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Professional Weight Lifting
Humans have been holding contests to measure individual strength and power for thousands of years. The first mention of weightlifting was from China’s Zhou dynasty dating back to around 900b.c. They would require their recruits to pass strength tests before entering the army. Ancient Greeks also started to have competitions to see who could lift the heaviest rocks. Later on, the Greeks invented dumbbells for competitions. They also attempted to lift heavy bags of sand in Egypt. Until the early 20th century it was very unprofessional and dangerous, they did not know the proper forms and they didn’t know when was too much.
It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that it started to get more professional and showed up in the official Olympic Games. Now it started to be judged and scored to see who was the strongest. It didn’t become a regular sport in the Olympics until the 1920’s. It was then that international weightlifting federation (IWF) began. This started in order to determine the regulations and to inspect the competitions, to make it a more fair judgment and safer sport. In the beginning the weightlifting contests consisted out of up to twelve different lifts with the use of either one arm or both arms. In 1906 they introduced weight classes, by 1969 there were about 10. In 1928, there became three standard lifts; the press, the snatch, and the clean & jerk.
There are three branches on weightlifting. The first is bodybuilding, which is to build the appearance of a person’s muscles and body, the second is powerlifting, which has 3 distinct movements, where the appearance isn’t of importance, and the third is weightlifting, like the actual competitions. What counts in bodybuilding is the athlete’s appearance, or how well it is able to be ‘built’. So the weights are only really used in training, the body is what is actually judged at competitions. In powerlifting, the pure strength of the contestants is tested. There...