Barbell Shrugged - The 3 Reasons Most People Struggle w/ The Snatch, Clean & Jerk Part 2 of 3

Episode Date: February 5, 2015

Hey everybody, Mike Bledsoe here. If you haven't already checked out our free ebook on improving your snatch, clean, and jerk, you can grab a copy over at barbellshrug.com by clicking the icon for it on the right side of the page. What you're about to listen to isn't an episode of the show. It's audio from a three-part conversation we filmed a couple weeks ago in preparation for our new online weightlifting program, FLIGHT. This is part two of three, and we talk about the three reasons most people struggle with the snatch, clean, and jerk. Registration for our online weightlifting program, Flight, is now open and will be until February 10th. For all the details and to grab

your spot, visit flightweightlifting.com. Go check it out now because we're giving away discounts and bonuses the earlier you sign up. Hi there. I'm Mike Bledsoe. I've got with me Doug Larson, both of us from the Barbell Shark Podcast. You might recognize us from that. We're standing here with our head weightlifting coach, Alex Macklin. You were watching. That was an awesome wave.

You were watching video two of a three-part video series. So in the first video, make sure you go back and watch that. We kind of talk about the path, you know, what it takes overall to become a successful weightlifter. You know, what's common, a common path for those who do really well. And today we're going to be talking about the three reasons you may struggle with your snatch, clean and jerk. What is reason number one, Alex? So, yeah, we put out that survey, and the three reasons that we saw, well, the first reason that we saw was people struggle with strength,

and particularly positional strength and weightlifting. So not being strong enough to receive a bar in the bottom squat and stand up, not being able to keep position, you know, as they pull from the ground and keep the bar path, you know, correct. And, you know, really just also, too, you know, not being able to be strong enough to maintain proper technique. When the form – when the weight gets heavy, their form breaks down. You know, some of the people have said that, you know, as I get fatigued, my clean and jerks become

more clean and press. You know, they need their squat to go up. Their form tends to deteriorate and get more sloppy as the weight increases. A lot of people had positional strength issues either overhead or catching the weight at the very bottom of the squat. So either they were missing the lockout or they're having to do press out, which very bottom of the squat so either they were missing the lockout or they're having to do press out which is kind of the same thing or there is they're struggling to catch the weight and then feel strong come out of the hole with any amount of power right yeah in addition to that a lot of people are strong overall you know they may have a strong squat strong deadlift or press but they're not strong in the very specific positions that are necessary

to be good at weightlifting because the type of positions you're in you know you're not going to be you may be a great back squatter but can you can you catch a front can you do a front squat in the same way you would catch a clean can you do an overhead squat and get down in the same squat position as you would do an overhead squat are you strong in the position when you pull the bar off the ground and at your knees right you squat. Are you strong in the position when you pull the bar off the ground and at your knees? Right. You know, are you strong in every position on the way up as well?

Yeah, I mean, you know, a big mistake in weightlifting is the infamous stripper pull. And it may be a technical flaw, but, you know, oftentimes it is a flaw. It is a lack of strength. Right. You know, a lack of strength in the legs um and then if in you know if your legs are not strong or as your back is then yeah your back's gonna shoot up your butt's gonna shoot up uh as you pull the bar off the ground uh the opposite

could be true as well if your back is weaker than your legs so you know if you pull a weight off the ground and your back gives uh your back's probably not strong enough to hold the position the heavy weight and keep it you know close to your body as this is why I'd be really beneficial to do a weightlifting program that isn't just snatching and clean and jerking but it's actually working on movements to help you get strong for very specific positions right a lot of people don't spend of time focusing on their very specific weaknesses. They try to do the same thing over and over and over again.

Say I snatch and clean jerk every single day and every day I do it wrong, just doing more of doing it wrong isn't going to pull me out of the problem. I'm going to have to find where my weaknesses are and find an exercise that's going to fix that very specific weakness or I'm going to have that weakness basically forever.

Forever. Yeah, I was actually being interviewed this past weekend by SweatRx. I went and watched a competition, pulled me aside, got talking. They were like, what would you tell anyone who's trying to get better at weightlifting? I was like, oh, okay. I don't have the cuff, but it was really obvious what the problem is, is people try to put movement first.

And that is, they think about the snatch and they think about the floor, the bar going from the floor to overhead. And what I'm telling people to do now, like what I told her in the interview was, you've got to get strong in every position. So on the way up, you should be able to pause at each inch on the way up and hold that position. Get strong in every position you need to be in. If you can't get in those positions that are necessary, even with lightweight, more than likely you have a mobility restriction. There's a problem with the shoulders. There's something wrong with the hips or the ankles. And you got to identify which of those joints you need to free up so that you can get in those positions. Get in those positions with lightweight and then add weight. Add just a little

bit and then start getting strong in every position. And not until do you get decently strong in those positions should you even be trying to move from position to position. And that's the movement. But all too often, people jump straight to, I've got to sling this bar off the floor and get it overhead. So that is what getting in positional strength is. And there's also a lot of assistance exercises you can do that may not look like the lifts themselves,

but if you have, like you were saying before, weak hamstrings, weak back or something like that, something along the posterior chain, just doing a deadlift may not do it. You might want to do RDLs or blue ham raises. There's a lot of these exercises that don't look a lot like the snatch and clean and jerk, but are really beneficial for getting stronger in those positions. Yeah, it starts with being able to be strong in your start position and your finish position.

So on a snatch, you want to be good and get into a perfect position at the start, which is basically bar just on the ground. You've got your butt down, arms locked out, shoulders up, shoulders back, chest high, butt low as the knees, et cetera, et cetera. And then also in your catch position, so you'd be catching at the very bottom, an overhead squat. If you can't do a start position and an overhead squat all the way to the bottom, you basically have no business trying to do a full snatch without some type of modification. And that's where the assistance exercises come in. All right, so the second reason why people feel people have trouble with the snatches and cleans is that they feel they have a lack of confidence. Some of our

people have said that they feel that they need more courage to get on the bar. They have this mental block. You know, they feel like once it starts getting heavy, they see all that weight on the bar and they're like, oh, I can't lift this weight. And they psych themselves out and they just miss lifts just because they're nervous or anxious about getting under it and they're also too uh you know it's it can be difficult when you have all these technical cues and all these things in your head they feel like they're always overthinking the lifts and you know it's it's that uh paralysis analysis thing they you know they get up to the bar and they have like shoulders of the bar knees back do all these things and then they freeze up so i think uh the big one a big one is just the mental game of weightlifting.

A big part of it is just being an athlete. Once you get to a certain weight or once you get to a certain point in the day, you need to just forget all the drills you've been doing, forget all the technique cues, and you just need to be an athlete, which basically means turning your mind off and just trying to move and just move as best you can, which is a hard thing to teach someone to do. It takes a little bit of experience, and that basically means turning your mind off and just trying to move and just just move as best you can which is a hard thing to teach someone to do right it takes a little bit of experience and that basically means that you got to have a whole lot of reps under your belt you got to practice a lot and then once you get to the point that you've had enough reps under your belt

you can just turn your mind off and just fucking just go you got to be an athlete and just fucking move yeah which is hard to teach that's an experiential thing but that's where you got to eventually get to well that's where the practice comes in. Yeah, and that's what Doug's talking about is like when you get, for me, I consider heavy weight for a snatch and clean jerk 85% or above your one rep max. And when you hit that point, if you're thinking too much, you're not going to make the lift more than likely. That's when you have to be that athlete. That's why you do all those reps in the 60 70 you know

80 rep ranges you go light a lot so that you can be thinking and lifting and then when you start getting heavy you do have to turn that off i mean those lighter percentages that's where you're making all the adjustments that's where you're getting better at the lifts and then when you get real heavy yeah that's exactly what i was saying. That's when you've got to turn on the athlete, not think about it. When you're at, you know, five pounds off your PR, that's not the time to start thinking, should I adjust this technique or should I be going through that checklist? No, you should have already done that lift so many times

that by the time you walk up to it, it's like, don't worry about what the weight is on the bar and just do the lift. Yep, yep. And, I mean, really also, too, it goes back to what we were talking about the first point and being strong and having that confidence as well and doing those assistance exercises. So, like, you know, a really great assistance exercise for building confidence with the snatch is, you know, doing snatch balances and things like that. You can work up to some pretty heavy weights with a snatch balance,

and that can help you get a lot more confident receiving the bar overhead in that overhead squat position. So, you know, being stronger too will help also with that confidence. Yeah, I think the best confidence-building exercise for snatch is heaving snatch balance. Heaving snatch balance, yeah. Which is a little bit different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, a snatch balance is great for speed under the bar,

heaving snatch balance for confidence because most people should be able to heaving snatch balance more than they can snatch. So that's when you go, oh, I can get under this weight with a lot more weight than I thought. Yeah, but both of those things are beneficial. A lot of people have confidence issues getting under the bar, and a lot of people just have a pure speed issue getting under the bar

that's not getting under the bar fast enough. And we know from the survey that those are actually one of the, you know, two of the top things that people talk about. And if I'm not mistaken things that people talk about. And if I'm not mistaken, that's number three, right? Number three. That's right. Speed under the bar. That's the third reason is speed under the bar.

I totally planned that. People, you know, people feel slow under the bar. They power most things because they don't feel fast getting under the bar. Oh, man, that happens to everybody. Dude, when people first start with weightlifting and snatching and not necessarily with cleans, it's morelifting and snatching and yeah not necessarily with cleans it's more common with snatching is that they always want to power snatch they don't want to catch in the bottom position they don't want to throw a barbell over their head in the

bottom position where they don't feel stable and they don't feel safe and they drop the fucking bar on their head right that would suck people before people feel like you know they're slow motion and really too another thing that goes along with speed is just timing and coordination of the lifts too they don don't have that timing down. Because weightlifting is a lot about technique, and speed is a lot about timing as well. Yeah, if you don't got your timing down, it's hard to get under the bar very fast. Right. Right about when you're going up and you get that kind of stretch in your arms,

it can help slingshot you under the weight if you do it right. But getting that timing initially is really difficult. You don't have that feeling yet. Yeah, I i mean it doesn't matter how long i weight lift the timing is still something i'm constantly tweaking and trying to improve and sometimes improving or making worse on accident i'll change one technique over here and my timing changes just because i started doing this drill which i thought was totally unrelated but now oh my god i'm going a lot faster under the bar yeah oh yeah i think i think point number two and point number three actually heavily related related the confidence to get under the bar and the speed to get under

the bar go hand in hand if you're not confident you're not going to get under the bar very fast and you can't get under the bar very fast then then you can't be confident it's this it's this interesting chicken or the egg thing right yeah right right yeah a few exercises i like to do like work on speed under the bar would be muscle snatches because people aren't getting under the bar fast because they're not pulling under the bar. Right, pulling, yeah. People always want to say that, oh, getting under the bar, drop. I can't stand it.

It's not a drop. It is not a drop. You are actively pulling yourself, accelerating yourself under the bar. Right, and that's why I like muscle snatches so much because people are actually actively pulling. They're pulling the weight up, but during a full snatch, they will be pulling themselves under. And that strength there in the shoulders is going to help make that happen a lot faster. One of the exercises I really like is the tall snatch or the tall clean. Yeah, absolutely.

Where you just basically stand straight up and you just try to pull yourself underneath the bar just using your arms and try to shoot your body down as quickly as possible um that kind of helps also with the timing factor because when that bar gets heavy you've when you you don't have much to pull here you've got to suit your ass down to the bottom of the bar as soon as possible so something i was taught originally was uh fatigue yourself on muscle this is probably this is more advanced technique maybe i shouldn't mention it don't do it don't don't tell them what it is Something I was taught recently was fatigue yourself on muscle. This is probably, this is a more advanced technique. Maybe I shouldn't mention it. Don't do it.

Don't tell them what it is. Hit like a heavy five rep max on a muscle snatch and then do a couple more sets really heavy and then do some snatches off the blocks. Snatches off the blocks are really great. And so what happens is you end up getting really fatigued there and you have to try so much harder. The effort required to pull out of the bar is so high at that point that you do that enough, you drill that enough,

that you combine those two exercises and workouts enough that when you do pull them out and you start getting back to a full snatch, all of a sudden you're snapping out of the bar, and it feels really good. It's a bummer. Most CrossFit gyms that I've been to, they don't that stuff they don't program tall snatches they don't program muscle snatches they don't program heaving snatch balances it's just not a very common thing to find in in most CrossFit gyms that I've been to we don't do it at our place that that often truth be told yes and unless we have people that are actually weightlifters that are doing a weight lifting specific program then from those part we just let them do the basics and all these

all these very specific accessory movements unless we call someone out specifically for having this problem like the group doesn't do it it's hard to find in a group setting yeah the it just there's not enough time i mean most people want to be in and out in an hour and and they're not going to be in metcons practicing practicing something for 15 minutes i mean that's a quarter of your training time but if you're dedicated just weightlifting that's a totally different story yeah that's something that we actually talk about and about in the first video we did. Again, if you want to see why that's important, you might want to check that out. That's about really all we have for video number two.

Video number three is going to come out in just a couple days, and we're going to talk about what a good weightlifting training program has and what a good weightlifting training program doesn't have. That'll be out in just a few days, so be on the lookout for that. We'll email you on our list, or also we'll be posting about it on social media, obviously. If you haven't downloaded the awesome weightlifting guide that the three of y'all put together, that's absolutely fucking amazing. If you haven't downloaded that yet, please click that link and look through that training guide. Also, we have another thing that's going to be a part of the new program that we're

putting together. The new program is called Flight and this thing's going to be a part of the new program that we're putting together. The new program is called Flight, and this thing is going to be called Flight School. And it's a cool weightlifting training program that Alex and another one of our coaches named Kurt put together with CTP. That's going to be a part of the actual training program as a part of the educational materials that come along as a bonus with that new training program. So actually, can you edit in like a little clip of that at the end of this video? Yes. Okay, so CDP is going to show you a little preview of that at the end of this program.

So be on the lookout for video number three. Also, if you want to add questions or comments about these videos or about the upcoming training program or about anything that you read in the guide that you just have a question about and you want to just get our feedback or if you're just all excited about the program and you want to just kind of just go rah rah below and just kind of get pumped up and pump up some of the rest of

the group you're welcome to do that too so i will see you in video three what's another error that we see a lot with the first pull of the clean or the snatch definitely the the lifter being pulled down by the weight and folding forward. Okay, so what Kurt's talking about is that when a lifter will pull the bar off the floor, what can happen is that the back gives. Okay, this is my problem because I have strong legs, but I have a weak back. Okay, my back is not as strong as my legs are. So what happens is when you pull off the floor and it's heavy, it's going to pull you down. As much as you try to keep your back nice and tight it's still going to pull you down and you're not going to be able to maintain position and you're going to get pulled forward. Everything is going to go south pretty

quick. So what you need to do is you need to strengthen your back and your posterior chain. And what are some good exercises to help strengthen your back and your posterior chain. And what are some good exercises to help strengthen your back or your posterior chain? Definitely the RDL and the deficit RDL in my opinion. And I like to do those slowly and controlled working on keeping that perfect posture on the way back down to the floor. This RDL is called a Romanian deadlift. It's otherwise known as a stiff legged deadlift. Basically it's going to hinge at the hips. It's going to let the bar come down, he's going to maintain a very, very nice tight back and then come back up. He's just going to go right below his knees, he

doesn't necessarily have to go down to the ground, but the main point is you're going to hinge at the hips, keep this back nice and tight. This is really going to work the posterior chain and help build a really, really strong back. You can also do this from the deficit. Like I said because there's more range of motion he can get a little lower. He can really get a nice hinge at the hips, send those hips back and really work those posterior chains muscles of the hamstrings and the lower back. Okay he he can get even, even lower. All right, and then he'll come back up. Okay. So these two movements, the RDL or the deficit RDL, these are great accessory movements to help strengthen your back and your posterior chain

muscles. I would recommend doing these once a week, a three sets of 10 once a week to help strengthen your lower back and your posterior chain muscles if you have the problem of a weak back. All right, so Kurt, what's another reason why people can't get under the bar? I think probably the biggest reason early on, especially the lifters aren't getting under the bar, is confidence. They're just not comfortable with it. They haven't done it enough. You know, things feel heavy in the hole. Things like that. Yeah. So people are scared of the weight. It's a heavy weight overhead and they never, you know, if it's a PR attempt, you know, they don't know how it's going to feel overhead. And so they probably dump it before

they even get a chance to lift it. So, alright. So what are some things that we could probably do to help develop some confidence when going overhead with the snatch? Just some really dynamic things that are going to help your bottom position, get you kind of rock solid down there and used to having heavy weight over your head, as well as being fast. And one of those is the snatch balance. Okay.

Yeah, snatch balance. All right. So let's see a snatch balance here. All right, so let's see a snatch balance here. All right, so snatch balance, really, really great exercise to teach one confidence and control getting to that bottom position. All right, so what's going to happen is that you notice that Kurt's feet are in the pulling position. What's going to happen is he's going to heave the bar up a little bit and then quickly push his body down underneath the bar and receive the bar with locked out arms. He's going to control that descent, but he's going to have to be fast. He's really going to have to

push his body down underneath quickly. And when you load this bar up with some weight, you know, you could probably do close to what you normally snatch, okay, or that should be your target goal. You load this bar up some weight you're really gonna have to move down to the box occur let's see it let's see a snatch balance beautiful okay notice how he did it gave a little quick little heave and then he immediately try to push his body down and he's move his feet out into their receiving position let's see it one more time. Good. Okay. One more time. Notice how the arms try to lock out as fast as possible. Beautiful. All right.

So the main question on a lot of people's mind and a lot of people struggle with this is the third pull or the catch. How to get faster at getting under the bar? How to get better or more comfortable or more confident at getting under the bar, how to get better or more comfortable or more confident at getting under the bar. So what are some things that, you know, we could teach them to help them with that? Getting under the bar quickly means actively pulling under the bar. So a lot of people think they lack the confidence because their bottom position is shaky and that's because they are still kind of making contact and hoping that the bar is going to float over their head while they just kind of pick their feet up and fall under the bar and that's not the case.

You actively pulling under the bar is how you get there. Have you ever seen that illustration of the Snatch cartoon where it's like the guy is like pulling the bar off the ground and then he goes to extend and then it says a miracle happens and then it's overhead. A lot of people feel like sometimes that's how it is because, yeah, if you have the mentality, I hate seeing that. Like, how do I get better at dropping under the bar? You're not dropping. You are pulling yourself under the bar.

You've got to keep pulling under the bar. So that's why, you know, with the third pull, we really try to emphasize it's a pull, it's an active pull. So whether you use the cues like keep pulling under the bar, we talked about using the bar as a handle. I know Kurt has told me that a lot. Think about using the bar as a handle to literally pull and ratchet yourself underneath the bar. So what are some exercises to help kind of with that? Big fan of the tall snatch to learn to actively pull yourself down under that bar. Yeah, Kurt why don't you show us the tall snatch or the tall clean. Let's go with snatch. Alright. So this

can be done, this is the tall snatch. This can be also done with the clean, just use the clean grip. But basically all kurt's gonna do is stand nice and tall actually i recommend people squeezing their butt because what happens is is that if you don't keep your butt squeezed you'll want to re-bend and use your legs more instead of actively pulling with the arms so squeeze your butt and actually you can also make this a little bit more difficult. You can actually go on the toes. Yeah, this makes it super, super, super hard. Now you can't use any kind of leg drive or anything and it's all pull yourself under the bar as fast as possible. Look how active and fast he's pulling himself on the bar.

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. So, when this weight gets heavy, you're going to feel. Actually, I love this drill because when you put weight on this bar, you actually start feeling yourself accelerating under the bar. You actually can feel yourself shoot down to the bottom and use the bar as a handle to shoot down to the bottom.