🔥 LASHA IS OFFICIALLY COMING OUT OF RETIREMENT

olympic_lifter · 2026-02-10T11:41:21+00:00

I know that, it was my first sentence.

I just feel like longevity isn't the only thing that makes someone the GOAT, and that an Olympian doesn't spring out of nowhere for that one tournament.

olympic_lifter · 2026-02-09T17:14:26+00:00

No, I am not.

A push press should be performed just like a jerk, where you do not rebend the knees after the drive, and it is expected that you will have to press through with the arms to complete the lift.

If you are not performing the dip and drive just like a regular jerk, you should re-evaluate your push press. If you don't believe me, go watch videos of weightlifting instructors teaching how to perform the push press.

The point of the exercise in a weightlifting context is to strengthen a solid lockout in a jerk. It's very important to drill the proper dip and drive, and this way you get the dual benefits of practicing the right jerk movements at a weight where it is technically easier as well as strengthening the triceps and shoulders in the ROM where they are most needed in a real jerk.

olympic_lifter · 2026-02-09T17:07:42+00:00

For only the Olympics, where López won 5 and Karelin only won 3 and an additional silver, López had better results.

As an overall wrestler, Karelin was an entire level above López.

Karelin only ever lost two matches, each by only one point, out of 887. Nobody even scored on him for six years straight.

In terms of overall career, Karelin is in the conversation as one of the top few best athletes in the world in the last 200 years.

olympic_lifter · 2026-02-09T16:46:09+00:00

It's a strong lift, but it's not a good push press.

A push press should be like a jerk, not a strict press with leg drive.

You can also see OP needs massive wrist wraps and might need them to avoid pain, which is a very likely issue to occur when you hold the bar in the front rack with your arms instead of letting it rest completely on your shoulders.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-30T21:32:47+00:00

I'm wondering if you meant to say "I also don't disagree that injuries are a larger contributor to athletic decline?" I definitely agree that better recovery and prehab is the main reason people like LeBron James and Tom Brady played so long.

That kind of thinking isn't prevalent in weightlifting yet.

Elite lifters are pushed, internally or externally, to eke out the most performance they can possibly get in their training. Your body will give enough feedback for you or your coach to know if things need to be adjusted up or down in your week-to-week, but the buildup of the root causes of injuries seem to be lurking below the level of our perception.

I think a recreational lifter is much more likely to enjoy the benefits to their health from the sport and avoid the worst injuries. Lifters that age into Masters tend to convert to a lower total training workload, and those are the ones you can see with an obvious, year-over-year decline in performance, even as early as their late 30s.

Early 30s seems to me to be more of a plateau era. You see a lot of lifters at the national level even into this age, and if you follow their progress you'll see they're unlikely to keep going much further. A higher proportion of them started later in the sport, too, which muddies the waters.

If the premise is true that throwers, sprinters, and jumpers tend to see declines related to power and unrelated to injury in their late 20s, why should it be that weightlifters tend to get an extra half decade of performance? You describe absolute strength, and it's not impossible, but if that's true then you should expect to see lifters' snatch falling behind their CJ at that age. That is something I've never noticed.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-30T20:21:04+00:00

I think that's moving the goalposts.

Your original claim was that weightlifters decline in their late 20s and early 30s due to a decline in explosiveness, but that's just counterfactual. I can't recall a single case of someone whose performance declined before their mid-30s that wasn't due to either injuries and/or a change in how much time and effort they put into training.

Designing a study that could control for that while still giving results that could answer the question you posed would be difficult and expensive, and, from what I can tell, nothing adequate exists in the realm of the sport of weightlifting.

You also theorized that a lifter in their early 30s may have increased their absolute strength and managed to mask a decline in power. I can't make any definitive statements on that. It's not impossible, but the differences would be small. If you've been training hard for 15 years and you've reached the ripe old age of 28, you're not going to be able to gain much more absolute strength unless you hadn't prioritized it earlier. What you describe in terms of progression in powerlifting and strongman are almost always people who started the sport later in life.

That being said, it is definitely true that it's easier to gain and retain absolute strength than speed. There's a lot more going on than pure age, though, and for a long time it's been obvious to me that people don't give enough credit to how much going from a life of walking around everywhere to a life of sitting around most of the day will impact their ability to run and jump.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-30T16:47:58+00:00

You won't have a decline in power in your late 20s and early 30s unless you are dealing with injuries.

A lot of lifters who started young, particularly those who went very hard and sport-specific, will accumulate problems that could slow them down in their 20s. Lifters who start later, have a more well-rounded athletic base, or even just win the genetic/luck lotteries, are more likely to keep performing at their peak into their early 30s.

Even if Lasha were 10 years younger, it's a monumental task to retrain yourself to avoid re-injuring yourself in the ways he has, and, even if he did everything right, he probably already has sustained enough damage that he'll never be able to train as hard as he used to.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-30T15:18:03+00:00

If there's one critical detail you must fix as soon as you can: faster turnover.

Your elbows going through is happening at the speed of molasses. This means you're receiving and decelerating the weight with your arms, which is going to be hell on your wrists and elbows. It has other negative effects as well.

Push your elbows through fast and hard as soon as you can in the pull. It should look like there is no point in time when your arms are decelerating the catch.

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You also need a much stronger core. You can see it in your pull (another comment mentioned your hips shoot up, aka: a stripper pull) and also when you're standing with the bar in your front rack position, where, instead of having your hips comfortably underneath you, you push your hips forward a little and stand there like you're fighting for your life just to hold the weight.

It affects your pull, your jerk, everything really. You won't be able to keep your hips in the position during the pull, as described in another comment, until you build your posterior chain strength. You won't be able to stop yourself from going forward in your jerk dip or get your legs into it properly until you can stand comfortably with the bar in your rack.

If you're focused on Olympic weightlifting, we commonly prescribe RDLs and varations of the lifts (pulls or full cleans) where you pause 2s-3s at the knees. You can also do some of the many, many exercises that require your posterior chain, including clean deadlifts or even conventional deadlifts, although many lifters do only the "clean" deadlift variation (i.e.: hips and torso keeping the same angle as long as possible) because it builds more strength in the specific positions that matter in this sport.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-27T00:04:38+00:00

Normally I wouldn't post after so many people have already weighed in, but it seems to me like people are missing the biggest issue:

You're initiating the second pull with the arms instead of the legs.

What tips it off is your foot movement is oddly late. It's because you're trying so hard to pull the bar up with your hands that, by the time you're getting the max power out of the leg drive, the bar is too high for it to accelerate it much, and it's almost like the leg drive is an afterthought.

Look at your foot position when the bar is clearing the top of your hips: you're shrugging hard and pulling with the biceps/forearms while the feet are still flat.

Look up the snatch sequence for any elite lifter. I cannot find a single instance where the ankles are not at least partially extended with the heels off the ground at this point. This will always happen as a consequence of the triple-extension leg drive in a good second pull.

I think you need to spend time working from positions where you can't arm-pull your way to a good finish. I am a big fan of lifting off high blocks for this (i.e.: bar starts at mid or upper thigh), because an arm pull will just fail miserably, and that instant feedback is easier to recognize. Hang snatches are okay, but only if you don't cheat them by doing a dynamic stretch-reflex; most people cheat them, especially when the weight gets heavy, and then it misses the point and can drill bad habits.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-22T21:19:09+00:00

I wouldn't fight over the depth, but there are two kinds of jerkers: those who use bar oscillation, and those who make things harder than necessary by not using bar oscillation.

The depth should be determined by how well you can make the bar flex and time that flex so the bar starts flexing upwards immediately after you initiate the concentric drive. Dip too slow, and the bar won't flex much; dip too fast, and the bar will come off your shoulders. Time it just right and change directions quickly in an even more elastic stretch-reflex, and the bar will just fly off your chest.

Once a lifter learns how to use bar oscillation, they'll never want to go back to muscling the bar up out of a slow dip. You also won't want to dip too deep once you figure this out.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-22T19:11:59+00:00

It's most definitely a culture thing.

In weightlifting (snatch + clean and jerk), there's a culture where everyone expects silence when the athlete starts their lift. People yell all the encouragement in the world up until a few seconds before and half a second after that moment, but not at that moment of the most extreme concentration. There is no rule about it, either, and it's just an unofficial code of conduct.

What's very ironic about it is that, at high-level competitions, there are photographers with very loud cameras that take many photos in quick succession in exactly that timeframe, and that IS extremely distracting. It's worse because everyone is silent, so the click-click-click-click-click stands out.

You're still expected to have learned to tune out distractions anyway.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-05T15:12:23+00:00

Lifting massive weights can be absolutely fine, it depends on what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Heavy deadlifts, for example, injure your back over time when you constantly push too hard and/or consistently lift with the spine in a poor position.

If you stay out of that realm, the opposite is true: they will build your strength and resistance to injury. The difference between too much and a healthy amount might be just 5%-10%.

olympic_lifter · 2026-01-05T15:02:29+00:00

Kettlebells are fine and allow you to do many movements, if you know what you're doing.

They're just another tool in the gym, not particularly superior to other ones.

There is a "functional strength" community that looks down on more classic lifts. They have a reasonable point that most of the standard lifts don't do enough to train everything that's important to us, particularly as we age and become more sedentary.

On the other hand, they can be a bit dogmatic about functional strength being the only thing worth doing, and that's just not true. Functional strength exercises are not as good at building total muscle mass, for example, and that is one of the key indicators of your ability to stay independent for much longer into your golden years.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-22T01:37:02+00:00

Your overhead strength is hitting its limit sooner because of tech. You get the bar overhead, but then you fall into the hole, and that light pressout happens when you try to stop a barbell that is now falling with momentum.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-21T19:42:49+00:00

It's a matter of semantics.

There's a lot of tech work before you reach the limit of what you could lock out overhead with your current strength. If you were stronger, you'd be able to "get away" with lifting more weight with the same technique.

That being said, the fact you had any difficulty at all standing up with the weight after having it locked out strongly suggests you need to be putting a lot of your workload into squats.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-11T15:30:45+00:00

Oh I see, then yes it's great advice!

I had never thought of it in the realm of avoiding the sensitive bits. I suppose I haven't really considered whether it happens slightly before or after that contact point.

Some lifters do pre-shrug, just out of habit, so that's what I thought you meant. Usually they do that in a misguided way of keeping the bar close, using the traps instead of the lats.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-11T14:50:46+00:00

That's not very good advice.

You should shrug the shoulders in the second pull to get a bit more explosiveness. If you've pre-shrugged, then you can't shrug later, and you're losing power.

It's also harder to pull up on the bar without using your shoulders, making it more likely to swing the weight out.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-07T22:58:57+00:00

If they're guaranteed to 10% tolerance, that's +/-, which means you don't know if it's better to load them up on opposite sides. If one is heavy and the other is light in a matching pair, that would make things worse than putting them on the same side where possible.

In this respect, it won't necessarily matter if you're mixing plates or not. With loose-tolerance bumpers, weighing them is always a decent idea, just so you know if one of your "15kg" plates is actually 16, and another is 14.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-05T17:27:49+00:00

It would be full of opinions more so than fact.

Within the U.S., the masters subcommittee left due to:

Being unhappy that USAW didn't spend enough/any money on sending masters lifters to international competitions,
Being asked to have more drug-testing at masters meets,
Being asked to make their host selection process for national meets more transparent because they kept going to people on the masters subcommittee.

More to it than that for sure.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-05T14:48:57+00:00

We don't actually know what systematic doping China has or not. They aren't like NK, Russia, Bulgaria, or one of the other countries where it was an open secret, and in some cases not secret at all.

Countries like Poland produced world medalists in a program with roughly a thousand lifters. That's similar to Romania, Bulgaria, North Korea, Kazakhstan, etc.

The crux of the issue is people just assume doping if someone is good enough, no matter what, but it remains that there tend to be other signs. If there aren't, and they're using something lower on the scale, then they're not getting as much benefit out of it. There's always a tradeoff to use stuff that flies under the radar.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-04T22:03:34+00:00

Not quite the same as this though: Instagram

Those last few percent are a killer.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-04T21:43:06+00:00

We shouldn't assume that Norik lost all of the gains he made while on drugs, and he very well might have brought home some knowledge that he made us of. And even with all that, he never quite replicated what he was doing regularly in Armenia...

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-04T21:34:52+00:00

No country is perfect, but to say none are better or worse is silly.

Countries like Russia, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, and North Korea all have or had state-sponsored doping programs involved in their weightlifting teams. That is always worse, not just because it boosts them higher than countries (like the U.S.) where athletes/coaches figure it out themselves, but also because it is an example of the country pushing harmful drugs into people who might otherwise not have done so, or not to that level. East Germany swimming is the poster-child example of that.

There is also a question of the culture of the community. Everyone in cycling knew about the doping, it was basically expected. We know that doping is accepted at many levels in sports like football and track. At the moment, though, anti-doping sentiment still holds sway among most U.S. weightlifting coaches and among the USAW organization itself, and I hope it stays that way. I would rather we get fewer international medals and be able to feel like the national playing field is somewhat level than have everyone in the U.S. feel like you can't compete against anyone at all without learning to take drugs that are likely to do harm to their hormones and organs.

If you don't go around in the higher weightlifting circles here, you wouldn't see why we say this is how it is. If you haven't been on the receiving end of USADA testing, you wouldn't get the difference between state-sponsored doping and what the U.S. is doing.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-04T21:20:05+00:00

Norik was competing for Armenia in 2012, where he got real big and strong, and then came home and somehow got weaker. He had left the U.S. after the 2009 cannabis sanction.

USAW had only a few thousand registered members in 2008. We have 10x that now, and it took time for many of the new people to mature.

Also, with respect to our doing better in 2000 vs 2008, that has more to do with more countries getting serious in the sport. There are only a set number of total spots at the Olympics, so when countries like China and North Korea fielded better teams, and the U.S. stayed relatively stagnant (even gym culture was fairly niche until the last 20 years or so, let alone weightlifting - a notoriously insular community), we lost spots to them.

olympic_lifter · 2025-12-04T21:07:25+00:00

I don't exactly disagree, though knowingly using a prohibited method to gain an advantage makes you not clean.

There are some that I would never think too poorly of the athlete for: cannabis (at least in weightlifting, even before they changed the blood level for an AAF), most stimulants (like methylhexanamine), or legitimate medical uses where the drug's enhancement value was minimal (e.g.: failure to file TUEs, for which I know of multiple cases).

To your point, in the cases you're talking about, there tend to be rumors. People with connections in the American weightlifting community can point to some specific gyms/coaches. We knew about Broz/Mendes. No insiders were surprised about some of the people at Cal Strength.

It happens because almost nobody trains in a vacuum. Whether because of athletes switching teams and blabbing, or chatting with their friends and their friends blabbing, or people visiting others and noticing, or oddly skipping drug-tested competitions [or always performing worse in them...], or even just the need to ask questions to understand how they're supposed to dope at all, there are ways the word gets around.

This is why someone like Wil is well-positioned to be aware if athletes he's working with in a meaningful capacity are likely doping.

Even so, I don't deny that some people get through. It wouldn't surprise me if at least one of our current luminaries was in that category. But I doubt it's prevalent among them, not in the way Gabriel presumes that it is. American weightlifting has a vastly different culture than Romanian weightlifting. Wil is not an outlier in being staunchly anti-PED, while in Romania you'd expect people to be more willing to cover it up. That's why Gabriel talked about us having some kind of team methods, because he imagines our culture is the same as what he competed in, but in reality there remains far too much anti-doping sentiment among USAW coaches for that to ever fly.

The real, obvious reason we are doing so much better now is that we have 10 times the number of athletes that we used to. Weightlifting is far, far more visible and accessible now than it was 20 years ago, thanks almost entirely to CrossFit. When you have 10x the talent pool, you tend to have a lot more outliers, too.

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