The physics of how Olympic weightlifters exploit barbell's "whip"
Olympic weightlifting consists of three basic movements performed on a barbell : the snatch, the clean, and the jerk (with the latter two executed in combination).
The type of bar matters when it comes to how it bends and recoils, but why is still a mystery.
Joshua Langlois, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, competes in Strongman competitions as a hobby. He also has friends who compete at the national level in Olympic weight-lifting events. “They told me how they use the whip,” Langlois said during a media briefing. “When they dip down, they can feel when the bar flexes back up and use that to accelerate the movement upward to increase the amount they can lift.”
Langlois decided to conduct a modal analysis, i.e., how an object moves or vibrates, to quantify the whip and better understand the mechanics, as well as what makes for a good barbell at the elite level. He suspended four 20-kg men’s barbells (women use 15-kg barbells)—with 50 kg loaded on each end—from elastic resistance bands so that the bar was essentially floating in space. Then he attached accelerometers at each end of the bar where the vibrational mode patterns occur. Next, he tapped set locations across the bar with a small hammer, measuring the acceleration at the endpoints, which enabled him to map out how the bars moved in response. He compared the vibrations of different barbells, as well as a single barbell loaded with different weights.
Langlois found that the standard motion of a bar floating freely in space has a higher frequency without sleeves—i.e., the outer, thicker area of the bar that holds the weights and can rotate independently of the central shaft—than with sleeves. This was an expected result, per Langlois, since adding mass to the ends of a bar will typically decrease the rate of oscillation and also shift the nodes (the points where the bar is stationary).
The surprise came when he looked more closely at the higher bending (flexural) modes : in that case, the frequency increased at higher loads. “The bar becomes more fixed so the actual wavelength of the bar is less,” Langlois explained. “With a set wave speed, wavelength is inversely proportional to the rate of oscillation, so we get a higher frequency. This is something we did not foresee happening. So the barbell is likely to matter.”
