Let’s talk about big people. And STOP! Even if you’re not a big person, this is still going to apply to you. So don’t jump ship on this article and go eat a paleo kale brownie if you’re a featherweight. Read it, blast you!

Actually, let me tell you a little story first. Back in 1994, I was competing in the U.S. Olympic Festival. All the weightlifters at this meet were being housed in a college dorm. Like most dorms, there was no elevator…just long flights of stairs leading to the upper floors. When I walked into this dorm for the first time, I was with a guy who was one of the top superheavyweight lifters in the country. This dude was 6’5 and weighed around 340 lbs., and I’ll never forget the look on his face when he found out his room was on the 3rd floor and there was no elevator. He looked at me and asked, “You mean I’m gonna have to climb three flights of stairs every time I want to go to my room?” I replied, “Yeah, it looks that way.” He shook his head and said, “Hell, I’m gonna lose two kilos of bodyweight this weekend. There goes my clean and jerk.”

Superheavyweights look at the world in a different way. They have to. Most people don’t understand how much your physiology changes when you’re hauling around massive loads of bodyweight everywhere you go. As weightlifting legend Bruce Wilhelm once said, superheavyweights have to train differently, and they have to live differently. One of the things we’re going to look at in this article is the adjustment you have to make in your life if you decide to super-size yourself.

If you’re not a great big mammajamma, you still need to know this stuff. Many of you are coaches, so you already know that the athletes you work with are going to come in all shapes and sizes. I don’t know what your current gym line-up looks like…maybe you’ve got a club full of medium sized lifters (guys around 165-185 lbs., girls around 130-150 lbs.). I’ve found these to be fairly typical bodyweight ranges for men and women, and you probably coach a lot of people who fit in there. Sometimes you’ll get the little “pocket rocket” types…the 135 lb. guys and 100 lb. gals. Fairly often, you’ll train the ones that are a bit bigger than medium, 215 lb. dudes and 175 lb. chicks. And sometimes you’ll get the big suckas… If you want to coach them successfully, there’s a certain mentality you need to have when you set up their training plan.

Plus, I’ve got news for you. Many of us are going to get a little heavier as we get older. Obviously I’m not saying we’re all going to be obese 10 years from now, but biology and Mother Nature will probably ensure we’re carrying around a few extra pounds somewhere down the road. This article is going to have some information about how to train heavyweight lifters, but it’s also going to take a look at how to manage the basic physical changes that will probably be inevitable as the years pass by. Bodyweight, people. It’s something we all have to be conscious of, in some way or another. No point in denying it, so let’s make sure we’re ready for it.

Training large people, a lost art…

The rise of CrossFit has propelled “fitness lifting” into the public forefront. People want to look good naked, which is largely connected to bodyweight in our culture. Because of this, the idea of training a heavyweight weightlifter or, possibly, encouraging a middleweight lifter to move up a couple of weight classes by gaining twenty pounds simply isn’t in the mainstream game plan nowadays. Many coaches will universally look at a heavy athlete and just say, “you need to lose some weight.”

That’s fine if it’s consistent with the athlete’s plans, but if the athlete wants to compete as a SHW lifter, you can’t go with the lose-weight-for-health approach, and you have to modify training. You see, heavier athletes have to be trained a little differently. Many coaches don’t get this, especially if they’ve never been superheavyweights themselves. If you’re a coach and a 290 lb. guy walks in your gym to become a weightlifter, you’re going to have to be aware of the fact that the program you set up for this athlete will need to be different than the ones you use with your lighter lifters.

In a nutshell, superheavyweights usually have to be trained with a much different schedule of volume and intensity than most other athletes. Their bodies are considerably bigger than the average human, and their recovery time will be slower than a 185 lb. man or 120 lb. woman. There are biological explanations for this that I’m not going to explain in detail here, just for the sake of brevity. But there’s some science that backs up what I’m saying, along with a common understanding that’s shared by most of the successful weightlifting coaches in the sport (particularly the ones who have produced good supers). If you try to train superheavyweights with the same volume as lightweights, you’ll wreck them.

I’ve seen a few high-profile mistakes in this department. Over the years, there have been some talented superheavyweights in our country who showed a lot of promise. But they were coached by people who thought they could have the big puppy on the same training program as everybody else in the gym, and the results were pretty bad. Typically, the lifter wound up with lots of injuries and not much progress. The breakdown usually didn’t happen immediately. There’s an initial time period where everybody can keep up with the workload. Eventually, however, all the overtraining catches up and you start to see a lot of tendonitis, pulls and strains, etc.

I’ve got some personal experience with this. For the first few years I competed in weightlifting, I was in the old 90-kilo class (198 lbs.). As time passed, I grew and added muscle, eventually competing in the old 108 kilos class (238 lbs.) for four years. I went up to superheavyweight (SHW) in 1997, where I got up to a bodyweight of 122 kilos (270 lbs.) and that’s where I had the most success. One of the best decisions I ever made was reducing my training days when I made the move to SHW. I had been training five days a week for several years, but my body just couldn’t handle that much volume when I went over 250 lbs. in bodyweight. I was working my butt off, but I just felt beat to hell all the time. I talked to my coach about it and we agreed to change my program to four days a week. This adjustment resulted in the best lifting of my career. Just that one extra day of recovery made all the difference in the world because I can tell you with absolute certainty that my body felt completely different at 270 lbs. than it had at 198 lbs.

At the time, I was training with a lot of international-level lightweight competitors. The volume these little suckers could handle was staggering. I would watch them in the gym, day after day, accumulating hundreds of reps each week, and I wondered at first why I couldn’t maintain the same loading schedule. Because I was young, I first thought I just wasn’t being tough enough. However, I talked to a lot of highly successful SHW lifters as time went on, and I learned a lot through trial and error. As I said, the bottom line is you have to change the workload for heavier lifters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should baby a SHW. They have to train as hard as anybody. It just has to be done differently.

Another misconception is the idea that the athlete’s strength level won’t be diminished if he/she loses only body fat. That sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t work in real life. Reduction in any kind of body mass will most likely decrease the athlete’s competition lifts. There are real-life examples everywhere to demonstrate this. I know this contradicts some of the academic theories you’re probably familiar with, and there are always exceptions to the rules. But I don’t deliver academic theories to you and I don’t base my arguments on rare exceptions. I come at this thing from the perspective of a highly experienced athlete who knows how this stuff works in real life, as kooky as that might sound.

And keep in mind, I was having this experience at 270 lbs., which is tiny for a SHW. Most of the top supers in the sport weigh around 320-340 lbs. Imagine how those big rhinos feel when they’re trying to keep up with the same volume as a lightweight athlete.

BUT…this doesn’t apply equally to everybody…

Keep in mind that this advice is for an Olympic weightlifter who wants to compete in the superheavyweight division. Now let’s shift the analysis to you, since I know most of you aren’t in that bracket. Actually, I’m going to go outside the box here. A few years ago, I wrote an article for the Catalyst website about the kind of stuff we’re talking about. National Champion Travis Cooper responded to my article with a question, and I responded with some comments that led to further discussion with Greg Everett and some other readers. I thought there were some valuable comments in here, so I’m going to copy-paste them into this article. Here you go:

Travis Cooper: So there have been a ton of arguments about body composition and optimizing your body composition. Do you believe that the right weight class is the weight class in which your body fat percentage is the lowest? If someone has a strict diet already and they have a relatively high body fat percentage, do you think that doing cardio to gain a better body fat percentage would be beneficial? I personally don't know what I believe, but I think this is a great discussion.

Matt Foreman: You’re right, great topic. If a person has a strict diet and a high body fat percentage, I guess cardio would be a good idea because it doesn’t sound like the O-lifts are that person’s main issue anyway. A person like that should probably make it the top priority to just get their body under control before they start focusing on weightlifting progress, in my opinion.

The question of, “Do you believe that the right weight class is the weight class in which your body fat percentage is the lowest?” is a good one that’s been discussed a lot, like you said. I guess my basic answer would be “yes,” but there are several variables that come into the picture. I’ve always thought a person’s height had a lot to do with picking their optimal weight class. When I was a junior, I was 5’11 and weighed 88 kilos, and my lifting was going nowhere for over a year. I switched coaches and my new coach told me, “At your height, you need to go up two weight classes.” I started gaining weight (which my body was definitely ready to do) and within a year my total had gone up almost 40 kilos and I was ready to move up to senior national level. I was definitely adding some body fat in addition to muscle, but it all benefited my lifting. 120 kilos was where I eventually did my best lifting, both on Sinclair and in terms of national ranking.

I think it’s a best-case scenario for a lifter to have the lower possible body fat in their weight class, but I don’t think reducing body fat should be a top priority for a lifter. I don’t know if that makes any sense or not. I think there’s an intuitive sense of when a lifter is in the right weight class, and it’s largely determined by height and the basic body structure of the athlete. Good coaches can usually make solid determinations on this. From what I’ve seen in weightlifting, moving up in weight class is almost always a better idea than moving down. Most of the lifters I’ve seen who moved down in weight class lost most of their leg strength. Obese people are exceptions to this, obviously. I’m basically talking about athletes with a level of basic conditioning and body composition that’s somewhat normal.

Superheavyweights are just a whole different conversation. They’ve basically gotta stay big at any costs, unless their positions are being destroyed by excess bulk (as happened to Chemerkin after 1997). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a SHW move down to 105/110/108 and have more success.

This is long-winded, but I should probably write a separate blog about it because it’s an important issue. In a nutshell, I don’t think body fat reduction should be a high priority for a weightlifter. That’s a simplistic statement though, and there’s much more to it than that.

Greg Everett: I would say that the athlete's height is a much more important factor in determining weight class than BF. How lean (or not) an athlete is more a function of genetics than anything else, so for many athletes, chasing after an unnatural level of leanness just keeps them continually weak and underfed and performing below their potential. There's also something to be said about training in the weight class you naturally fall into as well as possible - significant changes in bodyweight can be very difficult and taxing to maintain, both physically and psychologically. However, to be competitive based on height, often this has to simply be disregarded. And of course, you have to take into account how the athlete performs and feels at any given bodyweight - this is not always what you might expect. So I guess I would say the bottom line is that body fat percentage is something to consider, as of course the more muscle mass a lifter has at a given weight, the more potential he/she has to lift more weight, but it's only one part of the issue and arguably not the most important.”

Conclusion…

When I write these articles for Performance Menu, I always try to be aware that all of you are coming from a wide range of experiences and goals. Because of this, I want to make sure there’s applicable information in here for anybody, regardless of where they’re at in the sport. Bodyweight is one of those topics that make it easy, because absolutely everybody has to think about it.

If your lifting is almost completely appearance-and-health based, there are plenty of other resources for you to examine. I’m not a professional nutritionist or body sculpting counselor. I’m an Olympic weightlifter and coach. Fortunately, I know there are a very large percentage of you who are looking for input in this area, and that’s what this discussion has been. Some of you want to lose weight. Some of you want to gain weight. ALL of you want to know the right approach in your life as an athlete, and coach. So just put this article in your toolbox. You never know when it might be just the trick to solve a problem that’s in front of you.