7 Ways to Get Jacked With Olympic Lifts

The O-Lifts Don't Build Much Muscle...Until Now

by Christian Thibaudeau 

LEAD PHOTO CREDIT: ALI GREGERSEN OF CROSSFIT JUNCTION. PHOTO: PAUL SCHLAFLY IV

Here's what you need to know...

1. Training like an Olympic lifter won't automatically give you gains, but there are ways to train your O-lifts and build muscle.
2. Most modern Olympic lifters aren't jacked. They're not trying to be. Old school weightlifters were more muscular because they spent more time under tension.
3. To make gains while training the O-lifts, include assistance work and slow eccentrics (negatives). Use higher rep ranges as well.
4. Accumulate training volume by lifting at 75-80% of your max instead of going all out, all the time.
5. Isolate the muscles you want to build. But don't prioritize isolation work at the beginning of your workouts. Save it for the end.

What Olympic Lifts Will Do For You

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You won't end up looking like Klokov by training the Olympic lifts.

This doesn't mean Olympic lifts can't develop your physique. It's possible to train like a weightlifter and still improve your look.

Olympic lift variations and their assistance exercises can be very effective in building the traps, legs, glutes, upper and lower back, and shoulders.

But to be able to build muscle mass while training like a weightlifter you need to know why elite weightlifting training isn't effective at stimulating overall muscle growth.

Once you know this, you can modify your training to reach your goals.

6 Facts About Elite Olympic Lifters

1. At the elite level, the top lifters strive to stay in the same weight class for most of their career.

There are a few exceptions. Some will hop back and forth between two classes depending on the competition. But very few actually let their body grow one or two full classes up. Once they find their optimal weight class, they tend to limit methods that'll make them gain size.

2. Most modern weightlifters use a highly specialized approach. This means doing very few assistance exercises.

Their volume is spent mainly training the snatch and clean & jerk (and their variations), front and back squats, and hyperextensions.

Depending on the coach's philosophy, this will be anywhere between 75 to 100% of their training volume. Modern-day lifting is all about technical mastery – being as efficient as possible – and neural efficiency.

3. Reps are normally kept between 1 and 3 on most lifting exercises. This will give the lifter mostly neural adaptations and won't lead to much muscle growth.

A paper by the coaches for the Kazakhstan national team even goes as far as stating that the goal is an increase in strengthwithout an increase in body mass. Training is planned with that goal in mind.

4. The eccentric (negative) component is greatly diminished when performing the Olympic lifts because modern lifters drop pretty much every rep from the lockout/end position to the floor.

There's a minimal eccentric component when the lifter catches/receives the barbell (to break its downward movement) but this lasts just a fraction of a second and is done in large part by the stretch reflex. That makes this "eccentric loading" insufficient to stimulate much growth.

Related:  Olympic Lifting Made Simple

5. The development of the proper lifting technique has evolved a lot in the past 20-30 years. The best lifters are extremely efficient, decreasing to a minimum the height at which the barbell is pulled.

The best lifters are normally those who move the fastest and more precisely under the barbell. At that point, leg strength is the limiting factor (to stand up with the barbell) which is why front/back squats are a huge part of their training.

If you compare that to the technique of lifters from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the latter weren't as fast getting under the barbell. Instead they pulled to a greater height, which required a big emphasis on pulling strength, both upper and lower body.

6. The time under tension for each set is very short, roughly 3-12 seconds per set. This is suboptimal for the development of hypertrophy, which is best accomplished by sets in the 30-60 seconds range.

Related:  Olympic Lifting For Bodybuilders

Furthermore, most of that 3-12 seconds isn't spent under maximum tension because in the Olympic lifts you only produce maximum force for a very brief period of time – at the point of explosion in the power position.

Prior to the "explosion" the lifting is submaximal, essentially a deadlift-like motion with 40-60% of your deadlift, and afterward the barbell is largely moving up due to the imparted momentum.

Modern day weightlifting has a lot more emphasis on speed and power than slower-speed strength.

Exceptions Give Us A Clue

Out of the modern day lifters, the Asian athletes – from China and North Korea mostly – have the most muscular bodies. We're speaking in terms of body composition and having a lean and muscular look.

Out of all the elite weightlifters, they're the ones using the most assistance exercises: lots of pulls, rows, chin-ups, dips, handstand push-ups, lateral raises, triceps extensions, and even barbell curls.

It's not unusual for them to do 30-45 minutes of bodybuilding work at the end of their lifting session.

Lifters from Russia and Poland also tend to have plenty of muscle and they use a lot of assistance exercises too, mostly various pulls and presses.

They don't have the same type of development as the Asians (less arms and pectoral development) but still look more muscular than the lifters using a program relying only of the competition lifts and squats.

These two groups of lifters also tend to do more volume of work with a lower average weight.

Lessons From Old-School Weightlifters

Weightlifters from the '60s, '70s, and '80s were more muscular than today's lifters. They had more arm, shoulder, and upper back development. On average they were also leaner.

David Rigert, Anatoly Pisarenko, Pavel Pervushin, Lee James, Phil Gripaldi, Bill Starr, Yuri Vardanyan, and Sultan Rakhmanov, to name a few, had physiques that most of us would be very happy to have.

Here's why:

The Press Was Included

Prior to 1972, a third lift was contested in weightlifting competitions: the clean & press. The press was more of a slow-speed strength movement and involved the upper body a lot.

The press actually had a huge place in the training of weightlifters from the '60s and early '70s. Lifters used a lot of assistance work like the bench press, incline press, and push press to strengthen that lift.

David Rigert bench pressed 460 pounds, military pressed 375 pounds, and push pressed 480 pounds. This explains the bigger shoulders, triceps, and pecs.

Even though the press was removed from competition after 1972, it took some time for coaches and athletes to change the training approach. So lifters from the '70s and early '80s trained in the press era and had time to develop their upper bodies.

They Were Inefficient

Technique wasn't as efficient in those times either. On average, lifters pulled the bar higher in the clean and snatch and "pushed" the bar higher in jerks.

Today's lifter has a more efficient technique. They get under the bar faster, which means less emphasis is placed on pulling high.

When you pull the bar higher, you focus a lot more on the strength of the upper back, traps and even arms, as opposed to only maximizing leg and lower back strength.

This partly explains the thicker traps and upper back of lifters from the '60 through '80s.

They Couldn't Drop the Bar

Another major factor contributing to the thicker traps, upper back, and arms was bumper plates – the lack thereof.

Bumper plates, which can be dropped without damaging the barbell and platform, were introduced in the late '60s. Prior to that, lifters trained on iron plates.

The competition rules stated that the lifter had to lower the barbell down to the platform after a lift and in training. They didn't drop the barbell (unless it was a missed lift) because it would damage the bar.

The lowering portion of the Olympic lifts placed a tremendous eccentric load on the shoulders (when lowering a jerk or snatch down from overhead) and on the traps and arms (when lowering down to the thighs and floor).

This increase in eccentric loading relative to today's lifting practices no doubt contributed to building more muscle mass.

They Used Higher Reps

Finally, old-school lifters used higher rep ranges in training. The norm was closer to 3 reps per set on the competition lifts and 5 reps on the strength building movements.

Today it's 1-2 and 2-3 reps. Not surprisingly, this longer time under load created more physiological adaptations.

Related:  The Fallacy of High Rep Olympic Lifting

It's also worth mentioning that in the US it was typical for Olympic lifters to do bodybuilding work either off-season or between competitions. Tommy Kono, John Grimek, and Steve Stanko were international lifters who also won bodybuilding titles.

7 Training Modifications for Muscle Mass

Who this is for: Those who enjoy training the Olympic lifts and want to make them the cornerstone of their routine. They like the feeling of explosion and feeling athletic, but they also want gains.

Who this is not for: Those interested in competing at a high level in Olympic lifting. Those people would be well served to train in a way that's more in line with modern-day weightlifting programming.

1. Use more assistance exercises.

PHOTO CREDIT: CROSSFIT SNORIDGE

Your first choice should be movements that will have a positive impact on your Olympic lifts: pulls (hang, floor, blocks), deadlifts with your clean and/or snatch form, military presses, push presses, deficit deadlifts, power shrugs, and barbell rows for example.

A typical session for me will include:

• One competitive lift or a variation, like snatch or power snatch from hang/floor/blocks, clean or power clean from hang/floor/blocks.
• Two assistance exercises specific to the lift trained first in the session, like snatch pull from hang and deficit snatch deadlift, and one basic strength movement like front/back squat or good morning.

Good assistance exercises include:

A.  Snatch Related

• Snatch high pull (hang, floor or blocks)
• Snatch extension/low pull (hang, floor or blocks)
• Snatch deadlift (floor, deficit, blocks below knees)
• Overhead squat
• Behind the neck press with a snatch grip
• Behind the neck push press with a snatch grip

B.  Clean related

• Clean high pull (hang, floor or blocks)
• Clean extension/low pull (hang, floor or blocks)
• Clean deadlift (floor, deficit, blocks below knees)
• Shrugs or power shrugs

C.  Jerk related

• Push press
• Military press
• Behind the neck push press
• Half or quarter front squat
• Strict press from a split position
• Power jerk

2. Use a slightly higher rep number most of the time.

Do sets of 3 for the Olympic lift variations and 4-6 reps for the assistance movements.

3. Include plenty of work from the hang or blocks.

PHOTO CREDIT: CROSSFIT ERO

These force you to lower the weight back to the starting position after a completed lift and add a bit of eccentric loading. Lowering a snatch/clean or absorbing the bar on the way down on high pulls from the hang can build traps fast.

4. Focus on accumulating volume in the 75-80% range rather than going all-out all the time.

Doing 6 x 3 for the Olympic lift variations and 4-5 x 4-6 on the assistance exercises. Accumulate quality volume focusing on technical precision and speed.

5. When doing slow-speed strength exercises, focus on lowering the weight slowly in 3-4 seconds.

Think military press, back/front squats, and good mornings. This will add the eccentric component that's lacking from training on the competitive lifts and their variations.

6. Add dips and pull-ups to the program.

Dips will hit the triceps and chest nicely while maintaining proper range of motion at the shoulder joint. Pull-ups will improve back, arm, and grip strength. For these "bodybuilding" exercises do 3-4 sets of 6-8 reps.

7. Do isolation work for a muscle that you feel is neglected by the program.

Just make sure that it's trained at the end of the session and no longer than 15 minutes.

The Benefits

Making these adjustments will allow you to build plenty of muscle while working on your Olympic lifts. They'll help you get leaner.

Explosive work has been shown to increase insulin sensitivity more than other forms of training. And the more sensitive you are to insulin, the easier it is to get lean.

Yes, focus on increasing the load, but not at the expense of form, speed, and volume.

If you ever decide to test yourself, you'll need only 1-2 weeks of training on sets of 1-2 reps with reduced assistance work to peak your strength and get used to the feeling of maximal weights.

The 10 Commandments of Lifting

by Dan John 

Here's what you need to know...

1. Use whole-body lifts. The Olympic lifts and those in the powerlifting family are far superior to machines and isolation work.
2. Loaded carries are a game changer. Do them. And when find something like them that works, look for something else in your training to throw out. Keep it simple.
3. "The body is one piece" So why do most people train like they're building Frankenstein's monster. Arm day, leg day, etc.
4. Do the "basic basics." Eat your protein, drink lots of water, eat your veggies and always have breakfast. Even drugs won't get you far in the long term if you skip the basics.
5. If you're spending so much time at the gym that your mail is forwarded there, you're not dedicated – you've got a mental disorder.
6. Put the bar on the floor and pick it up a bunch of different ways. And make sure you're always including lifts that end with a barbell over your head.

Two Tablets of Iron

In 1998, Daniel came down from the mountain carrying two tablets of iron. Here's what they had written on them.

1.  Use whole body lifts. Rarely isolate a muscle.

When the web was in its early infancy, High Intensity Training enthusiasts, self-labeled "HIT Jedis," dominated the discussions. Pity them, for they knew not what they do.

They allegedly had horrific genetic limitations as they constantly referred to themselves as "hardgainers." Training more than eight times a month was considered insane.

And I began to notice something else – perhaps their bodies were designed to type as they'd post thousands of times a day discussing the most minute details of training. But, they rarely, in fact, trained.

To them, the key was to bring each and every muscle to momentary failure and then rest it until it fully recovered. By doing so, you would shed fat and have the body of whatever God, in God's wisdom, had ordained you should look like.

It just doesn't work this way.

The big lifts – the Olympic lifts and those in powerlifting family – will do more for your development than all the machines in every facility in the world. You may be able to find a weak-looking 400-pound bencher, but you won't find two.

The big lifts with the big weights, within reason, will get you bigger, stronger and, ideally, faster. It's always been true.

2.  Constantly strive for more weight on the bar and move it faster.

When I wrote this, the only "Westside Club" I knew was in Culver City, California, the home of some of the most amazing lifters and throwers in history. They moved big iron and loved to experiment with ideas and training methods.

Here at T Nation, we're used to reading about the Westside method with its dynamic work, chains, box squats, and all the rest from the minds of Simmons, Tate, and Wendler, but in 1998, not a lot of people outside of track and field appreciated the idea of moving the weights faster.

Related:  More on improving lifting speed

Danny Sawaya is a strength coach whose method is built on sensing bar speed. If it slows, either go lighter, stop, or recheck your recovery. His method is more complex than that, but not much more.

3.  The best anabolic is water.

Not long ago, someone online took me to task for this point. I told him that it's called hyperbole and I tried explaining it.

I asked him, "If you're eating veggies and protein and drinking water, who gives a shit about anything else you're doing? Maybe calories in/calories out isn't perfect for fat loss, but it is pretty good for everything else."

My point was simple: If you aren't doing the basic-basics, forget about the rest. You can't out-roid three hours of nightly sleep and a diet of doughnuts and bagels. Sure, you can out-roid a bad lifestyle for a while, but, long term, the basics of eating food and drinking water are going to get you where you want to go.

Regardless, anabolic steroids have been around a while and I still think most people who choose to take them begin too soon. In college, a guy from another country told me that he had been "juicing" for a few years. He was a very poor thrower and it made me wonder just how bad he would be if he were "clean."

He told me that at his gym, all the older guys were taking them, so he did, too. The issue? He never even got the chance to figure out how far and how strong he could get without the magic. If you're an elite thrower, you'd better be gifted enough to bench 400 and clean 300 without any steroid support. If you can't, you don't have the aptitude.

This reminds me of a recent rant of mine concerning parents who insist that Billy or Cindy miss sports or activities in high school to take SAT prep courses. They're missing the big issue, which is this: If you have to study to prove you have the aptitude, you don't have the aptitude. Sorry.

If I can drink water, sleep more, and eat normal and still defeat you while you're juicing hard, you probably don't have the aptitude. Sorry. Blame your genes.

4.  Did you eat breakfast? If not, don't ask me anything about nutrition.

Since first laying down these commandments, intermittent fasting has really taken off. I first read about it in the magazine, Mind and Muscle Power, and then later here at T Nation in an article by Ori Hofmekler. Ori called it the "Warrior Diet."

Since then, many others have "invented" it too, but you have to go way back to Hippocrates if you want to know its true inventor. Back about 471 BC, he wrote this:

"Obese people and those desiring to lose weight should perform hard work before food. Meals should be taken after exertion while still panting from fatigue. They should, moreover, only eat once per day and take no baths and walk naked as long as possible."

The no bath and walking naked thing hasn't been discussed much, but this basic idea about fasting has obviously been around a long time.

Back to breakfast. I train in the morning and stopped eating a regular meal before training years ago. But I really hit breakfast hard. If you train in the afternoon or evening, you should really consider breakfast as your key meal, especially for protein. So, yes, breakfast is something you may want to eat.

5.  If you smoke or don't wear your seat belt, please don't tell me the quick lifts are dangerous.

Back in the 1990s, the internet was filled with doomsayers telling us that we'll all die from doing snatches and cleans. I hate to give any credit to CrossFit, but it's nice to see non-performance people doing the O-lifts again.

It's not that those lifts were "lost," it's just much easier for the local personal trainer to sit you down on a machine and have you push the little stack up and down versus teaching the Olympic lifts. Unfortunately, O-lifters don't spend enough money to keep the lights on. Machines are a lot easier to teach to a neophyte.

People also need to keep things in perspective. Lots of things we do in the gym are "dangerous," but most of them pale in comparison to the dangers presented by the big, bad, world, especially stuff that's easy to remedy, like wearing a seat belt, stopping smoking, or not running with the bulls while wearing flip flops.

6.  Go heavy, go hard.

I wasn't as smart when I wrote this as I am now. It should have said, "Go heavy, go hard, and go home."

If you're spending so much time at the gym that your mail is forwarded there, you're not dedicated – you've got a mental disorder. Enough is enough with good, solid training.

7.  Keep it simple. Less is more.

I'm always searching for quicker ways to reach goals in both my training and my coaching. The arrival of kettlebells helped me with the hip hinge and squat. The TRX has done miracles for balancing my pull and I use dozens of exercise variations with different sleds, wagons, and Prowlers.

These new tools have allowed me to toss out all kinds of other things. For instance, thick bars teach the deadlift and clean pull better than me talking; chains teach acceleration each and every rep; and ab wheels target the anterior chain better than a dozen core movements.

When you add something new, search for what you can throw out!

8.  You have to put the bar over your head.

See commandment #9.

9.  Put the bar on the floor and pick it up a bunch of different ways.

I'll hit these two points together.

My philosophy of strength training can be broken down into these points:

• Put weight overhead.
• Pick it off the ground.
• Carry it for time or distance.
• The body is one piece.

I love the Olympic lifts and I still compete in them. The O-lifts are completed with the weight lifted and mastered overhead and it's easy to figure out a good lift or a miss. Picking weights up and putting them down is really all that strength training comes down to in the end.

In powerlifting, I still think the deadlift is king. There's no cheating with arches, depth, or equipment, and judges can't really make a bad call. It's the root lift of strongman contests and it's easy to figure out who accomplished the most.

As for loaded carries, nothing in my coaching toolbox approaches them as far as being a game changer. Do them.

Related:  Timed Carries for Traps, Arms & Core

"The body is one piece" is from John Jerome. Few people heed this advice, though. Instead, most of us train like we're building Frankenstein's monster. Arm day. Leg day. Freaking tibialis anterior day. But the body is one piece, and you have one digestive tract, one cardiovascular system, and one magnificent nervous system.

If you have trouble "here," you're going to have trouble "there." If we shut the supply of blood to your brain, your training will be impaired. That's not medical advice, by the way.

Thinking "the body is one piece" begins the process of seeing the life of the athlete, a training year, and a workout from a more distant vantage point. It's a global view, a paradigm shift, from seeing everything as bits and pieces like Frankenstein's monster to seeing everything as miraculously interconnected.

10.  Know and love the roots of your sport.

I love throwing and lifting. I like going back in the archives and articles of people from the past and trying to steal some insights. For football, I own John Heisman's book on the game (yes, that "Heisman") and a dozen or so other books that basically show us that nothing is new under the sun.

When I read articles, I often see the vision and impact of people who have died long years before the author's parents were alive. And it's great.

Studying Arnold isn't a bad thing for an aspiring bodybuilder. He didn't let much get in his way. If you want to be on the stage, you had better learn that lesson.

Related:  5 Things We Can Learn From Arnold About Building Muscle

For strength athletes, figure out how John Davis was the first to clean and jerk 400 pounds after serving in WWII, using no drugs, and by following a very simple training template.

There are lessons there to be learned and the best ones stay with you. Case in point, I wrote these commandments in 1998 and I still stand by them.