California-based IT professional Darren Pham served as a systems engineer and event management team member at eBay. In this capacity, he was responsible for everything from creating strategies with securities teams to leading IT-related projects and integrating monitoring systems. In his free time, Darren Pham maintains an interest in health and fitness and is fond of Olympic weightlifting.
Many people use the terms powerlifting and weightlifting interchangeably, but the two sports are quite different.
Olympic weightlifting or weightlifting focuses on performing two overhead lifts known as the clean and jerk, and the snatch. The clean and jerk is a two-part lift that begins with cleanly bringing the bar to the shoulders, then jerking the bar above the head. To perform this lift properly, athletes cannot stop the bar at any time when moving it from the shoulders to over the head, nor can they press the bar out when jerking it upwards. Meanwhile, the snatch involves picking a bar up from the ground and smoothly raising it to an overhead position.
Conversely, powerlifting does not involve any overhead lifts. Rather, the sport focuses on the deadlift, squat, and bench press. Squats are performed with a bar over the shoulders and involve creasing the hips in line with the knee until athletes create a parallel line. Meanwhile, deadlifts are performed by picking up the heaviest barbell from the ground and standing straight up with it, and bench presses are done while lying flat on a bench and descending a bar before lifting it back up to its starting position.
Darren Pham 