Olympic Lifting for Sports by Drake Webster
[This is a guest blog by one of our Athletic Interns, Drake Webster, an Exercise Science student from ECU]
What can I do to be a better player? What should I do to get me to the next level? These questions are often asked by athletes who are wondering why they are not getting to the next level or playing to their full potential. Many different answers fly around when only one question should be asked right back to them, are you doing Olympic lifts in your program? Many times the answer to this question will be no and this is the answer to the first two questions an athlete often asks.
Olympic lifts are good for sport preparation because of their explosive/powerful nature and also the triple extension that is used in all of these lifts.
Explosiveness or power- These lifts are done with high force in short burst. Every athlete wants to be more powerful than their competition. If you want to increase your power output, incorporating Olympic lifts into the program can get you that power. A research study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning compared peak force, peak velocity, and peak power output of power lifters, Olympic weight lifters, sprinters, and a control group. The study showed that Olympic weight lifters had the highest peak force and velocity which means they had the highest peak power of all the groups. The study also goes on to say that these lifts can be very specific for sports and may be required to reach peak power needed for some sports.
Triple extension- Most if not all sports have triple extension during the sport. Triple extension is when the ankle, knee and hips are all extended. This is often achieved when doing a jump or sprinting. So even though you may not think about doing triple extension, it is happening all the time in sports. When you are consistently doing triple extension in your training through the Olympic lifts hen when you are on the field the triple extension movement will be a lot more natural and also more powerful.
Olympic lifts are a very important part of many strength and conditioning programs but also some programs lack the Olympic lifts. If the goal is for you to be the most powerful athlete and able to jump and sprint faster than Olympic lifts should be involved.
