympic training center; but we have only a handful of resident weightlifters, and few outside of that situation are able to train with such a schedule due to obligations outside of lifting. I suspect that other programs train even more than this, including “Warm-up” sessions as a team in the mornings, etc.

Training volume can be much greater for an individual who is a full-time weightlifter—stress other than that from training is minimal, and access to recovery modalities, nutrition, etc. are maximal. If you can snatch 150-200% more times in a given period than your competition, you certainly have a leg up on them.

That being said, speaking of the programs overall, I think the key factor for dominant countries’ success is systematic recruiting and long term development. The more talent you can get into the gym and retain, the better weightlifters you can create. The best training system in the world would never be able to make certain people world champions, and likewise, people built for weightlifting will excel in nearly any environment and with any program. This is not to say that the system and training doesn’t matter; it’s just to underscore the fact that there are inherent abilities that dictate any athlete’s potential in a given sport, and identifying the people who have physical advantages for that sport is a critical factor.

The long term development is just as important. When you start a lifter at a very young age, you can do everything right. You can build the proper foundation both physically and psychologically. When instead, as we most often do in the US, start lifters at later ages after they’ve often been athletes in other sports, we’re working with a host of complications and often the result is that we rush or skip parts of the development process.

I would say that another common factor in success is work ethic and dedication. These athletes are weightlifters. That’s it. There’s no question about what it is they’re in the gym to do, and I would venture to say that the sport defines their lives for the duration of their careers (or at least the most successful parts of them). There have been great weightlifters with odd circumstances out there who are able to be successful without being locked in the gym for 10 years, but they’re the exceptions. Their training and competition are incredibly meaningful, and there is genuine reward for success, whether it’s monetary or not.

Many of these countries (such as Russia and China) have established educational programs at high levels in which professional coaches can be trained. Consider MS and PhDs in the US—there is no degree in weightlifting available. The closest you can get is kinesiology, biomechanics, or exercise physiology, and I think we all have a pretty good idea of how much experience with and exposure to weightlifting these individuals have. There just aren’t the same educational opportunities here. This results in coaches having to be largely self-taught, which means a lot of experimentation, which means a lot of failure or underwhelming results. Reading Russian training literature for example, it becomes very clear that we in the US are far behind in terms of systematic weightlifter development. And much of this literature is from the 1970s.

And of course, the drug issue can’t be ignored. I don’t believe this is by any means the only thing that prevents us from being successful internationally, but it certainly can’t be ignored. I don’t believe drug testing is very successful, and the number of positives that do turn up is not representative of the actual use by lifters. However, if we had everything else in place, I believe we would be able to close the current gap considerably even with our stringent testing—world records and world championships… probably not.

Ultimately what we can learn from these countries is pretty straightforward: We need better education for coaches; better recruitment of athletes; better long term, systematic development; and better financial support and incentives for success. Making all that happen is the tricky part.