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

Abstract

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.