Mirabai Chanu has established herself as one of the best lifters in the world in the past few years, winning the world championship in 2017, kicking off India’s medal tally with a silver on the opening day of the Tokyo Olympics, and becoming the Commonwealth champion and world championship silver medallist last year.
The only major medal not in her cabinet is one from the Asian Games. During the last edition of the Games in 2018, she was out injured. This time, she is taking no chances. In September, at the 2023 World Weightlifting Championships, Chanu did not perform a lift, appearing only for the weigh-in.
Why do even that? Because the presence of a lifter is mandatory at the 2023 world championships if they are to be eligible for the Paris Olympics, but the International Weightlifting Federation allows athletes to attend only the weigh-in and not actually compete, for their presence to be marked.
Like most athletes in weightlifting, Chanu’s career is marked by her struggles with injuries. After all, lifting weights day in and day out at the outer limit of human capabilities is an act that comes with great risk to the body.
“We are talking about the world record holder in the clean & jerk,” said Chandani Parsania, an elite sports physio with the Inspire Institute of Sports in Bellary, Karnataka, who has worked closely with Chanu. “These athletes are always pushing the boundaries, every training session is a risk, they are always walking the line.”
How does Chanu, who weighs in at 49kg, lift almost twice her bodyweight in the snatch (her best is 88kg), which involves lifting the weight in one smooth motion from the ground to an overhead position? Or create a world record in the clean & jerk—119kg—two and a half times her bodyweight?
The weight training part of it is straightforward. Athletes train using the big, foundational lifts that build overall strength and power—deadlifts, squats, hip thrusters, bench presses, overhead presses—using all the variations possible in these exercises, as well as varying the amount of weight and reps (lifting at 90 percent of their max lift with very few reps pushes maximal strength, lifting at around 70 percent with more reps boosts power, at around 50 percent with many reps builds strength-endurance).
The bulk of their training with weights, though, focuses on the two Olympic lifts. These are broken into segments, and each segment is trained. Let’s take the snatch as an example. Athletes will train, separately, the “first pull”, where the bar is lifted off the floor and brought to knee height; the “power position”, where the bar travels, hugging the shin, and the hip is extended to bring the bar to the upper thigh; then “the triple extension”, an explosive extension of the ankles, knees and hips—the feet leave the ground and the shoulder is also shrugged, and the bar is now chest high; next comes rotating the shoulders and extending the elbows, pushing the bar into the overhead position, while the rest of the body goes down into the squat; and finally, moving up from the squat into a standing position with the weight stabilized overhead.
Each of these movements is critical for a powerful snatch. If the body is not in perfect alignment, or the muscles are not firing in the right sequence, it is not possible to lift big. Instead, there is every possibility of a serious injury.
Which is why the most interesting part of a weightlifter’s training is the work that goes into prepping the body for big lifts—the warmup, the mobilization of joints and muscles, working with the small muscles that stabilize joints, or fixing imbalances in the muscles.
Parsania remembers a time right after the 2018 CWG when Chanu could not lift the bar, forget weights, because of lower back pain. “It took us a lot of time to diagnose it, lifters are so strong that it’s often hard to pinpoint the cause of pain,” Parsania said. “She had weakness in some of her 'local core' muscles, small muscles that are very close to the spine and stabilize the spine as if they are staples.”
When most people talk about the core, they are referring to the bigger surface muscles, also called the “global core” muscles, like the abs. But it’s the local or deep muscles that directly attach to the spine that are much harder to train and fix, and often the real cause for back pain.
“We had to first isolate the problem, then teach Mira how to recruit the muscle cognitively, then begin training for the muscles, and finally train it enough that the recruitment of the muscle becomes automatic,” Parsania said.
Mirabai, who now trains mostly under the national weightlifting head coach Vijay Sharma and American physiotherapist and weightlifting specialist Dr Aaron Horschig in St Louis, Missouri, is one of those rare elite athletes whose detailed workout regimes are available for all to see.
Here's a superb video that takes viewers step by step through the process of identifying weaknesses and imbalances in Mirabai’s musculature and the way they were fixed:
It’s an amazing peek into the detailing and effort that goes into training elite weightlifters and the importance of the small muscles that stabilize or allow for joints to move.
One of the newer ways in which lifters train to recruit and fire these small muscles efficiently are “bamboo bars” or “earthquake bars”. These are bars made of wood and resin that can hold a huge amount of weight, but are also flexible. Lifters hang weight plates tied to resistance bands from these bars and use these to perform lifts. The combination of the hanging weights, the oscillating movement of the resistance bands as well as the bar itself means that the weight is very hard to stabilize. A person can lift a heavy weight without recruiting all the correct muscles if the weight is stable, simply by compensating with whatever muscle is strong in them. When the weight vibrates and oscillates, this is no longer possible. The only way to complete a lift then is to recruit every muscle required, especially the small stabilizers.
Watch her doing an exercise called the “Turkish Get Up” using an earthquake bar.
Perhaps the most useful video of Chanu training is one where she and Dr Horschig go through her full warm-up routine:
Useful, because this is something that most people who exercise regularly can fit into their training.
Observe carefully how Chanu’s warmup, which lasts 25 minutes, involves working every possible muscle, ligament, tendon, and joint. Beginning with gentle stretches for the lower back, mid back, upper back, glutes, hip, hamstrings, and ankles, followed by gentle jogging, then a series of sprint drills that get the blood pumping and open up the hips, calves, knees, and leg muscles, then movements that work the full range of motion of the neck, the shoulders, and the chest, and so on, ending with a series of movements now popularly known as “animal flow”, before she finally gets to the bar. Even then, she begins with no weight on the bar, just priming her body by doing the lifts with the correct technique without any weight on, before she actually starts adding weights.
“She does not just walk into the weight room and grab the bar,” Horschig says in the video. “You can tell how much detail goes into the warmup. She is one of the best athletes in her sport, and she takes her time.”
It’s a lesson in the proper way to train—the big weights are just a small part of it.
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