A Beginners’ Guide to Weightlifting (Cliff Notes if you will)

The Name

First let’s address the name of this sport.  It seems to have tons of names: Olympic weightlifting, Oly lifting, Olympic style weightlifting, O lifting, and many more.  The actual name -- from my understanding -- is weightlifting, one word.  I don’t think it is a big deal, but some people in the sport get bent out of shape when it is misnamed.  I just love the idea of finding a somewhat obscure sport and getting snobby about it.   They get upset that you can’t name it precisely or count with confidence in kilograms.  Who cares about such minutia?  As an aside, just because it is referred to as, Olympic weightlifting doesn’t mean that all participants are going to be Olympians.  The distance between lifters like me and Olympians is similar the the gap between me and Lebron James. Below are links to an actual Olympian.

The Lifts

The two lifts in Weightlifting are the snatch and the clean and jerk.  Lovely names huh?  Even the most stoic of us will crack a grin when hearing them.  Sports shouldn’t be sexual double entendres. 

The snatch, requiring a wider grip, takes the barbell from the ground to overhead in one movement.

The clean and jerk is really two lifts in one.  In the clean, you take the barbell from the ground to the shoulders in one motion.  The jerk takes the barbell from the shoulders to overhead.  The jerk is done by most by splitting the feet from front to back, although some very good lifters use a different method.  

There are so many variations of the two/three that it can be very confusing.  The snatch and the clean are most efficiently executed by catching them in the full squat position.  If they are caught above a squat they are referred to as power snatch or power clean.  This is just the beginning of the long list.  Catalyst Athletics has a pretty exhaustive video archive of most variations.  

Kilos to Pounds

How European of you.  Speak American!  One kilo is 2.2 pounds.  100 kilos X 2.2 equals 220 pounds.  You can also quickly just double it and add 10%. 

I hope this sheds a little light on this very simple sport.  Soon, I will help you understand how a meet works, from weight classes to ascending bar weight, and how many times you get to lift.  Hope this helped.