Can You Create A Great Body With The Olympic Lifts?

One of my personal favorite methods of training is Olympic Weightlifting and it's variations. I'll admit it, I love to rip a heavy weight from the ground to overhead in one explosive, powerful and graceful movement like the Snatch. I also love to rip the bar from the floor to my shoulders and then powerfully drive it overhead like in the Clean and Jerk. And I love all of the overhead pressing, squatting, high pulling, snatch balancing and more that come with it. I personally find the Olympic lifting methods to be amazing for developing speed, power, explosiveness, flexibility, conditioning, strength and more. But, can you develop an amazing body through Olympic lifting?

I know when most people think of the strength sports they couldn't tell you the difference between Powerlifting, Olympic lifting and Strongman training; which is a shame. All three of them are amazing sports, and yes, all three of them are very different sports. Also, most people only envision the super heavy lifters that tend to carry a little more body fat, and they never realize that the lifters in the lower weight classes tend to be anatomy chart ripped.  Just take a look at the picture above to see what I mean.

And I know that there are a host of personal trainers that will say things like: "The lifts are too quick, there's not enough time under tension to gain muscle and get ripped." or, "There's no isolation movements so you can't develop great muscles with the O-lifts." or, "There's no muscle confusion, so you can't get a great body that way." or a host of other reasons why they don't believe that one can develop a great body with the O-lifts.

So, let's take a look at some bodies that have come out of the Olympic Weightlifting World:

Dmitri Klokov:

Lu XiaoJun:

Zoe Smith:

Marilou Dozois:

Cara Heads:

The Legendary Bill Starr:

The Legendary Dave Rigert:

My Man, the Immortal John Grimek:

Li Hongli:

As you can see, training hard and heavy with the quick lifts of Olympic Weightlifting and their variations can, without a doubt, lead to an amazing physique.

I think that the only real reasons why people tend to poo-poo them is because they are a little technical (although if you're training for fitness and health you don't need perfect technique) and they're hard. But, hard work is the only way to develop a great body.

Yours in strength and health,
Brett Stepan