On July 15, the Toronto Star published a project titled: The Science of Sport.
The project is a profile of five different athletes and their various sports.
Olympic weightlifter and AAS athlete Maya Laylor is one of those athletes.

By Kerry Gillespie:

SWIFT ASCENT AND SETBACK

Maya Laylor started lifting weights just three years ago and sailed through the junior ranks into senior competition, picking up provincial and national records along the way.
This spring, the 19-year-old from Toronto broke decades-old provincial records with a 91-kilogram snatch and 110-kilogram clean and jerk and then, just weeks later, added more kilos to both lifts. But at senior nationals in May, the five-foot-four lifter’s winning run was finally brought to a halt with particularly strong lifting in her 69-kilogram class by Marie-Josée Arès-Pilion and Kristel Ngarlem.
Now, with the Pan Am Games off the table for Laylor, her plan to “work harder and not stop” shifts to vying for the Rio Olympics.

SPORT FORMAT

There are two lifts in a weightlifting competition, with the totals added together to determine the winner. The snatch is the more technical of the two, and that’s where Laylor lifts the bar in one motion from the floor to overhead. The clean and jerk, where the heaviest weights are lifted, is two distinct movements. In the first, she cleans the weight from the floor to shoulder height and in the second, jerks the bar overhead. In both lifts, her final act is to stand up, arms locked with the weight overhead, demonstrating control.

SNATCH TECHNIQUE

Laylor squats down to grip the bar and pulls it to her knees and then hips, so close to her body it’s almost scraping on the way up, and finally uses her legs — not her arms — to push the weight up while simultaneously squatting down underneath the bar to catch it overhead. Her feet hit the platform in a deep squat as her shoulders lock with the bar overhead. It’s one of the most explosive and athletic movements in all of sport.

TIMING

Laylor uses her muscles to pull the weight off the ground to start the lift. But contracted muscles also create a stiff body, and that’s the opposite of what she’ll need a moment later. She must move with incredible speed to snap down under the bar. To move quickly enough to do that, she has to relax her muscles. But only for an instant, because once the full weight of the bar is overhead — in her case that’s well over 90 kilograms — she must be fully contracted, with her joints and bones stacked in perfect alignment so they don’t crumple beneath the weight.

MUSCLE RELAXATION

“One of the athletic gifts of the Olympic snatch is the rate of muscle relaxation,” says Stuart McGill, a Waterloo University professor who has researched this phenomenon in weightlifters. “The great athletes have a different neurology; they’re able to pulse muscles on and off faster.”

FLEXIBILITY

The more flexible Laylor is, the more efficient her technique can be and the less strength overall that’s required to move the same weight. As the bar is going up in the snatch, from hips to overhead, she is squatting down preparing to catch the bar. The closer to the ground she can get, the less distance she has to move the bar to get it overhead.

AN INCH DIFFERENCE

Even her ankle flexibility makes a difference. Weightlifters wear special shoes with a stiff sole and adjustable anterior wedge that can raise the heel to keep the foot flat on the ground in a deep squat. A less flexible athlete would need a bigger wedge. But even a one-inch wedge means she has to lift the bar one inch higher.
In Olympic weightlifting, it’s not the man or woman with the biggest muscles who wins; it’s the one with the best technique who can bring that strength to bear.

Gillespie captured the true essence of Olympic weightlifting. To read more about the Science of Sport project click here .

From the Toronto Star website: Kerry Gillespie is picking up Randy Starkman’s mantle as the amateur sports writer for the Toronto Star. Gillespie, who started her career at the newspaper in 1998, honed her skills covering political games at Toronto City Hall and Queen’s Park before becoming one of the Star’s editorial board writers. @kerry_gillespie | Kerry Gillespie Facebook