I'm going to ramble here, excuse me if I'm preaching to the choir :
Right off the bat, from an animation perspective, you are going to want to make sure that the elbows, knees, crotch, and shoulders get special rigging/modeling attention. If what you are focusing on is doing the classic "weight lift" action, those body parts I mentioned are typically the most problematic, from a deformation perspective. Optimally, what you want when you bend the joints to those extremes, is to retain is the volume of the joints & deal with the intersection of flesh.
Typically this issue can be tamed through the use of blend shapes connected with expressions to the rotation of the joints, extra controls, or top notch weighting. If your character artist is well aware of the challenges to beset the model, everything will probably work out alright. Regardless of wether the character is more or less "realisitc" , or stylized , its nice to have these areas solid. One other thing to take into consideration is the camera angle all this will take place from. If its always a front on shot of the lift, maybe not as much detail needs to be paid to parts of the body that aren't visible from the camera .. such as a bicep to forearm intersection. Must consider many things to make sure a character is functional, but not over engineered.