Difference Between Weightlifting and Weight Lifting
This is going to be an extremely pedantic post and I’m sorry to write. I have been doing weightlifting for a long time (two words), but in the last year or two I have gotten into weightlifting (all one word). It turns out that these are two very different things.
In short, weightlifting is a sport that is contested at the Olympics, where people dressed in vintage swimwear lift barbells loaded with kindergarten-colored kettlebells. In one of the exercises, the snatch, the bar is lifted up from the ground in one quick motion. In the other clean and jerk, the bar is lifted to the shoulders and the lifter pauses to breathe and perhaps grimaces a little before pushing it high. (You can lift more weight in the second method, so they are separate lifts. Each athlete’s best snatch, best clean and jerk, add up to determine who wins.)
If you’ve never heard of it or never thought about it when you said or heard the word “weightlifting”, bring me here.
There are many different strength sports. One is powerlifting, where people compete in squats, bench presses, and deadlifts. There is a strong man where people (not just men) lift various objects such as stones, barrels and log rods, chosen at the whim of the promoter. And then there is bodybuilding, where the weights are lifted in the gym all year round, and then the dieters shed as much fat as possible and take the stage to showcase their muscles at a beauty pageant event.
You can also, of course, just lift weights. This is not weightlifting; it is “lifting weights”, “lifting weights” or “strength training”. You can call it “lifting weights” if need be.
I hate being forced to be so pedantic about this. Weightlifting is a terrible, terrible, bad, very bad name for one of the many sports in which people lift weights. By the way, powerlifting is almost as badly named; Olympic lifts show strength and power lifts show strength. So people like me continue to protest that we are weightlifters , not powerlifters or bodybuilders, and the average person who flexes dumbbells in the gym has no idea why we care so much about whether there is a gap between “Weight” and “lifting weights”. … “
The problem, ultimately, is that no one has ever come up with a better name for the sport they have at the Olympics. Some people will call it “Olympic weight lifting”, which will lead to confusion when you tell your friends that you are doing it, but you will not go to the Olympics because of it.
Crossfitters found a workaround by casually mentioning “simple lift”, which I support in theory, but weightlifters have not adopted the term. We compete in weightlifting and explain what we mean by saying “Well, you know, weightlifting, weight lifting”, simulating the movement of a breakthrough. I’m sorry. This is the best we have at the moment.