When you’re involved in Olympic weightlifting in this country, there are a lot of harsh truths you have to face. One of them is the fact that this country doesn’t really have a system set up for long-term development of weightlifters, from starting young kids in the sport all the way through their mid-20s peak years.
 
When I talk about a system for long-term development, I’m talking about the kind of system they have in places like China and Russia. In those countries, kids are selected for specialized sports academies when they’re seven or eight years old (or younger). These academies are funded by the government, and they basically allow the kids to train as full-time professional athletes. Food, housing, sports med, the best coaching available, supplements (let your mind wander on that one), and financial opportunity.
 
Here in the richest country in the world, we have diddly squat for weightlifters. Actually, I shouldn’t say that. We do have some fantastic coaches. Contrary to the beliefs of the internet moron masses, US coaches have every bit as much skill and ability to build great champions as anybody overseas. It’s not that our coaches can’t compete with theirs. It’s that our system can’t compete with theirs.
 
Coaches in this country are basically working on their own. You might not have heard the news, but the resident athlete weightlifting program at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs got shut down last year. That was basically the only place in the country that offered athletes even a fraction of the systematic advantages we see in Europe and Asia. Now it’s gone. That leaves us with a country full of coaches who are trying to develop athletes with no help from anybody. And in case you haven’t figured it out, this makes it extremely difficult to compete with the machines from China and Russia.
 
The lack of a system creates a wide range of problems. One of the main ones is our sport’s inability to attract top athletic talent. If a kid in this country has phenomenal athletic ability, he’s usually going to pursue sports that have money. It’s understandable. Why would a kid with athletic greatness pick Olympic weightlifting over the NFL?
 
However, make sure you noticed that I used the word “usually” in that last part. There are occasional times when USA Weightlifting basically just gets lucky, and a few kids with intergalactic talent decide to make our sport their life. This is actually happening right now in 2017, as I write this article. We have a current crop of young lifters who have established themselves as a legitimate world power at the Youth World Championships, winning multiple medals against the best lifters in the world from those leviathan countries I mentioned earlier. The two brightest stars in the bunch are CJ Cummings and Harrison Maurus, who both became Youth World Champions this year.
 
In other words, we’ve actually got some weapons in our arsenal that are just as good (or better) than the traditional top countries in the sport. And so the conversation begins, as it always does, about whether or not these young champions will become older champions in the future when it really counts, at the Senior World Championship and Olympic level.
 
This article is about the long-term development of a weightlifter. We’re not going to gripe and grumble about the lack of a proper development system in the US. We’re going to look at the things that have to happen on an individual athletic level to correctly build a young stud into a polished champion. Many of you are coaches, and you never know…you just might have one of these kids in your gym someday. If you get a CJ Cummings, what are you going to do with him? How are you going to build him? How can you avoid pitfalls that might sink the whole deal? Let’s take a look at some recommendations.
 
First, the basics…
 
Without a doubt, the absolute highest concern and #1 piece of the puzzle for a beginning weightlifter is proper technique development. Getting the athlete to move correctly and use effective technique should be your first, second, third, and last priority during the starting phase of the process. In this sport, it doesn’t matter how talented you are. If you don’t have great technique, you’ll never rise to the top. Anybody who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
 
There are two main steps to building great technique. 1) An effective teaching procedure. 2) Not getting greedy. The athlete can only learn correctly if the coach uses a progression that leads to perfect movement (understanding that “perfect” is a complex word and not everybody has to move exactly the same to have perfect technique). These teaching progressions have to be done with PVC pipes, empty bars, and eventually light weights.
 
Nothing will kick the whole thing in the ass quicker than moving the athletes to maximum weights before their technique is solidified and consistent. It’s an easy trap to fall into, granted. We’re all weightlifters. We want to lift heavy weights. And this applies to coaches just as much as athletes. I get it. When you teach somebody how to snatch and they start to look good, there’s always going to be a temptation to start increasing the weight on the bar and max out. But this temptation has to be controlled, and the max attempts have to happen at the right time. The “right time” is never going to be after two or three workouts. Trust me; adult coaches can be just as impulsive and irresponsible as youth athletes.
 
You’re all educated in this sport (most likely), so I’m not dropping any revolutionary knowledge bombs on you by advising slow, meticulous technique development with beginning weightlifters. Even if you’re new in the game, you know technique is more important than weight, at least until you reach the magic moments when the movement is ingrained properly, and it’s time to go up and break some records. So knowing this is the crucial first basic step in long-term development, what are some of the more advanced considerations that need to be addressed?
 
The athlete’s career
Ooohhh, now it starts to get juicy. Once we know that weightlifters have to learn the sport the right way, what do we plan for next? Probably the next thing to mention is competition. In the early years, weightlifters should compete often (four to five times per year, or maybe six). They need to accumulate a lot of platform experience, and they need to have a lot of 5/6 and 6/6 days. Weight selection is enormously important in the competitive education of a lifter. If the coach picks the right weights, the kid is going to make a lot of successful attempts in meets. If this happens, the kid is going to develop the mentality that he/she is a 5/6 or 6/6 lifter. If you get greedy as a coach and start having kids attempt risky weights all the time when they’re starting out, they’ll probably have quite a few 2/6 or 3/6 days. When this happens, they’ve built expectations in their heads that don’t lead in a good direction, and you can probably expect them to miss a lot of lifts when they compete as adults.
 
So once technique has been taught the right way, and the lifter’s competitive experience has been successful in the early stages, what happens then? Now we’re talking about that phase when the athlete is around 19-20 years old, out of high school, but still six or seven years away from the peak years.
 
In my experience, this is often a difficult time for weightlifters in this country. The early 20s are a time when normal people are thinking about education, jobs, possibly getting married, starting to build up enough money to buy a home, etc. Weightlifters can’t make these things a priority in their lives, at least not if they’re trying to win a World Championship. Life has to still be about training.
 
In order to train, you’ve got to have a roof over your head, food on your table, a car, gas money, etc. These things cost money. This is why weightlifters have typically been broke in this country throughout the sport’s history. If you talk to the people ­­­­­­­ different ball game.
 
Our government and the USOC haven’t started kicking in any more money than they did in the past, but private companies and businesses have. Through endorsements and sponsorships, it’s now entirely possible for the cream of the crop of US weightlifting to make decent money. I’m not talking about millions of dollars, but I’m definitely talking about a solid living that’s miles ahead of anything that was available to any of us back in the old days.
 
As I said, this kind of opportunity is confined to the upper level of our national scene. If you’re a lower-level lifter…sorry. You’re still broke as a joke, most likely. However, the point I’m trying to make is clear. As crazy as it sounds, we might actually be standing in the beginning of a new era where weightlifters in this country can make a living from the sport. I’m not going to drop any specific names or financial records, but I will tell you I know some of the top lifters in America right now, and I know how much money they’re making. To an NBA player, it’s laughable. But to an Olympic weightlifter from my era in the sport, it’s a fortune.
 
This is a strange conversation because it’s hopeful. Most conversations about USA weightlifting aren’t like this. They usually involve a frustrating ending where we realize we’re all just banging our heads against a wall and the only reason to keep doing this is the love of the sport, because there’s no real way to get anything from it besides personal satisfaction and accomplishment. Now that a lot of people give a crap about Olympic lifting and there’s actually a possibility of getting paid, coaches don’t have to shrug their shoulders and try to offer some pathetic sounding optimism when a 21-year-old stud wants to walk away. Conversations between people often change quite a bit when you mention the possibility of making money.
 
Will it stay this way? I don’t know. I think that’s the main question for us old-timers. We come from a time when nobody got paid for this, and we’ve seen it all change into a landscape that’s new, unfamiliar, and exciting. The idea of an Olympic lifter making decent money almost seems too good to be true. That’s why we all wonder if it’s going to stay this way. I sure as hell hope it does.
 
In a way, this article started out as a comprehensive look at all the things that have to happen for the long-term development of a weightlifter. There are obviously several important factors we didn’t mention, but maybe the analysis went this way because there are really only a few crucial elements that are deal breakers. A) They have to learn to lift correctly. B) They have to learn to compete correctly. C) They have to receive the proper level of financial support and future opportunity to make them want to keep lifting and competing. Maybe that’s most of the battle, don’t you think?
 
Do we have a rock-solid system in place that covers all of this? Hell no. I just described a situation that’s better than it used to be. In other words, it’s better than complete crap. We’re still light years away from having a weightlifting system in this country that’s in the same galaxy as China and Russia. However, it is getting better. And guess what? Our international results are getting better, too. Isn’t that a funny coincidence? It almost makes you think there might be a chance for the good old US of A to become a stronger force in world weightlifting than we’re accustomed to, if the current popularity and corresponding level of opportunity continue to grow. I hope so, brothers and sisters. It’s a lot of fun to see Facebook updates about American kids winning Youth World medals. Now we just have to see if we can turn those into Senior World and Olympic medals. Is it possible? I think so. But we won’t get them for free. The price we’ll pay is finding a way to give talented kids a reason to push themselves to the top. We’re not all the way there yet, but we’re closer than we used to be.