The last 30 years have brought about a lot of changes in Olympic weightlifting. That’s not a surprising statement, obviously. Almost anything will likely change quite a bit if you put a 30-year time frame on it. However, the interesting part of the sport of weightlifting is the fact that quite a few of these changes have happened just within the last ten years, which is probably when most of you started in it.
 
I started weightlifting in the late 1980s, so I’ve been able to watch the whole game develop into what it is now. As you can likely guess, many of the changes that have taken place in the sport have been good. The dramatic rise in popularity is one of them. Weightlifting has simply exploded in terms of numbers, media exposure, and public recognition. Yes, CrossFit has been one of the main reasons for this. CrossFit exploded… CrossFit heavily emphasized the Olympic lifts…people who joined CrossFit gyms fell in love with the Olympic lifts and decided to go into Olympic weightlifting…Olympic weightlifting exploded…and so forth.
 
This astronomical growth has also happened during (and because of) the rise of the internet and social media. Weightlifters can now network with other people in the sport easier and faster than ever before through their computers and phones. There’s just a gigantic level of overall communication going on, which is mostly a good thing. However, there are also drawbacks. One of the primary ones is the amount of incorrect, unreliable, and misleading information that’s floating around online. Most of the new people in this sport don’t know the difference between dependable weightlifting material and bullcrap, which is understandable. When you’re new, you’re not educated yet. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It just means you’re inexperienced, which is okay. The problem is that you can easily be led astray by phonies who promote themselves as gurus.
 
What I’m going to talk about in this article is complicated because it’s not exactly a situation where liars and frauds are deliberately trying to deceive people. It’s more a situation where well-meaning people want to get the best possible results in weightlifting, so they explore every imaginable avenue to make themselves better. However, this frantic search for perfection and excellence is causing them to overanalyze their lifting experience. This overanalyzing leads them to inventing problems in their heads that don’t really exist. They look at things that are normal difficulties in weightlifting, and they think there’s some kind of threatening disaster hanging over their heads. This leads them to seek advice and input from other well-meaning people who offer answers and strategies for fixing problems that…well, aren’t really problems.
 
This might sound confusing, so let me get right to the point and make it easy for you. We’re talking about weightlifters who think they have some kind of major physical or anatomical problems in their bodies, so they run to physical therapists for all kinds of rehabilitative or corrective exercises that are designed to reshape the way their bodies move and function. This process leads them to put changes and restrictions into their weightlifting programs that hold them back from really training with the maximum effort and intensity that’s required to make big progress in this sport. In other words, people are thinking there’s something wrong with them, so they ask specialists to fix the things that are wrong, and the interaction with these specialists creates a situation where they’re more focused on rehabilitation than hard training. They’re obsessed with fixing things that aren’t really broken. The end result is weightlifters who won’t train aggressively enough because they’re worried about getting hurt.
 
Jeez…this is complex. Many of you are already saying, “Yeah, but…” I know, I know. Be patient, and let’s take a look at the whole picture.
 
The basics…
 
Let me give you a hypothetical example to make sure we all know what we’re talking about. Let’s say we have a weightlifter named John. John is new to the sport and he doesn’t come from a heavily athletic background. He trains at a CrossFit gym where a coach has taught him the Olympic lifts, and he’s decided he wants to seriously pursue the sport. You’re with me so far, right? Okay, now let’s say John has a little problem with the way his body moves when he’s doing cleans. When he catches his cleans on his shoulders in the bottom position and starts to stand up, his back rounds forward slightly. Some old weightlifting coaches call this “turtlebacking” because the rounded back looks like a turtle’s shell.
 
John’s rounded back isn’t excessive. It’s noticeable, but it’s not causing any completely disastrous problems that destroy his ability to perform the clean. However, John is a perfectionist, which means he takes videos of all his lifts and then goes home after workouts to analyze what he’s doing. He sees his rounded back and knows it’s a technical imperfection, so he works on trying to keep his back tighter and flatter when he catches cleans in future workouts. After a few weeks, he’s still rounding his back a little bit, so he starts to believe he has some kind of natural problem with his entire anatomy. Maybe he has a big strength deficiency in his back muscles, or his abdominal muscles, or his shoulders, or his shins, or his hairline, or his fingernails, or god knows what else. And to take this a step further, John convinces himself that he’ll never be a good weightlifter until he fixes this problem. Or worse, he’ll suffer some kind of horrific injury somewhere down the line.
 
So John looks around online, and he finds a physical therapist who specializes in working with athletes. He makes an appointment with this therapist, who examines John and says he has a strength imbalance between his rhomboid and serratus muscles that needs to be corrected. The therapist sets John up on a rehabilitative program of specialized exercises that are designed to fix this imbalance, and part of the program involves John limiting the weight he uses for cleans for the next four months.
 
We’ve just watched John transform his mentality from a weightlifter to a patient. Instead of focusing on hard training, John is now focused on rehab treatment. He’s convinced that he has a problem, and he’s got a professional from the medical field who’s confirming it. John will no longer train aggressively. He’ll train cautiously from now on. And you better believe that there will be more situations in his future when he’ll notice movement problems in his technique or, even worse, PAIN! These things will be obvious indicators in John’s head that he has additional problems, so it’ll be back to the therapist’s office for more rehab programming.
 
Now, this is the point where we need to understand that there are two possible ideas for what is really going on with John. Here they are:
 
1) John has a legitimate problem. The information from the therapist is accurate, and the rehabilitative exercises he’s prescribing are valuable. John needs to fix his problem, and the therapist is helping him accomplish that.
 
2) John is being a weightlifting hypochondriac. Nothing is wrong with him and his rounded back is something that would correct itself through continued training, strength development, and technical improvement. The therapist is building his own business by enabling John’s fears.
 
I know the hypothetical scenario I just described with John can easily be misunderstood, and it might lead you to believe I’m dismissing or disrespecting physical therapists in general. That is absolutely not true. I’ve had four surgeries in my career, and the physical therapy process I went through after them was the entire reason I came back successfully. I’m a huge believer in PT. I think it can save you, fix you, and keep you from a premature exit from the sport. Let’s make sure we all understand that. This is why I gave you scenario #1 just now. We have to acknowledge the possibility that John might really have a problem, and the therapist might be giving him input that he desperately needs.
 
However, this article is primarily focused on the other possibility, because it’s definitely something I’m seeing more and more in weightlifting in recent years. Despite my own faith and belief in the value of physical therapy, there are plenty of situations in the sport these days that fit the John example. The explosion of popularity has brought both positives and negatives. Weightlifting hypochondria is one of the negatives. If you’re a physical therapist (or a weightlifter who’s being treated by one), don’t think I’m dissing you. I’m not. But I am saying there are plenty of people in the modern age of the sport who are getting carried away with their perceived physical problems, and there are therapists who are preying on these people to build their client list. Physical therapists are just like weightlifting coaches, or cops, or teachers, or any other groups of professionals. There are good ones out there, and there are bad ones.
 
Naim Suleymanoglu…
 
The greatest weightlifter in the history of the sport is Naim Suleymanoglu from Turkey. His gold medal performance at the 1988 Olympics, where he snatched 152.5 kg (336 lbs.) and clean and jerked 190 kg (418 lbs.) in the 60 kg. bodyweight class (132 lbs.) still stands to this day as the greatest pound-for-pound achievement of all time.
 
I want you to take a look at that 190 kg C&J Naim did at the ’88 Games. You can either get on YouTube and look at a video titled “Naim suleymanoglu 190kg World Record” or you can just follow this link.
 
It’s a front angle view of the historic lift. I specifically want you to watch Naim’s body as he stands up from the bottom position in the clean. When he’s about halfway up, his hips shift dramatically to the right (his right, not yours). If you pause the video at 0:08, you’ll see it clearly. It’s a really weird little twisty thing that happens when he stands up, and he’s doing it under the heaviest load in history.
 
You’ll notice how his back didn’t break. His spine didn’t shatter. His pelvis didn’t rupture. His hip joints didn’t dislocate. He simply completed the lift and walked off the platform as healthy as a horse. This little hip tweak was just part of how his body moved when lifting maximum weights. We don’t know exactly WHY it happened. Maybe he had a strength imbalance between his left and right side. Maybe one particular group of muscles was much more developed than another group. Maybe one of his legs was a little longer than the other. Maybe one of his hip joints was structured differently. We don’t know for sure.
 
What we do know for sure is that he lifted like this his whole life, and it didn’t cause any major physical problems for him. Naim went on to win Olympic gold again in 1992 and 1996. If you watch his winning clean and jerk from the ’96 Games, you’ll see the exact same hip shift as he stands up from the bottom of his cleans. That means he stayed at the top of the sport for a decade, breaking world records routinely, with a physically abnormal movement that would probably cause most normal people to freak out in terror, convinced that he was heading for a broken body.
 
This hip shift was simply part of how his body moved. And if you spend as long as I’ve spent watching elite weightlifters, you’ll see plenty of other examples just like this one. Some people have movement oddities in their bodies when they perform the Olympic lifts. They aren’t problems. They aren’t dangerous. And they aren’t going to lead to catastrophe. They’re an illustration of the point I’m trying to make in this article. We’re not all built the same, so we’re not all going to move exactly the same.
 
Does that mean….?
 
No, I’m not saying every bizarre little physical tweak you see in a weightlifter’s movements is okay. There are plenty of poor positions that have to be corrected in this sport. That’s what coaches are for. And yes, there certainly are times when physical therapy rehabilitative exercises can be implemented into a lifter’s training program to correct these problems. I’ve used plenty of them in the past. Hell, I’m using some of them even now.
 
The main idea we need to acknowledge is that not everything you see needs to be jumped on and doctored instantly. There are plenty of times in this sport when an athlete’s movements and positions will be improved and fixed through simple practice and strength development. I was a turtleback cleaner when I started. The problem eventually went away and I developed into a flat-back lifter with good technique. How many special rehabilitative exercises did I do to make this change? Not one. I simply keep training, my body got stronger, my positions got more efficient, and the turtleback went away.
 
How do we know the difference between a legitimate problem and weightlifting hypochondria? That’s a tough one to answer with a blanket statement. My personal opinion is that you should give an athlete plenty of time and practice before you start looking to send them to a specialist. You have to remember that we no longer live in a culture that’s based on toughness and grit. Our world has been pussified in recent decades. More people mentally associate pain with injury, and the need for medical attention. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and it has to be managed with sound judgment.
 
I suppose there’s definitely a “you need to harden up” element to this. Granted, you don’t want to tell somebody with a serious problem to harden up. You want them to get the problem fixed. Knowing when there’s a problem and when there isn’t a problem is a hard skill to develop. As in all things, experience helps a lot. So as you’re gaining that experience, it’s a good rule of thumb to err on the side of toughness, and not jumping the gun on medical help or rehabilitative therapy. When you’re coming back from an injury (or surgery), PT will be one of your most valuable weapons. But when you’re not injured, sometimes it’s the right solution to your problems…and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the solution is time, practice, and training. And an understanding of what you learned from watching Suleymanoglu’s world record. Not every movement oddity leads to disaster.