I need to start this article with a massive news flash that you might not be ready for. It’s a piece of information that could take you totally by surprise and blow your doors off. Are you ready? Okay, here it is.

Steroids and other performance enhancing drugs are a big part of Olympic weightlifting, and have been for decades.
 
Did my sarcasm come through? If not, make sure you understand that was a joke. We all know performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are one of the most controversial topics in our sport. If you’ve got some education and awareness about what’s going on at the international level in this game, you probably know that many/most/all of the top Olympic lifting countries in the world have highly sophisticated systems for giving PEDs to their athletes and making sure the athletes pass their drug tests. I know, I know…we’re all aware of this.
 
Sometimes, lifters and coaches from these countries make their way over here to the good old United States of America. I’ve been in the sport for almost 30 years at this point, and I’ve seen this happen several times. It’s almost always one of two possible situations. 1) A foreign coach from one of these high-level countries comes over here to the States wanting to get a job coaching, thinking their status and Russia/China/whatever warm-up jacket will make it easy for them to walk in and dazzle all of us lowly Americans. 2) A foreign athlete who’s slightly past his prime but still lifting competitively will come over here to the States, thinking our country will throw money at him to win an Olympic medal for our country.
 
In situations like this, they’re all are looking to cash in. However, that’s where a problem that most of them weren’t ready for starts to quickly emerge. They find out this isn’t a drug country. Actually, let me amend that statement. America is most certainly a drug country, but the sport of Olympic weightlifting in the US isn’t a PED game like it is in the overseas countries these lifters and coaches came from. In their homelands, taking PEDs is as much a part of weightlifting as putting on shoes and chalking your hands. Random drug testing? Don’t kid yourself. In countries like Russia and China, they have drug programs that are funded and protected by the government, enabling their athletes to take PEDs like Tic Tacs with almost no risk of getting caught. Forget about getting popped on a random drug test.
 
But in the US, it’s not like that. Yes, we’ve got lifters in this country who take drugs, but most of them aren’t top national competitors who are in contention to lift internationally. Random drug testing in this country is no joke. I was on the random testing list for 10 years and I can attest to this. Long story short…there are drugs in Olympic weightlifting in the US, but there’s not a big-time drug system and our top level scene is mostly clean.
 
That point transitions to the subject of this article. You see, these foreign coaches and lifters I’m talking about almost always make the same mistake when they come over here. They try to continue doing the same training they were doing in their home countries, failing to understand the difference between what it’s like to be a clean weightlifter vs. a drugged weightlifter. In most of the situations I’ve witnessed over the years, this has led to either a disaster or near-disaster.
 
That’s why I want to talk about the potential problems associated with this kind of predicament, and it’s something you need to know about. Athletes who take PEDs at the international level are successful, so their training methods often get a lot of attention. When these athletes (or their coaches) come to this country, lots of people want to get coached by them because of their star quality. You might be one of these people, or you might be a coach who’s thinking about hiring one of these cats to work in your gym. Let me just say one or two things about that, okay?
 
First of all, understanding the mentality…              
 
Weightlifting on drugs and weightlifting clean…those are two completely different worlds. I’m not going to turn this article into a lengthy explanation of the physiological differences involved between them. There’s plenty of reading available in the weightlifting world about it. Suffice to say when you take drugs, you can physically do a lot of things that aren’t possible when you’re clean. Drugs work. That’s why so many people take them.
 
When you’ve been in weightlifting as long as I have, you learn a lot about this stuff. I was a 100 percent clean athlete during my career, so I don’t have firsthand experience with drugs. But after you’ve trained with (and learned from) a lot of athletes and coaches who are doping, you start to notice some specific trends.
 
First of all, most of the drug users I’ve known in my life have extremely unrealistic beliefs about their own lifting. The simplest way to say it is most of them think they could lift pretty close to the same massive weights even if they were clean. I suppose this is a simple ego conflict. When you’re a juiced up champion, your pride won’t let you admit your accomplishments are coming from the drugs. So you wind up with this strange psychological predicament where athletes are loaded up on PEDs that are clearly giving them a massive advantage over their competitors…but they think they’d still be the best even if they weren’t taking anything. I once knew a lifter who was taking ridiculous amounts of PEDs and his best total was only 10 kilos more than my best completely clean total. This guy absolutely believed he was a better lifter than me, no matter what. See what I mean?
 
This can easily create a situation where the lifters and coaches who come from this world think it’s totally reasonable for clean lifters to handle the same workload they did when they were doing their best doped lifting. Think about it. If they truly believe the drugs didn’t make much difference, they’ll coach lifters from that frame of mind. Most successful athletes and coaches are going to train people very similarly to how they trained. It makes sense. Their methods worked, and they think they have the recipe for success. So they wind up taking the training programs that led them to championships (with drugs) and giving them to a bunch of clean lifters and saying, “Here’s how you get to the top.” They refuse to acknowledge how much help the drugs gave them, so they think everybody will be able to handle their training level regardless of whether they’re on drugs or not.
 
Now we’ve got athletes trying to do Eastern European drug training, without the drugs. Gee…I don’t know, people. What do you think the results of that might be? I’ll tell you what they’ll be, in most cases. Horrible injuries from overtraining.
 
I know this all sounds like hypothetical situation territory. But trust me, I’m absolutely describing a scenario I’ve seen played out multiple times over the years. You have to remember how long I’ve been doing this and how many times I’ve been around the block. I’m not going to start throwing out a bunch of names or places, but there are a couple of examples I can give you without exposing anybody personally.
 
Real life
 
Back in the early days of my career, I actually spent several years watching a story develop that illustrates this thing perfectly. There was a program in this country that was being coached by a former European coach/athlete with a lot of success on his record. This was during my top years as an athlete when I was a regular on the national scene, so I knew a lot of the guys who lifted in his program pretty well.
 
The first two to three years of this program’s existence were troubled. A lot of very talented lifters were being pumped into it, and the results were spotty. There were some success stories, but also a big pack of injuries. I knew a few guys who joined this program and told me things like, “After three weeks, I couldn’t even walk anymore.” And I’m talking about some of the top young upcoming talent in the US at the time, not a bunch of broken down old masters.
 
I spoke once with one of the casualties of the program and asked him what was going on. His answer was the first time I actually heard somebody say what I just wrote earlier in this article, “We’re trying to do European drug training with no drugs.” It wasn’t a complicated thing. The immense workload was just wrecking everybody.
 
The coach was using the training methods that had driven him to the top of the world, along with the other athletes in his country who had done the same thing. Obviously, this was one of those countries I spoke of in the beginning of this article, where drugs were a basic component of the program. He was applying their programming, which was heavily dependent on the use of PEDs, to American lifters who weren’t taking anything. And it was burying them. We actually had a few promising young prospects who lifted in this program, got broken in half, and then quit the sport because of the damage.
 
However, the program eventually turned a corner. All of a sudden, these guys’ totals were all up 20 kilos and nobody was hurt anymore. I wasn’t in this program, as I said, so I can’t verify the exact changes that were made. But by all accounts I gathered from the lifters, the coach changed up the workload and made some adjustments that got everybody healthy and lifting well. My personal opinion, and I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, is the coach figured it out. At some point, it become clear that the drug training wasn’t working with clean athletes, so he went in a different direction, and the results turned positive.
 
It’s worth mentioning that this coach was an extremely smart man. Bu that’s not always the case, you know? If you had the exact same situation I just described and changed the coach to a knucklehead juicer who wasn’t smart enough to read the landscape and figure out he needed to adapt, the whole ship might have sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
 
Actually, what am I saying? I DO know plenty of situations like that. As I said before, I’m not going to mention any names in this article. But there are multiple stories floating around out there about foreign coaches who have tried to set up shop in this country, and produced nothing. There are also multiple stories about foreign athletes who have relocated to this county and tried to make a big splash competitively…and produced nothing. I hate to sound like a jerk, but once they find out they have to pass drug tests if they want to compete internationally for the United States, it doesn’t take long before the big fizzle.
 
Now…you
 
You’re going to be susceptible to this. If some of these foreign superstar lifters or coaches walked into your gym, people would listen to what they were saying. The gym owner might even hire them to coach everybody.
 
Or maybe we’re not talking about working directly with one of these people. Maybe we’re just talking about getting your programming from a lifter or coach with almost no experience in training clean. With the internet these days, you can get pretty good access to lots of stuff that falls into this category. Everybody and their crippled grandmother is trying to sell programs online. It’s not hard to find what I’m describing.
 
I’m not saying this can’t work, and I’m certainly not crapping on coaches and athletes with drugs in their background. Some of the best coaches I know have some drugs in their background. Just because somebody juiced, that doesn’t mean they can’t be effective coaches of clean lifters. It can happen. Hell, it happens all the time. Many of the best coaches we’ve had in this country over the last few decades were lifters in the 70s and guess what? Many of them were juicers, like almost everybody back in those days. So don’t think I’m placing a blanket label on everybody who has drugs in their history. That’s not what’s going on here at all.
 
The point I’m trying to make is that coaches have to make decisions when they train lifters about what kind of workload they’re going to pile on. If they make sensible decisions, the results can be outstanding. If they make bad decisions, the results can be catastrophic. Based on my experience in this sport, the risks of bad decisions are often higher if the coach is coming into the business with an unrealistic idea about the difference between drug training and clean training. This isn’t always true, but it’s true sometimes.
 
I’m not painting everybody with the same brush and I’m not condemning anybody because of their history. I’m simply trying to give you some cautionary words based on experience, hoping these words will give you a stronger overall understanding about a part of this sport that you just might have some dealings with if you stay around long enough. Best of luck to you in your journey.