💪🏼History of Human Performance - Part 1: Strength
📈Knowing what has been achieved in the past is important to understanding the limits of human performance.
🏋🏻♂️In the first part of this series we focus on strength and use the clean and jerk as an example, for it is tested at the Olympic Games and in CrossFit® alike.
👩🏻💻To compare people at different bodyweights, several formulas have been developed over the years. A classic one is the "Sinclair Coefficient" (which replaced "Hoffman's Formula" and has recently been replaced by the "Robi" itself).
🧔🏻We bring you the Sinclair points of the strongest Olympic weightlifter alive, who is having an absolutely outlandish Sinclair Score for his clean and jerk. Note: Lasha has since added 3kg to his CJ world record (267kg).
🕵🏻♂️We show you how his clean and jerk compares to the best clean and jerk of a super heavyweight in the past, Anatoliy Pisarenko. Fun fact: among every clean and jerk ever performed under official circumstances, Pisarenko's Sinclair is only surpassed by Naim Suleymanov/Süleymanoğlu.
🤔What about CrossFit®? Notoriously difficult to compare based on the broad skills and capacity required, a good place to start is probably fittest man alive and former Olympic weightlifter Mat Fraser. Not quite reaching the numbers of the best weightlifters in history, he still comes up with a Sinclair that would put him on the national team of many countries.
💉What about drugs? PEDs have always been big in pro sports, specifically in power/endurance disciplines. Thus the constant reshuffling of weightclasses and deletion of previous world records. Only to eventually see somebody putting up the same numbers as in the 1970s.
🙅🏻♂️And while there might be no definite "cap" to human performance, it is probably fair to conclude that a Sinclair of 270 is where the curve becomes flat for weightlifter and a Sinclair of 200 is where you'd like to be to compete for the CrossFit® Games podium.
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