So having finished a look at the sport in general and some of the determining factors in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 4, I want to look at the next issues on the docket. I’ll warn you up front that today may be a bit all over the place (even relative to the rest of this series) as I try to make my point.
Location/Equipment
From an equipment point of view, Olympic lifting is actually a relatively ‘easy’ sport compared to many. You need a proper bar (and OL’ing bars are different than bars for general use or powerlifting in terms of how they flex and spin), bumper plates (special plates that are meant to be dropped and bounce), squat stands and, strictly speaking, little else. In the early days of the sport, the plates weren’t even bumpers; many old school coaches still teach lowering the bar under muscular control for this reason; when they were coming up you couldn’t drop bars or you’d ruin the plates, lifting surface or both.
A platform (a lifting area made to absorb the impact of bars being dropped) is nice but many lift without one. And while things like jerk stands/blocks or pulling blocks are nice (they allow the bar to be started in different positions to work on weak points or work different ‘parts’ of the lifts) they are far from required. Many get by with a bar, plates and squat stands. Most Olympic lifters also wear special heeled shoes with a very hard bottom as well. The bottom is necessary to ensure that the force of the lifter goes into the platform (rather than being lost to squishy shoes) and the heel facilitates the necessary squatting positions.
So strictly speaking, anywhere you can lift weights you can do the Olympic lifts. Which isn’t to say that facilities are necessarily easy to find. The equipment is specialized (and you tend ruin bars and bumpers if you use them for more traditional movements) and are not necessarily super inexpensive (note that bars and bumpers can range from basic training sets to elite competition sets milled to the utmost in terms of precision and bearing quality and such).
But at a fundamental level, the sport can be done anywhere you can lift weights.