What do you consider yourself...

[Cynical Simian]

a power lifter to me, is not real concerned about form...

PLing judges and coaches might be surprised to hear this...

Honestly, this whole attempt at definition seems rather futile.

 

[DZLS]

you're probably right...

i guess most of the "power lifters" i've seen, seem to not be concerned with form... but these guys are probably not involved in competitions either, where some sort of rules are in order for these guys to have a lift count... but it's not form as much as a rule you need to lower the weight to a certain point, but then it doesn't matter as much when you bring it up...?

 

[NorgePrecision]

Right now I would consider myself a weight lifter, but I'd like to try a natural competition in bodybuilding some day.

 

[musketeer]

the reason i separated the Oly and weight lifters is because i consider an Oly guy as someone who is mainly doing explosive lifts while using good form...

a weight lifter does not limit himself to the Oly lifts, and will add some other exercises into the mix...

a power lifter to me, is not real concerned about form... they are just looking to move as much weight as they can in one rep without blowing out a sphincter...

maybe someone else can give their definitions of each category...?

i guess another way to put it is in rep ranges...

BBer - various reps ranges, various tempos, strict form...

weight lifter - medium rep range, more explosive, little less form...

power lifter - low rep range, explosive, however you can get it up...

Oly lifter - low rep range, explosive, strict form...

???

My pleasure to clarify Diesel!

Powerlifter:

Squat Bench Deadlift (they compete to lift the most in these three lifts - they can specialise in one/two, but that's all they care about)

Weightlifter/ Olympic Weightlifter:

Snatch and Clean & Jerk (that's all these guys need to do - they are extremely efficient at these movements, but there is terrific functional strength carrover because of the number of muscles stressed dynamically in these lifts)

Body Builder:

Absolutely concerned with appearence - ultra-low bodyfat, terrffic control of superficial (outer) muscle and the ability to manipulate their cellular status in order to appear ripped to the bone and yet massive and full. How strong or athletic they are may be has no bearing on their results - it's just a great side effect of their training!

Strong Man:

Strongmen can specialse in a few lifts or not concerned with any particulat lift, just damned impresive at doing anything! A bit of a jack of all cards in that they are good at PLing and Oly lifting but obviously not as good as the specialists.

 

[b fold the truth]

My pleasure to clarify Diesel!

Powerlifter:

Squat Bench Deadlift (they compete to lift the most in these three lifts - they can specialise in one/two, but that's all they care about)

Weightlifter/ Olympic Weightlifter:

Snatch and Clean & Jerk (that's all these guys need to do - they are extremely efficient at these movements, but there is terrific functional strength carrover because of the number of muscles stressed dynamically in these lifts)

Body Builder:

Absolutely concerned with appearence - ultra-low bodyfat, terrffic control of superficial (outer) muscle and the ability to manipulate their cellular status in order to appear ripped to the bone and yet massive and full. How strong or athletic they are may be has no bearing on their results - it's just a great side effect of their training!

Strong Man:

Strongmen can specialse in a few lifts or not concerned with any particulat lift, just damned impresive at doing anything! A bit of a jack of all cards in that they are good at PLing and Oly lifting but obviously not as good as the specialists.

Man...I think that you hit the nail on the head...and thanks so much for the great compliment to the Strongmen. Most of us have come from other backgrounds.

I would also like to add that you are not a...
Bodybuilder till you have stepped on stage.
Powerlifter till you have stepped onto the platform.
Oly Lifter till you have dropped under the bar in front of the judges.
Strongman till you have finished the contest.

You must COMPETE to be the sportsman...

B True

 

[lardo5150]

I dont compete. But I lift for the perfect body, so I would consider myself more of a bodybuilder.

More so now that I am going to start competing this summer.

 

[Madcow2]

I refer to myself as a "bodybuilder"... I guess my first concern is not with strength, but with aesthetics... to me, the strength comes hand in hand with your muscles getting larger, albeit not as much as if you are lifting the heavier weights...

What you see here is not so different from your own goals just a reversal of your equation, "the strength comes hand in hand with your muscles getting larger", being applied.

Muscles hypertrophy to compensate for increased training demands. Hypertrophy doesn't happen to make you look bigger, it happens to make you stronger (not meaning pure neural work). The size is the body's method of adaptation and it's way of dealing with increased demands. If there are no increased demands there will be no hypertrophy beyond current status which is why the guy who squated 225x8 last year and did all kinds of fancy exercises and blowout BBing splits in the interim is still squatting 225x8 this year and is consequently the same size.

What people are doing here is simply going about generating as much hypertrophy as possible. Very very few are going to be PLs or OLs here or even competing in a sport - they are just all adding muscle and going about it in a systematic way. In a nutshell, consider the body as a system and work at increasing capacity as fast as possible in large compound lifts that train the entire system. Basically, this is the easiest and most direct way to adding muscle as fast as possible. Now obviously few are peaking in 1RM or only concerned with the PLs, they are using a variety of core lifts that evenly develop the body and a more valid hypertrophy range (whereas very low reps and 1RM lifts tend to be heavily neural).

So that covers what you are seeing on the core resistance side of the equation. People tend to be focused there because BBers have a way of thinking there is some kind of magic and that hypertrophy or bodybuilding is very very different from strength training. Maybe you don't want to be a power hitter and break home run records but only want to look good rounding the bases. You still better learn to hit the ball fairly well and consistently or you'll be sitting on the sidelines.

As far as diet and what people recommend eating, normally it wouldn't be a concern. If you weight X now at reasonable bodyfat and want to weigh X+20 you should get better at the big stimulative lifts and consume enough calories to provide for that +20 part (or enough to get you to +10 and then up it again). Pretty damn simple but it gets horrendously screwed by people who don't seem to get this and spend 10 weeks adding no weight (fat or muscle) and complain that a program didn't work - I mean, if the resistance program was shit, you'd still have gotten fatter and therefore gained weight due to caloric excess. These are usually the ultra-ripped 160lbs guys who count every calorie and micromanage their trace nutrient intake to the tune of $200 a month in supplements thinking that muscle won't accrue without a minimum of 30mg a day of monkey ass oil.

Cutting is just about as simple. Granted you can micromanage all this until the cows come home but most people are screwing up at the base 90% big block level and not at the 0.05% trace level. Caloric excess, caloric deficit. Eating squeeky clean is a lifestyle decision but it won't do crap for your hypertrophy if you aren't eating enough and the guy shoveling down Big Macs will blow you out of the water.

That covers diet. As far as aesthetics - bodyfat level, the amount of muscle you carry - this has been done so after that it's genetics and just a careful eye. Genetics you can't do anything about and as far as remaining in proportion, what almost everyone here as found is that if you train the body with big lifts it tends to grow very very symmetrically (it's actually pretty damn hard to grow your body out of proportion beyond certain limits no matter how hard you work - else we'd have a lot of guys with massive arms from doing bis and arms all day but these are typically the guys with not much arm development either whereas the guy squatting/pulling like a beast gets guns with a few casual sets a week). Most guys here were really stunned that the best rear delt progress they ever made was when they dropped laterals and learned to row corrently. Very few here are wanting for some huge gap in symmetry. The take-away is, if you want to put on muscle, don't waste a lot of energy with isolation work. I'm not saying you never do it, but don't blast a shotgun array trying to pre-empty any possible imbalance from occuring at the expense of actually growing by increasing capacity in the core lifts. If you see something, you address it - don't attempt to address 50 things all at once in advance of them even showing up. It's not like you can't later devote 4-6 weeks to pure aesthetics and maintaining core muscle mass.

So I think that kind of gets at the heart of your poll and explains why you see what you see here. Actually, most if not all of these guys have trained and eaten, probably for years since few here are very young, exactly like what you are used to seeing. The fact that they aren't doing that anymore isn't that they aren't bodybuilders or interested in health or aesthetics, it's that they are doing a lot better now than when they used to do more typical BBer workouts and activities. Most guys here have no trouble adding muscle, dropping fat, keeping their lifts moving, or being pretty satisfied and happy in general. That's pretty rare outside of a newbie board.

 

[glennpendlay]

i think the catagories for this poll are not quite right...

as far as im concerned, a powerlifter is someone who competes in powerlifting, period! if you dont compete in powerlifting, your not a powerlifter. you might be training to be strong on the bench or deadlift or squat, but the defining characteristic of being a powerlifter is, competing in the sport of powerlifting... its kind of like being a professional football player. you cant say you are an NFL quarterback unless you get paid to quarterback an NFL team. just going out in the backyard and working on your "quarterbacking skills" on the weekend doesnt make you a quarterback!

ditto with weightlifters, or olympic lifters. to be a weightlifter or olympic lifter, you have to compete in the sport of olympic weightlifting, otherwise known simply as weightlifting, or olympic lifting. if you dont compete in this sport, your NOT a weightlifter!

ditto for bodybuilding, although i think the definition is a little more blurry here.

if you dont compete in one of these three sports, then you are NOT a weightlifter, powerlifter, or bodybuilder.

another catagory could be, recreational lifter, training for increased size and strength. this could include the guys who want to be get bigger and stronger, but dont ever want to compete, just want the satisfaction of being bigger and/or stronger.

the last catagory, would be people who train for improved sports performance in a sport other than the three "iron" sports of OL, PL, or BB.

this, i think, would include everyone!

What you see here is not so different from your own goals just a reversal of your equation, "the strength comes hand in hand with your muscles getting larger", being applied.

Muscles hypertrophy to compensate for increased training demands. Hypertrophy doesn't happen to make you look bigger, it happens to make you stronger (not meaning pure neural work). The size is the body's method of adaptation and it's way of dealing with increased demands. If there are no increased demands there will be no hypertrophy beyond current status which is why the guy who squated 225x8 last year and did all kinds of fancy exercises and blowout BBing splits in the interim is still squatting 225x8 this year and is consequently the same size.

What people are doing here is simply going about generating as much hypertrophy as possible. Very very few are going to be PLs or OLs here or even competing in a sport - they are just all adding muscle and going about it in a systematic way. In a nutshell, consider the body as a system and work at increasing capacity as fast as possible in large compound lifts that train the entire system. Basically, this is the easiest and most direct way to adding muscle as fast as possible. Now obviously few are peaking in 1RM or only concerned with the PLs, they are using a variety of core lifts that evenly develop the body and a more valid hypertrophy range (whereas very low reps and 1RM lifts tend to be heavily neural).

So that covers what you are seeing on the core resistance side of the equation. People tend to be focused there because BBers have a way of thinking there is some kind of magic and that hypertrophy or bodybuilding is very very different from strength training. Maybe you don't want to be a power hitter and break home run records but only want to look good rounding the bases. You still better learn to hit the ball fairly well and consistently or you'll be sitting on the sidelines.

As far as diet and what people recommend eating, normally it wouldn't be a concern. If you weight X now at reasonable bodyfat and want to weigh X+20 you should get better at the big stimulative lifts and consume enough calories to provide for that +20 part (or enough to get you to +10 and then up it again). Pretty damn simple but it gets horrendously screwed by people who don't seem to get this and spend 10 weeks adding no weight (fat or muscle) and complain that a program didn't work - I mean, if the resistance program was shit, you'd still have gotten fatter and therefore gained weight due to caloric excess. These are usually the ultra-ripped 160lbs guys who count every calorie and micromanage their trace nutrient intake to the tune of $200 a month in supplements thinking that muscle won't accrue without a minimum of 30mg a day of monkey ass oil.

Cutting is just about as simple. Granted you can micromanage all this until the cows come home but most people are screwing up at the base 90% big block level and not at the 0.05% trace level. Caloric excess, caloric deficit. Eating squeeky clean is a lifestyle decision but it won't do crap for your hypertrophy if you aren't eating enough and the guy shoveling down Big Macs will blow you out of the water.

That covers diet. As far as aesthetics - bodyfat level, the amount of muscle you carry - this has been done so after that it's genetics and just a careful eye. Genetics you can't do anything about and as far as remaining in proportion, what almost everyone here as found is that if you train the body with big lifts it tends to grow very very symmetrically (it's actually pretty damn hard to grow your body out of proportion beyond certain limits no matter how hard you work - else we'd have a lot of guys with massive arms from doing bis and arms all day but these are typically the guys with not much arm development either whereas the guy squatting/pulling like a beast gets guns with a few casual sets a week). Most guys here were really stunned that the best rear delt progress they ever made was when they dropped laterals and learned to row corrently. Very few here are wanting for some huge gap in symmetry. The take-away is, if you want to put on muscle, don't waste a lot of energy with isolation work. I'm not saying you never do it, but don't blast a shotgun array trying to pre-empty any possible imbalance from occuring at the expense of actually growing by increasing capacity in the core lifts. If you see something, you address it - don't attempt to address 50 things all at once in advance of them even showing up. It's not like you can't later devote 4-6 weeks to pure aesthetics and maintaining core muscle mass.

So I think that kind of gets at the heart of your poll and explains why you see what you see here. Actually, most if not all of these guys have trained and eaten, probably for years since few here are very young, exactly like what you are used to seeing. The fact that they aren't doing that anymore isn't that they aren't bodybuilders or interested in health or aesthetics, it's that they are doing a lot better now than when they used to do more typical BBer workouts and activities. Most guys here have no trouble adding muscle, dropping fat, keeping their lifts moving, or being pretty satisfied and happy in general. That's pretty rare outside of a newbie board.

 

[Maks]

Hehe ... Social lifter !!! Very definetly nothing of the other ones ! Although ... is there an accepted definition of a social lifter ?

 

[harhar]

Weightlifter and olympic lifter are the same thing. If you dont compete in olympic lifting, you are not a weightlifter.