The sport of lifting heavy metal bars, and also the general activity of training with weights. As a sport it has been in the Olympics for over a hundred years and has two lifts — the snatch, where the bar goes from the floor to over your head in one movement, and the clean and jerk, where you stop at the shoulders first. Taiwan follows Olympic weightlifting closely and has won gold in it. The word is also used much more loosely for ordinary gym training: "I do weightlifting three times a week" just means you lift weights to get stronger, with no competition involved. Some careful speakers would call that "weight training" instead, but almost nobody minds. It works as a normal noun — "weightlifting is hard on the back" — and appears before other nouns too: a weightlifting coach, a weightlifting belt.