It took two years for Clarence Kennedy to add 2.5 kilograms to his snatch, but when you’re advanced enough in weightlifting that your personal record is 185 kilograms (407.8lb) at 103 kilograms (227lb) bodyweight, progress takes time.
The Irish weightlifter and YouTube personality, who told us in September that these days he weighs closer to 100 kilograms, posted his new PR of 187.5 kilograms (413.4lb) to his popular YouTube channel over the weekend.
Note that he made the lift wearing single loop wrist straps, which aren’t allowed in international competition. For comparison’s sake — and again, these weren’t competition standards by any means — if Kennedy were competing as an American athlete, this snatch would be 12.5 kilograms heavier than the current -105kg record held by Wes Kitts. (Kitts made a 175kg snatch at this year’s Pan American Championships, though he’s been seen snatching 180kg in training.)
We reached out to ask Kennedy how he finally broke through his old PR, but he just said,
My training has been the same really, I have increased my strength quite a bit and I’ve made a load of other PRs that I haven’t released on YouTube.
Consistency and effort win out, as always.
So what does his training look like? When we interviewed him earlier this year, he told us he squats four out of every five days and that 80 percent of his training is squats:
“Doing a lot of jerks and a lot of Olympic lifts in general doesn’t actually seem to improve my Olympic lifts that much, so I just did the bare minimum of Olympic lifts. They’re the hardest on my knees, especially cleans. So when I was trying to rehab my injuries, I focused a lot more on back squats, which don’t really affect my knees so much and they ultimately wound up helping my Olympic lifts.”
The new PR is also pretty notable in that Kennedy went vegan in early 2016. A common “criticism” of vegan athletes is that many build their strength as omnivores and then drop meat from their diet. That Kennedy is still breaking personal records after more than a year without animal products certainly doesn’t hurt the argument that you can build strength and muscle without meat.
[Kennedy made our list of the 5 strongest vegans on Earth — check out the rest of the list for some serious plant-based muscle.]
We’re looking forward to seeing the other PRs that he says he’s yet to release on YouTube.
Featured image via Clarence0 on YouTube.