Strength Lifting

[Dastardly]

Is anyone else here continually frustrated by the terminology of powerlifting and how difficult it makes things to explain to the "bro's" at the gym?

For example, the other day;

Some guys (who refer to me as a powerlifter for some reason) were doing some training of a mixture of lifts such as squats (quarter squats of course) power cleans (really just muscle cleans) deadlifts & push presses.

They claimed to be doing power lifts and also mentioned that I was too (me doing squats, bench & power cleans)

I could not help but take some time to explain to these guys that 'powerlifting' was not a form of training but a type of weightlifting competition involving Squat, deadlift & bench press. This was new to these guys and I am unsure how well they understood what I meant.

Then when trying to explain that a POWERclean was not a powerlift things got confusing.

When I tried to explain that they were doing muscle cleans and that POWERcleans used explosive POWER from the hip to get the bar up and this differed from the POWERlifts like bench press which used slow absolute strength of arms things got even more confusing.


This is just one example of how confusing it can be, I have had other occassions.

I really think that Rip's suggestion of renaming powerlifting, strengthlifting would make a lot of sense.

Perhaps we should all write to the IPF ?

[Marotta]

you mean the ISLF, right?

[TTT]

man.. take headphones to the gym.
doesn't have to be connected to anything.
then you wouldn't have had to go through that.

they won't talk to you and you won't have to have such conversations.

thank god I train at home.

[j2times]

man.. take headphones to the gym.
doesn't have to be connected to anything.
then you wouldn't have had to go through that.

they won't talk to you and you won't have to have such conversations.

this

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

I think trying to correct terminology misuses is mainly a waste of time. Lots of people use the wrong terms in many domains, out of habit, ignorance or convenience. Most of the times it's not a problem, their misuse is not going to hurt you, and the fact that you know the right terminology is transparent to them.

The only occasion when this becomes an issue is when you need to compare performance between groups of people who use different definitions of the same term. In that case, you obviously have to agree on common ground, but it's not as easy as it seems.
You will have a hard time convincing a guy who claims to squat 400Lbs and only goes a quarter of the way down, that he's not really doing a squat, and that your puny 200Lbs with perfect form represent better performance.

Hence the good advice you have been given: dont' get involved, only reply when asked, and keep lifting.

IPB