If you follow weightlifting, you know who Karlos Nasar is. The 19-year-old Bulgarian prodigy is at the top of the sport right now, having claimed multiple world records well before his 20th birthday. A large part of his success on the weightlifting platform is owed to his extraordinary raw strength, and nowhere is that more evident than when watching him squat.
On Thursday, Mar. 7, 2024, Nasar (who competes at 89 kilograms of body weight, or about 196 pounds) posted a video of himself smashing a 280-kilogram, or 617.2-pound, back squat to social media. Check it out:
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Karlos Nasar: A Record-Setting Machine
Since bursting onto the weightlifting scene in 2021, Nasar has rapidly established a reputation as one of the sport’s next great athletes. At 17 years of age in 2021, Nasar became one of the youngest World Champions in men’s weightlifting history when he won the 81-kilogram division at that year’s World Weightlifting Championships.
Since then, Nasar has habitually set (and reset) world records in both the Junior and Senior divisions and across multiple weight categories (Men’s 81 and 89-kilogram, specifically). As of Mar. 2024, Nasar has the following records to his name:
- Men’s 89-Kilogram Clean & Jerk (Senior): 223 kilograms, Dec. 2023
- Men’s 89-Kilogram Snatch (Junior): 176 kilograms, Feb. 2024
- Men’s 89-Kilogram Clean & Jerk (Junior): 223 kilograms, Dec. 2023
- Men’s 89-Kilogram Total (Junior): 395 kilograms, Apr. 2023
- Men’s 81-Kilogram Clean & Jerk (Junior): 208 kilograms, Dec. 2021
- Men’s 81-Kilogram Total (Junior): 374 kilograms, Dec. 2021
Why Weightlifters Squat
While the back squat is not one of the two primary disciplines of competitive weightlifting (that’s the snatch and clean & jerk for the uninitiated), weightlifters perform back and front squats very regularly during their training as accessory movements. Squatting big, and often, provides several benefits to Olympic lifters:
- Squats build a “reservoir” of leg strength, ensuring that the athlete can quickly stand up from the bottom of an overhead squat or clean.
- Squats allow the weightlifter to refine their posture and movement cadence, which transfers to the snatch and clean & jerk.
- Squatting helps weightlifters accrue enough volume and progressive overload to grow, without having to perform too many technically-intensive Olympic lifts.
Whether this squat is Nasar’s best is unknown — 280 kilograms is a weight he’s hit several times in the past, though footage of anything heavier is hard to come by.
- Notably, Nasar attempted a 300-kilogram back squat 1-rep max one day after he set a new clean & jerk world record of 220 kilograms at the 2022 World Weightlifting Championships:
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Karlos Nasar vs. the World
Nasar certainly boasts some strong legs, but how does he stack up against his colleagues in the Men’s 89-kilogram class, regarded by many fans as the most competitive division in the sport? Decently, but not exceptionally.
Nasar’s most notable adversaries include 2016 Olympic silver medalist Tian Tao of China, Tao’s teammate and 2022 World Champion Li Dayin, 2020 Olympic silver medalist from Venezuela Keydomar Vallenilla-Sanchez, and former clean & jerk world record holder Antonino Pizzolato of Italy. All of these athletes boast leg strength that contends with or, in some cases, exceeds, Nasar’s own:
- Tao has back squatted 320 kilograms.
- Dayin rarely back squats, but multiple videos exist of him front squatting 250 kilograms.
- Vallenilla-Sanchez can back squat 300 kilograms and front squat at least 280 kilos.
- Pizzolato can comfortably back squat 270 kilograms for multiple repetitions.
Despite holding the world record in the clean & jerk, Nasar has yet to beat all of these men in an official competition. Fans of weightlifting can expect to see Nasar clash with many (if not all) of them at the upcoming 2024 IWF World Cup in Phuket, Thailand this April — the final qualifying event ahead of this year’s Olympic Games in Paris.
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Featured Image: @karlos_nasar_ on Instagram
