For most athletes, the challenge is to keep their weight down. However, for those in the highest weight categories of their sports, it is possible to take a more luxurious approach to diet. Brazil’s super heavyweight weightlifter Fernando Reis, for example, will not be holding back at the dining table as he strives to earn his country’s first Olympic medal in the sport.

“Today I weigh 140kg, but my goal is to add another 10kg by 2016, for the Olympic Games,” Reis told rio2016.com. “For us super heavyweights, diet is everything. It’s our fuel. We need good muscle mass for a good performance.”

For Reis, who won gold in the +105kg category at the 2011 Pan-American Games, the serious business of eating starts as soon as he wakes up. Breakfast consists of at least six eggs, bread, fruit and juice. Lunch and dinner are veritable banquets: a selection of meats, pasta, potatoes, rice, beans and salads. In between, he snacks on sandwiches and fruit, and all of this is supported by protein supplements. In total, he consumes about 8,000 calories per day.  

This is not surprising, when you consider that these super-sized athletes lift weights equivalent to that of a gorilla or lion. This can only be done with the perfect combination of strength and technique. And there is only one way to achieve this: total dedication to a gruelling training schedule.

Dragos Stanica and Edmilson Dantas, coach and technical coordinator respectively for Brazil’s national team, explained how they train their athletes to surpass their physical limits at competition time, by pushing them close to full capacity during preparation and allowing the adrenaline of competition to do the rest. “It’s like a gymnast doing a double flip during training and then trying a triple in competition,” said Stanica, a Romanian who has been part of the Brazilian national team since 2003.

When it comes to technique, weightlifters must train for the two different types of lift they perform at the Olympic Games: the snatch, and the clean and jerk. The snatch consists of lifting a barbell overhead in a smooth continuous movement and holding it there for two seconds. The clean and jerk is a composite of two movements: the clean sees the lifter raising a barbell from the floor to the shoulders, and in the jerk they lift it above their head.

“Several variants of the snatch and the clean and jerk exist, and these need to be perfected. The athlete thoroughly repeats these movements, always aiming to reduce as far as possible their flaws,” explains Dantas.

Jaqueline Ferreira broke the Brazilian -75kg record at the London 2012 Games (Photo:Getty Images/Laurence Griffiths)

In strength training, athletes exercise the pull, lifting the barbell from the ground, and the full squat, lifting the barbell from a crouching position. It is all geared towards establishing a fast and precise movement, and successful athletes are able to lift more than twice their own body weight.

“In weightlifting it is necessary to use explosive power, great technique and speed,” says Dantas. “The faster the athlete can lift a certain weight, more he is able to increase the load.”

This development of explosive strength can be applied to other sports and Dantas – who competed at the Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992 and Atlanta 1996 Games – now coordinates a project that applies weightlifting training methods to other sports. He has already worked with judokas, water polo players and the Brazil women's volleyball team that won gold at the Beijing 2008 Games.

Now he is focused on helping the host nation’s weightlifters get onto the Olympic podium for the first time, in front of their own fans in 2016.