Does Screaming Help Lifters?

It is a little apples and oranges of a comparison. What the question should be is does the timing of your scream help. We have all seen the great lifters take in that air and hold it during the lift to stay tight. Screaming during the lift will let the air out, the body loses its tightness and the lift can fail, unless the air is released right at the lockout. Screaming before you are under the bar can work to psych a lifter up (personally I prefer nose-tork). Another observation is that the newbie lifters yell alot, almost to reassure themselves where as the more experienced lifters save all that energy for the lift. Ed Coan is the master of that. Years and years ago Ernie Frantz used to tell us not to even have your mouth open during a lift to stay tighter. Several lifters use mouth pieces to this end. Pretty neat video. Wonder if they have every done a program on powerlifters. That would be pretty amazing.

Oh just great that is just what i dont need my gym members to read !!!!!!! they are already good at screaming they just need to learn how to lift and put the weights away after !

I bet WADA will need to take a closer look at screaming now... ;-)

To be classed as Elite you must be able to scream in five octives !

the last one didnt break the first time either.notice???

yeah but it look like the blocks that were holding it on the first one shatered

As a proffesional log splitter (everyone is here in Montana,lol) My granddaddy always said you got to give that yell or grunt at the end of the whack, which as anyone who cuts wood knows it's true,So I think it's a timing issue.I know myself I'm more apt to yell after a good personal lift because the adrenaline is flowing.( I usually sound like Tarzan).

Seems like we have a range of opinions here. I know people who claim they can lift 10,20 lbs. more when they scream. I think it just wastes precious energy, I prefer not to be amped up, but in a calm, peaceful state of mind, that way I can focus on my execution of the lift. For me, I don't need to yell, i put in the work in the gym, the strength will be there on meet day.

there's a different logic for yelling than being angry or losing energy - and it is scientific. Not going to explain why you should in PL cause hey, I'm not giving my competitors that edge. some it works for, others it detracts from anyway.

i've watched that series - it's entertainment mostly and it's fun to see guys jump over cars to jam basketballs and they had ray lewis run through a bolted door, good thing linebackers in pads don't make a run at your house to break in apparently. my all time favorite was the fool who for a mere $50 stood in front of a tennis ball pitcher and caught the 60 mph tennis ball in his goods. with what's happening in usa economy, i've got a list of idiots i'd like in front of that tennis ball thrower.

alan's gym idiots who don't put weights away and do 1 rep and drop the weights are typical. they yell more than i do with 6 times the weight they're using. matter of fact i don't tend to yell in working sets. silently building the machine to succeed while the hapless newbs scream and drop things around me this time of year.

yell if you like or be silent, it's your call. get someone to yell at you and your work goes up too, they say. up to 10 percent more effort. whatever your style is, recognize it's how you are, and don't let others bully you into using theirs.

Well several of us here are current world champions and world record holders in powerlifting and olympic lifting and ok we might snarl, growl and spit at you but dont see the reason to scream unless doing a bayonette charge or something like that.

This is an interesting idea for a show, but the "science" is always SOOOOOOO bad. They may as well do a rain dance and come to the conclusion that my little brother does - screaming is required to "scare" the bar up.

If you're used to screaming during a lift, then of course you'll do better if you scream, and your performance will suffer if you don't, because it's what you're used to. For the same reason, some people still walk out of a monolift, or take a certain number of breaths before they take the bar off the rack, or for me, yawn before you take a heavy lift. (And I'll bet at least a few of you yawned after reading that - I wonder if Sport Science wants to tackle that one.)

But back to the terrible science. You cannot come to a "scientific" conclusion after one case study. There is no control and there is no repetition, and like many of their experiments, it is set up under the assumption that their hypothesis is right. They could have AT LEAST found one other athlete that doesn't normally scream, and tried making him/her scream to see if it helped or hurt.

Even some of their basic assumptions in the experiment are wrong. The load measurement at the bottom of the stack is not an accurate indication of the force generated, since force is absorbed in every brick that breaks, and a higher reading would come about if NONE of the bricks broke, and the entire amount of force was transferred directly to the meters. In brick-breaking contests like that, the bricks are purposefully set up to allow the force to flow in the most desirable way for breaking. If they want to get a better reading, don't put the gaps between the bricks - and put the meter right under the middle of the stack. But, that certainly wouldn't look as cool.

And for my last complaint. I love that they conclude that if I could learn to scream like Paul, my 200 bench could instantly become 250! I'm gonna try that at my next meet. Or not, because I'd probably bomb out.

Don't listen to Becky, you have to scream to scare that bar up. I don't do it on easy lifts, but when I get heavy, I yell, it just happens, I don't do it on purpose.

Amen. If that were me, I would be concentrating so hard on NOT screaming that I would not be fully in the moment of that break. I would be thinking about being silent. Great, we found a correlation, but not a cause necessarily.

Screaming causes you to lose intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) which is very bad for powerlifting.

I vote for the screamers. I come out the gate with a yell and I give a yell when I finished. I don't say anything during the lift. Helps me focus and have more drive. Old people have to keep that adrenalin going.

Man, funniest shit I ever heard. LMAO!!!!!!!

I got a sweater for Christmas... I was hoping for a screamer!

Sorry...

Robert Harris
Las Vegas, NV

Chuck Vogelpohl. The End.