How Much Can Olympic Champion Caeleb Dressel Snatch?

The last 20 years have seen incredible advances in dryland strength training for competitive swimmers, and especially in the last decade, the world’s elite have incorporate more-and-more complex Olympic lifts into their routines.

So how much can the world’s best lift?

World Record holding American swimmer Caeleb Dressel posted a video on his Instagram on Monday snatching 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds. At 6’3″ tall and about 200 pounds (according to public sources), that’s an impressive lift.

Popular internet weightlifting forums usually put 100 kilograms as the baseline for an “advanced” weightlifter, which makes sense for an athlete of Dressel’s caliber – though a swimmer isn’t necessarily using weightroom strength as a primary motivator.

A snatch is, essentially, wide-grip deadlift. This exercise ios considered to be one of the best full-body lifts an athlete can do. The lift incorporates both pulling in your lower body and pressing in your upper body, and involves using the entire body to create a single motion of rapid power production.

The legs drive the bell high enough for the upper body to get underneath and press to the catch of the lift.

This move not only requires a great deal of strength, but also a lot of technical work.

Dressel tagged Florida’s coordinator of strength & conditioning for Olympic sports Tracy Zimmer in the post.

Dressel’s teammates can be heard cheering in the background, and we can even see his fellow Tokyo 2020 Olympian Natalie Hinds in the background preparing a bar for at least a 40kg (88 pound) lift of her own. Hinds commented “3rd times a charm” on the post.

Dressel told SwimSwam that this is a weight that he has been chasing for a while, and was a goal weight for the year.

Strength training for athletes have come a long way since the early 2000s, where for many athletes, strength training was a source of many bugaboos about stunted growth, injury, and loss of flexibility that would damage speed. Those fears, especially the one about injury, aren’t completely unfounded – lifts like the snatch can be dangerous if an athlete doesn’t have the proper supervision, coaching, and fundamentals in the weight room. This work has become a bigger-and-bigger part of coaching education, though, and is probably a big driver of the explosion of times we’ve seen as well – not just the top end, but in depth, as more-and-more athletes have access to this kind of training both via their primary swim coaches and via an increasing number of private strength businesses catering to young athletes that have emerged around the country.

As swimming takes in better-and-better athletes to the sport, this kind of lifting could reap bigger-and-bigger rewards.

25-year old Caeleb Dressel has 7 Olympic gold medals, including 5 last summer at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. He is also a 19-time World Champion. He took some training breaks in the fall after the Olympic Games, and after the retirement of his former coach Gregg Troy has returned to the pool under new University of Florida head coach Anthony Nesty and staff.