[i]Originally posted by bendragon[/i]
I’m not so great a fan of the O lifts as many of the former posts, so I offer this as a point of discussion. Any lift can be done explosively. Olympic lifts take years to learn to do properly. Any lifts performed with a barbell in your hands produce large amounts of stress on your body, possibly limiting effective training volume. Hip, hamstring, low back strength can be developed using squats, good mornings, and other less complex movement. Just asking people to keep open minds and hoping researchers start looking at elite samples or start learning to translate Russian.
First it does not take years to learn the OL’s for some it can take mere minutes. Thats a fallacy passed on by coaches who cant teach the lifts.
I believe you have taken what simmons said about holding a barbell in your hands and taken it out of context, he was refering to Powerlifters, where squating heavy and deadlifting heavy in the same cycle is too much cns stress.
Any lift can be done explosivly but the OL’s offer so much compared to most other lifts. For examlpe in the squat clean you can develop so many strength qualities like starting strength, acceleration-strength, strength-speed, as well as eccentric amoritization in the catch phase of the lift. The power snatch offers flexability-strength, speed-strength and lateral balance if one chooses to do the split version. On top of that there are so many OL variations one can use them to develop ablsoute strength as well. The list goes on and on.
As far as russian research there are many translated russian texts and many of them about top russian weightlifters, medvedev, davorkin, oleshko, Roman. Eeven the late great Dr.Mel Siff was a huge fan of using the OL’s lifts as a form of supplementary training for sports performance.