Jacked olympic lifters - Fact of Fiction
Yes there are some pretty impressive physiques among elite olympic lifters. Tavakoli Hossein, Pyrros Dimas, and several Chinese lifters come to mind as recent exemples. This has led several individuals to make claims such as that their muscular development put some bodybuilders to shame and what not. A lot of peoples will look at these top physiques and automatically make the connection that the olympic lifts will build a ton of mass... they won't.
I've been around olympic lifters for a long time. I've competed and trained as one for several years. I've trained with several lifters who competed (and won medals) at such competitions as the Pan-Am games, World championships and the Olympic games. I've been around lifters from other countries and trained with top coaches. I must have seen and trained with hundreds of lifters. So I am basing what I'm saying here not on a few photographs, DVD or TV coverage of a select few elite individuals but on a wide range of athletes.
I can honestly tell you that very few olympic lifters, even those who are international level, look more muscular than what you see in regular gyms. The exception is with their lower body; it is true that the quadriceps and hamstrings development of these athletes is very impressive (in most cases) but a lot of people forget that this lower body size was built from squats, and lots of them! The actual performance of the olympic lifts have actually very little to do with this.
Except for their lower body development, most olympic lifters have an average athletic body. When you see them you know that they are in shape and that they probably compete in some sport, but you probably wouldn't think about them being elite olympic lifters.
Let me say again that there are a few tremendously impressive physiques among olympic lifters. But these are really the exceptions rather than the rule. Tavakoli Hossein is often quoted as an example of a super muscular olympic lifter, and rightfully so. But how many guys like him do you see among elite olympic lifters? None!
And these guys are the most genetically gifted lifters in the world! So its easy to see that the proportion of such jacked olympic lifters among less than elite ones is most likely even smaller. Let me be clear, the majority of the best olympic lifters look athletic but nobody would classify them as ''huge'', despite lifting weights up to 18-20 hours a week.
I remember reading something that Louie (Simmons) wrote a while ago. Louie started out as an olympic lifter and he switched to powerlifting after seeing both types of competitors and noticing that powerlifters were and looked stronger, while olympic lifters didn't really look the part.
Where are all the musclemen gone?
Oddly there were a lot more muscular olympic lifters in the 60s, 70s and early 80s than there are now. Back then, most olympic lifters did have great upper body size. Why is that? Well prior to 1972 a third lift was contested in competition: the clean and press, which was (at least originally) a great test of upper body strength.
So back then, lifters did spend a lot of their training volume training on the press. And this included a lot of assistance exercises such as: military press, push press, incline press, bench press, Bradford press, dumbbell press, partial presses, dips and even curls. These movements built a ton of overall upper body mass.
The press was dropped in 1972 because it had became impossible to judge (athletes were now bending back so much that the lift basically became a standing bench press!) but lifters from the 70s and early 80s still did most of their training in the press era and did possess the upper body to prove it.
It is also interesting to note that olympic lifters from the past used more reps per set on average. Today you will rarely see an elite lifter do more than 2 reps on the competition lifts and more than 3-5 reps on the assistance exercises like squats.
Back in the days, higher volume of work was fairly common. Eastern European used the 10 x 10 protocol a lot on squats and presses. Jacques Demers; the last Canadian to win an olympic medal in weightlifting used this program as his base lower body work for the off-season and was known for pilling up sets of 6 reps on the competitive lifts, Jacques was built like a bodybuilder! When I trained with him he was 45 years old and still managed to power clean 170kg and squatted over 230kg. He was still ripped and huge.
Another reason for the bigger muscles of guys back then was the lack of bumper plates. Back in the earlier days of olympic lifting they didn't have bumper plates and thus had to lower back the weight to the floor instead of dropping them like they do now.
Despite what some believe, the eccentric portion of the movement (lowering the weight) has a powerful effect on muscle growth, you can quote science as much as you want, that is a fact. This is evidenced in this case: the lifters had to always lower the weight under control and as a result they were bigger than today's ''droppers''.
Look at today's elite lifters; there is one place where they are just as big or even bigger than the lifters of old: the lower body. Do you think that it's a coincidence that the only exercise they do on a regular basis that still has a controlled eccentric portion is the squat?
That having been said, there seem to be a tendency toward the return of more muscular lifters. And oddly they all come from Asia, and especially China. Again, is it a coincidence that Chinese lifters are also known for their great exercise variety?
Contrary to most European lifters, they do include a lot of rowing, pressing and other upper body work and as a group they do seem to be much more muscular than most other elite lifters. They also do a lot of overload work like holding supramaximal weights overhead, which will build shoulder size and strength.
So what olympic lifting methods will help me get jacked?
The explosive lifts themselves actually have little impact on muscular development. I'm not saying that the olympic lifts will not build muscle size at all, but compared to more traditional exercises and method they are inferior at stimulating muscle growth. That's not to say that explosive lifting (olympic lift variations and other fast movements) doesn't have an impact on muscle growth though. So here are some things you should consider:
1. Explosive lifting (olympic lifts, plyometrics or light exercises performed as fast as possible) do have a potentiating effect in that they do develop the capacity to recruit the high threshold motor units/fast twitch fibers.
In that sense the explosive movements can ''wake up'' the nervous system which will become more efficient at recruiting those growth prone fibers during subsequent exercises better suited to develop muscle mass. So in a sense, explosive lifting can be used to make the rest of the workout more effective.
2. Systematic use of explosive lifting develops CNS efficiency, which means that the nervous system will become more and more effective at recruiting high threshold motor units. The more efficient your CNS is, the better you become at bringing the growth-prone fast twitch fibers into play which increases your potential for growth.
3. Despite what has been said in points 1 and 2 simply recruiting the fast twitch fibers is not enough to stimulate maximum muscle growth. The movements where the most fast-twitch fibers are involved are plyometric exercises, and these movements will do very little, if anything to build muscle mass.
Even exercises such as speed squats, speed benches, jump squats, medicine ball throws and the olympic lifts will not build a ton of muscle by themselves despite the fact that they do lead to a supremely high fast-twitch fiber recruitment.
The thing is that muscle fiber recruitment is only one of the many factors involved in stimulating muscle growth. It does play an important role, but if other factors are not present then growth will not be stimulated to a significant extent. Some of these other factors include hormonal responses to training (increase in hGH, testosterone, IGF-1, IGF-1 receptor sensitivity, androgen receptors sensitivity, etc.), metabolite accumulation, energy debt, muscle damage, muscle fatigue, time under tension, etc.
So while I do agree that we should do our best to maximize fast-twitch fibers recruitment, if we use methods that limit the other factors, little growth will be produced.
4. You can take a page out of what the old-time olympic lifters did training-wise though. The best built lifters used a higher average rep range on their training lifts.
Canadian national coach Pierre Roy referred to this as ''specific bodybuilding''. Pierre would have his athletes train with as much as 6 reps per set on the competitive lifts and their variations for 4 to 8 sets per exercise. His reasoning was that most lifters didn't have enough muscle mass ''in the right places'' to showcase maximum strength.
He argued that most north american lifters were relatively weak in the shoulders and this was the reason for many of the missed lifts (the lifters could not comfortably hold the bar overhead if it was slightly out of the ideal ''corridor''). When using the olympic lifts I also recommend not dropping the bar after each rep, but rather trying to lower the bar under control.
