Down with the Thickness?: Male Olympic Weightlifters’ Negotiations of Weight Class, Strength, & Body Composition

ABSTRACT

The pressures around body composition that male athletes face outside of their competitive season – when they have the opportunity to increase their strength and muscle mass through weight gain – are not well-understood. In this article, we utilise a poststructuralist theoretical framework to analyse in-depth interviews with eight male American Olympic Weightlifters, a population that continuously leverages their body compositions against their competitive potential. We find that although our interviewees primarily relied on athletic discourses emphasising body functionality and rejected male body ideals, they combined athletic ideas about the ‘inefficiency’ of body fat with dominant discourses about its ‘unhealthiness,’ a conflation that was associated with an unwillingness to increase their weight classes. We reflect on this seeming tendency to avoid a major physiological strategy (i.e. hypertrophy) that increases strength.

KEYWORDS:

• Male athletes
• body image
• body composition
• weight class sports
• olympic weightlifting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The mechanisms of strength gain are considerably more intricate than we portray here; for example, the importance of training specific muscle fibre types also plays an important role in strength but is less relevant to our discussion of bodyweight.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monica Nelson

Monica Nelson is a recently-graduated Masters student from the Department of Kinesiology (School of Public Health) at the University of Maryland. Her research examines the sociocultural determinants of strength development, particularly among strength athletes.

Shannon Jette

Shannon Jette is an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology (School of Public Health) at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on social, cultural, and historical aspects of knowledge production in the disciplines of kinesiology, medicine, and public health.