QUANTIFICATION OF TECHNICAL SKILLS IN WEIGHTLIFTING

Abstract

Weightlifting is a sport in which a weight shaped as a barbell must be brought from a position on the ground in front of the weightlifter into a position above the athlete's head with the legs and arms stretched. There are two different Olympic Techniques, the 'clean & jerk' and the 'snatch'. In this study we have investigated the snatch technique. The path of the barbell (Kazuo et al., 1996) was identified as one of the most important indicators of the quality of the movement. There is no priority path that can be identified as the most desirable for being successful as a weightlifter. However, by comparing many trials a certain path seems to coincide with a good and successful snatch Garhammer (1984) suggested taking the kinetic energy of the different body segments as an indicator for quality. We hypothesize that a well-performed snatch needs to be an (muscle) energy effective movement that results in a certain path of the barbell, as seen by the research mentioned above. To prove our hypothesis we compared the path of the barbell and the muscle energy for successful snatch movements.