If you love strength sports enough to appreciate both weightlifting and bodybuilding, there’s a chance you’ve fantasized about seeing Dmitry Klokov and Bradley Martyn train together.
Now the powers that be at YouTube have answered your prayers with a monster-sized, forty-minute video of the two shooting the breeze at Zoo Culture, a gym in Los Angeles. The former World Champion and Olympic silver medalist swung by during a recent tour of the Americas and talked at length about correct form during weightlifting. If you’ve always wanted to watch a free version of Klokov’s seminars, this is probably your best bet. Watch it below.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the man. (His English is excellent, but we corrected a few grammatical errors so it flows better.)
On why weightlifting isn’t always fun:
I’ve been training for 22 years. And if you’re asking me how many times I was happy about it? When I felt comfortable, everything was perfect? Let’s say, ten times. Ten competitions. (…) Other days this was just hard work. Focusing on your dream, focusing on your goal. And this is not fun.
You’re not just training for nothing, to look good at the beach. You’re working for the platform.You are working for the moment when a lot of people will be watching you. And this is so stressful! But at same moment if you’re working hard and competing well, you will have a lot of fun and be happy about it.
On bodybuilding and weightlifting:
For me, weightlifting is a sport of balance. You don’t just train your body for power or strength. You must be strong enough and fast enough. If you’re just fast and not strong enough, this is not good. If you’re just strong but not fast enough, this is not good. If you train just your quads and you squat and deadlift but your hamstrings and back aren’t strong enough like your quads? Your technique can’t be good. Your technique, guys, this is your muscles.
What (weightlifters) have to do every day in the gym is train your muscles. It’s like bodybuilders, we are like bodybuilders. We’re looking in the mirror and we say, OK, my shoulders are a little bit bigger and in better shape than my quads. What do I do? Train my quads.
What are weightlifters doing? Every ten days or two weeks we go for a snatch and clean and jerk, make a video, and afterward we watch this video. And we understand: my butt is going up too fast, or my shoulders are going back, and I see my weakest points. And with this information, I know what I have to focus on for the next ten days or two weeks. For us, the snatch and clean and jerk, it’s like exams.
Klokov also found time to push press 445 pounds. It takes place about 3:30 in the YouTube video and while watching his lengthy psyche up process is pretty great, you can also watch the short version in the Instagram clip above.
[While he’s perhaps best known for bodybuilding, Bradley Martyn is a seriously strong weightlifter. Watch him cleaning 315 pounds for reps here!]
To make things even more awesome, Klokov brought along Kirill Sarychev to join them. To put this into perspective, we’ve got one of the best known bodybuilding personalities, one of the best known weightlifting personalities, and one of the best known powerlifting personalities all in the same gym.
To this day, Sarychev holds the record for the heaviest raw bench press ever performed, having hit a 335-kilogram (738.5-pound) lift in November 2015. Martyn’s face when he realizes he’s sharing a gym with the bench press legend is pretty great:
Image via Bradley Martyn on YouTube.
But Sarychev was a little more taciturn than the other two (his English isn’t quite as strong as Klokov’s) and seemed content to just lift in the background.
We’re sure there was at least one lifter who walked into the gym to see Klokov, Sarychev, and Martyn hanging and wondered if he was still dreaming.
Featured image via Bradley Martyn on YouTube.