Weightlifting
Lift Off
Female participation in Olympic weightlifting is blowing up across the country. Now the field is ripe for sports scientists to uncover why women like American Morghan King are crushing it.
National champion Olympic weightlifter Morghan King gets a lot of strange questions about how she spends most of her waking hours.
“So you bench press for a living?” they’ll ask. Not quite. “You get all oiled up, walk out on stage and pose?” Definitely not.
That’s when King usually does her best to explain what a clean and jerk is, or a snatch. But in the era of functional fitness, it’s only when she mentions the now-ubiquitous deadlift that people finally sort of get it. Then comes the other comment she’s gotten pretty used to.
Perfect form
© Sam Kweskin
“But you’re so small?!”
King is indeed tiny — 5 feet tall and 115 pounds, to be exact. And yet, pound for pound, she also happens to be one of the strongest people on the planet. At 32, King has only been lifting seriously for five years but she is currently one of America’s most successful Olympic lifters. The same year she decided to do it full time, she won the national championship in her weight class and made the world team. She later won the American Open after an infamous nail-biter with a far more experienced lifter; she then went on to break a women’s record at the 2015 Pan Am Games. By 2016, she was on her way to Rio to represent the United States at the Olympics, and she is presently a frontrunner to compete in Tokyo in 2020.
Morghan King is not only one of the most exciting athletes the sport has ever seen but one of the most important American lifters ever, having shattered stereotypes and helped introduce the sport to what is now its fastest-growing demographic: women.
“When I was in fourth grade, I remember wanting to break Michael Johnson’s 200-meter record,” she says. “Clearly, I don’t see gender.”
While just about any man or woman with a gym membership in the last 50 years has probably done some weight training, few would be able to tell you what a clean and jerk was — even fewer could name a gold-medal-winning Olympic lifter. After almost a hundred years as a somewhat obscure Olympic event (it became a regular event in 1920), Olympic weightlifting is finally blowing up. USA Weightlifting — the sport’s governing body for all competitions — reports that between 2012 and 2016, overall membership rose roughly 125 percent. But female membership in particular is surging. While the number of women signing up also rose about 125 percent, women now compose 35 percent of its current membership, up from just 19 percent in 2007. Some attribute the shift to the debut of women’s lifting at the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney, where American Tara Nott picked up the event’s first-ever gold medal. Others say it happened shortly after functional fitness classes included Olympic lifts in its workouts. And some people put it down to King.
A lifelong athlete who went from collegiate soccer to half marathons and triathlons, King spent her early 20s on that familiar journey of searching for the perfect athletic outlet. Eventually she found the brutal hybrid workouts that have become so ubiquitous at local functional fitness gyms. She was an early adopter of these brutal hybrid workouts and even competed at several regional events. But that was just her gateway drug.
“I was fit, I felt good, but I was missing something,” she remembers. “I wanted a real sport. I wanted to get stronger. I started exclusively Olympic lifting and there was something about it that just felt like everything was within my control. It was all on me. I was always the little kid, always trying to prove something, and I found it.”
Lifting was King's missing ingredient
© Sam Kweskin
Many within Olympic lifting are saying that the rising female participation numbers may have something to do with how well-suited women are to the sport. Some of the gains are so remarkable that sports scientists are scrambling to understand what unique physiological dynamics may be at work. While many admit that research surrounding women and strength is embarrassingly thin, recent records tell a compelling story. The first-ever men’s weightlifting World Championship was held in 1891, but it wasn’t until 1951 that a man was able to clean and jerk 400 pounds. It took 10 more years for a man to snatch double body weight. The first-ever women’s competition only came along in 1987 and women were able to reach those same two milestones in less than half the time.
“These are barriers, like the four-minute mile,” explains Jim Schmitz, a three-time Olympic team trainer who has coached 10 men to the Olympics and three women to eight separate World Championships. “When men were breaking these records, they had been lifting for nearly a hundred years.”
And now, with so many more women lifting — and training and competing at the highest level — a new pool of research subjects is yielding some fascinating findings. It seems there is some actual science behind why women love it so much, and why they’re so darn good at it.
King, however, doesn’t need any stats or graphs to convince her she’s on the right path — the impact she’s having on women everywhere is obvious. “One of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me,” she says, “was when my friend [2012 Olympian] Holley Mangold told me, ‘You do realize how influential you have been for these younger lifters — they are now seeing women of all sizes being able to do this.’ A lot of the young girls getting into it first saw me on social media.”
King preparing to lift
© Sam Kweskin
King’s career is actually an exciting reflection of what’s happening in gyms all over the country. Former Olympic lifter Jasha Faye, for example, owes much of his new-found success to the rise of women in the sport. Faye owns Marin Heavy Athletics in the Bay Area, a gym that specializes in Olympic-style lifting, a rare oasis for purists who are tired of learning moves that are often diluted for the masses, as they often are at mainstream functional fitness gyms and barbell clubs when they integrate the lifts into high-intensity circuits. Faye says that half of the people who walk through his doors are women and that of the athletes he coaches at a competitive level, more women than men are qualifying for national meets. Faye’s gym hosted a local competition last April and there were 22 women and eight men.
At just over 6 feet and 220 pounds, with tattoos that run continuously from his torso to his toes and some impressive facial hair, Jasha Faye looks a lot like your typical barbell club trainer instructor. But the truth is, Faye is what you’d call an old-school Olympic weightlifter, with heroes like Armenian 1980 gold medalist Yuri Vardanian and Greek triple gold medalist Pyrros Dimas. Now 45, Faye has been lifting professionally for long enough to have witnessed an incredible evolution.
Back when he began lifting at age 13, there were only a handful of women lifting in the Bay Area. Faye notes that Jim Schmitz was one of the first to coach women in the ’70s. Schmitz, now 72, says that a few women joined his gym in the ’70s, right about the time jobs that required more physical strength were opening up to women — firefighting, construction, the police force. Some of them even decided they wanted to compete but there wasn’t yet a separate division for them. So they went ahead and competed against men. “My first couple of meets, I actually lost to women,” Faye says.
Trainer Jasha Faye
© Ryan Paiva/Lifting-Life
In 1987, the International Weightlifting Federation sanctioned the first Women’s World Championship. Ten years later, the “lady bar” was introduced. It was smaller in diameter, weighed five kilos less and was supposedly better suited to smaller hands.
After many years as a trainer and coach at various gyms throughout the Bay Area — including acting as an adviser for many functional fitness programs — Faye finally opened his gym in May of last year. In a part of the country where functional fitness gyms seem to outnumber fast-food joints, it’s the perfect spot for athletes looking for something different. “The women are the ones who show up every day,” Faye says of his athletes. “They’re tougher, they listen to what you tell them, they’re not stubborn, and they’re not ego driven.”
“I think women search for perfection more,” King says. “Women are so technical. We ask why, we have follow-up questions. We’re more coachable.” And when all the powerful movements come together for a perfect lift — that’s the point at which King believes women get hooked. “I actually fell in love with this sport because it’s so rarely perfect,” she explains. “But there have been a handful of times that have been pure magic.”
This is all incredibly important in a sport where technique trumps strength. “The gains women are making is what happens when you stop looking at weightlifting as a strength sport and look at it like any other movement-based Olympic sport,” Faye says. “The implement in your hands happens to be a barbell, but the movement is finite, and you can hammer out that technique over time.”
Challen Schleh began lifting with Jasha Faye two years ago and it was love at first clean and jerk. The naturally athletic 31-year-old is a former gymnast who later turned to yoga and eventually even became a trainer. It was during a short stint as a functional fitness instructor that she caught a glimpse of some very badass-looking women, about her age, throwing insanely loaded bars above their heads. Sure, she had seen people doing Olympic-style lifts before — they were even part of the classes she taught, but not like this. “It was explosive but without all the running and jumping rope — all the filler,” she remembers. “It was a totally new perspective. A new way to be.”
Instead of imploring his lifters to find that extra gear, grind out 10 more and aim for exhaustion, it’s as if Faye is coaching a tennis serve. The moves are technical, precise and, to Schleh, beautiful. While she had always chosen her workouts, this time the workout chose her. “I still practice yoga, I hike,” she says. “But Olympic lifting has become my obsession.”
Former gymnast-turned-lifter Challen Schleh
© Jasha Faye
The success women are having in Olympic lifting has taken one group of people by surprise more than any other: sports scientists. There is an oddly empty database of stats relating to women and strength and even less research related to female Olympic lifters. Many trainers end up sort of making it up as they go along when it comes to coaching their female athletes. “There is almost no science on Olympic lifting in general, besides what Russia did in the ’80s,” explains Andy Galpin, a professor at Cal State Fullerton and the co-director of the university’s Center for Sport Performance. “And if you want to look at females specifically, the number is zero — nothing exists.”
Galpin works with everyone from NFL players to UFC fighters, but lifting is of particular interest to him. He’s a lifter himself, he runs a weightlifting club, and he began working with King about six months ago. Frustrated at the lack of research — but also excited by the prospect of pioneering a new area of exercise physiology — Galpin and his team at Fullerton have in fact decided to launch their own study. They recently wrapped up phase one, in which they collected leg biopsies of 15 elite female weightlifters — including King — in order to better understand their muscles. While Galpin says the study will take two to five years, he is already seeing some surprising results.
“One thing we’re looking at is muscle fiber types — what percentage is fast-twitch and slow-twitch,” he explains. (Fast-twitch muscle generates bursts of movement.) “For a long time, many have presumed that females have more slow-twitch muscle fibers. We’re actually seeing the opposite. In some cases, we’re seeing almost entirely fast-twitch, which is unheard of.
King demonstrates her form
© Sam Kweskin
“The beauty of this to me is that we may actually discover that women are just as well-suited for this sport as men.”
While Galpin believes it will be the similarities between men and women that will surprise us the most, one former competitive lifter who has spent much of his career studying women’s Olympic programs points to key differences that may also help women excel. Bud Charniga has been in weightlifting for over four decades, once held a junior world record, has worked with both the Chinese and Russian women’s teams and has even published several articles on the subject, one of which declares “it is hard to imagine a strength sport better suited to — even designed specifically for — the female body than Olympic weightlifting.”
Charniga has in fact coached his own daughter to several national meets.
Weightlifting is all about skill. You don’t need big muscles to be good. You don’t need aggressiveness.
He points to things like a greater range of motion and less muscle tension as key qualities you’ll find in a talented lifter. “Weightlifting is all about skill,” he explains. “You don’t need big muscles to be a good weightlifter. You don’t need aggressiveness — that actually tightens muscles up. Relaxation is a strength — the ability to allow your muscles to use the elasticity.”
Charniga is also particularly interested in testosterone levels in women, saying it may have something to do with their ability to train harder, more often and recover faster. Charniga suggests that female weightlifters at the highest levels can handle such massive, high-intensity loading, because of their lower levels of testosterone.
Galpin admits that there could be something to this but cautions against building a training program around it until we know more.
“It could actually be estrogen that’s enhancing recovery,” he says. “But we don’t know. All we know is that there is some advantage that females have over the men. We’ve just got to figure out what it is.”
And while Galpin is quick to point out that he’s no sports psychologist, he can’t help but agree with King about the way women learn their lifts. “I’ve worked with multiple female Olympians and professional athletes, and what I can tell you is without a doubt the women take criticism far better,” he says. “I generally don’t have to convince the women to do anything — they ask for direction, I tell them, they go do it.”
The interest in lifting is growing
© Sam Kweskin
For most women out there who have incorporated Olympic lifting into their routines, the simple fitness benefit speaks for itself. The reason we all work out is to be better at four basic moves in life: pushing, pulling, jumping and squatting. Many consider Olympic weightlifting the ultimate expression of these four functions, and this is why everyone from pro basketball players to wrestlers use it to cross-train. Double-gold-medalist skier Mikaela Shiffrin does Olympic lifts to give her more stability as she hugs a slalom turn; track star Lolo Jones lifts to give her more explosiveness off the blocks and in hurdling.
“You use your whole body in concert,” Faye explains. “There’s no need to do separate body parts or to break down the movement. In fact, if you could only ever do one exercise that worked the most body parts at once, it would be the clean and jerk.”
Despite living in that cocoon of training, recovery shakes and rest that all Olympians do in the run-up to qualification, Morghan King is still very aware of what’s happening in amateur lifting all over the world. She says that during a recent trip to Romania, at one point the training hall was filled mostly with women. “Five years ago, it would have been 70 percent men,” she says. The gym she used to train at now has 10 Olympic lifting platforms, and people recognize her on the street.
“I recently went to one of these pro-club-style gyms, where they have a pool, tennis courts, sauna, everything,” she says. “While I was lifting, a girl came up to me and asked if I was Morghan King. She had just taken a USAW certification course — and she was shorter than me!”
Like Charniga, Faye also has a daughter who has fallen in love with weightlifting, and at age 13, she too has become hooked on the sisterhood of bumper plates.
“Isabella loves weightlifting and she loves her team,” Faye says. “She’s surrounded by very positive, strong, beautiful women who are in bed early and eat really well and are really dedicated — she takes a great deal of pride in showing up to school knowing that she’s already done her squats.”
King herself seems to be as driven by the excitement surrounding the rise of women in lifting as she is by winning medals. She is as inspired by Olympians as she is all the average Janes out there who have decided to get ridiculously strong. “I feel like when we interview women in sports, a lot of them say ‘I was a tomboy growing up,’”King says. “But that’s a weird in-between — you are still feminine, but you don’t really fit into a box.
“Instead of people telling us what we can do, we now just have more options of what we can do. There are little girls out there crushing the boys and it’s just a normal thing — that’s exciting.”
