Comparing and Contrasting Powerlifting and Weightlifting

Former vice president of Columbus, Ohio-based Cardinal Builders, Michael Mike Lelasher, has decades of building industry experience, including pre-construction, project management, and business development. In his spare time, Michael Lelasher is an avid scuba diver and powerlifter.

Some individuals confuse powerlifting with weightlifting. However, they are two distinct competitive sports. In powerlifting, athletes aim to lift the most weight for one repetition in their gender, age, weight, and experience level brackets. Each competitor has three attempts in the squat, bench press, and deadlift stages of lifting their maximum weight, referred to as one-rep max. By contrast, weightlifting, also called Olympic weightlifting, is the only barbell sport in the Olympic games. It involves two competition lifts: the clean and jerk and the snatch. Both are vertical overhead lifts.

Besides the variety of lifts, powerlifting and weightlifting also fundamentally differ in required capabilities, lift execution speed, and generated force. The underlying quality required for powerlifting is strength, while weightlifting mandates a combination of strength, balance, coordination, and flexibility.

Powerlifters execute their lifts much slower, which allows them to make corrections and, thus, have fewer misses than their faster-paced weightlifting counterparts. The latter’s lift will fail if they do not complete it in a strictly-defined time and order.

Finally, weightlifting generates more force than powerlifting, where force equals the power per kilogram of body weight. The reason is it engages various muscle groups both in the upper and lower body, which leads to higher power production.

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